The connection between scientific psychology and practice is characterized by the accuracy of setting applied problems and methods for solving them. As a rule, such tasks were generated by difficulties arising in non-psychological areas, and their elimination went beyond the competence of the relevant specialists. We also note that applied branches could appear independently (including in time) from the formation of general psychological science.
Possible examples.
- In 1796, an employee of the observatory was fired at Greenwich for a gu.e.u. error (almost per second) in determining the location of a star. The method used at that time for solving this problem (the Bradley method) consisted of the following. It was necessary to regulate the moments of the passage of the star along the coordinate grid of the telescope, while counting the seconds and marking (calculating) the position of the star a second before and a second after its passage. The astronomer from Koenigsberg Bessel came to the conclusion that the error of the employee was not the result of negligence. In 1816 he published the results of his 10-year observation of human reaction time. It turned out that the time of a motor reaction is a very variable characteristic, and the differences between people are approximately 1 s. So, from the clarification of an unfortunate «mistake» associated with the characteristics of the organism of a particular person, differential psychology arose, studying and measuring the individual differences of people.
- It is interesting that it is human errors in the performance of a particular activity, the problems of the «human factor» that many branches of psychology owe their appearance to. In response to the difficulties of managing modern highly advanced technology by a human operator, engineering psychology arose. The study of difficulties in teaching and upbringing, crises of human development in certain periods of his life marked the beginning of pedagogical and developmental psychology.
Branches of psychology can be distinguished according to several criteria. First, by areas of activity (in particular, professional), the needs of which they serve, i.e. according to what a person does: labor psychology, engineering, pedagogical, etc. Secondly, according to who exactly performs this activity, is its subject and at the same time the object of psychological analysis: a person of a certain age (child and developmental psychology), groups of people (social psychology), a representative of a particular nationality (ethnopsychology), a psychiatrist’s patient (pathopsychology), etc. Finally, branches of psychology can be defined by specific scientific problems: the problem of the connection between mental disorders and brain damage (neuropsychology), mental and physiological processes (psychophysiology).
In the real work of a psychologist, scientific branches interact widely. For example, a workplace psychologist has knowledge of both engineering psychology (or labor psychology) and social psychology. The psychological side of school work belongs simultaneously to the spheres of developmental and pedagogical psychology. The development of practical applications of neuropsychology—first of all, the problem of rehabilitation of patients with brain lesions in one or another professional activity—requires knowledge of labor psychology.
It is clear that a practicing psychologist is not just an everyday psychologist. Of course, he does not always have ready-made models for solving problems and must study and inventively use everyday experience, and yet for him this experience is framed conceptually, and tasks are quite clearly divided into solvable and unsolvable. It should be emphasized that the relative autonomy of applied industries from their common psychological foundations makes it possible to establish their own practical connections with other sciences — sociology, biology, physiology, medicine.
The forms of cooperation between scientific and worldly psychology are manifold, a typical example of which is a psychotherapeutic session. The therapist cannot create and transfer to the patient new ways of mastering his affective past, resolving internal conflicts. The patient builds these ways only himself, but the therapist helps, provokes their discovery and is present with him, like a doctor at the birth of a child. He clarifies the conditions of the discovery, tries to explain its patterns. The results of such cooperation are, on the one hand, a full-fledged life of a healthy person, on the other hand, the development of the central section of psychological science — the study of personality.
There may be successful cases of self-therapy, self-comprehension and overcoming of severe mental ailments, when scientific and worldly psychologists are, as it were, combined in one person.
A typical example. M.M. Zoshchenko in «The Tale of Reason» conducts a psychological analysis of the sources of his own personal crisis. He examines in detail the variants of the hidden content of affectogenic symbols, dreams and states (the outstretched hand of a beggar, the roar of a tiger, aversion to food, etc.), then gradually determines (does not “remember”, but precisely determines) the trauma suffered in early childhood, and , thanks to its conscious development, achieves self-healing. The techniques he found and tested on himself enrich the arsenal of practical methods of psychotherapy.
Often, various therapeutic techniques are based on everyday empirical rules for controlling behavior and only then are they expressed in theoretical terms.
Possible example. The regularity is widely known: excessive desire, striving for any goal prevents its achievement. Thus, the Austrian psychologist W. Frankl considers many neurotic disorders — cases of stuttering, motor disorders, etc. (with the objective preservation of the motor sphere) is a consequence of the hyperdirectedness of a person, which prevents him from overcoming the disease. The therapeutic technique he proposed is based on the mundane rule — “fight the enemy with his own weapon”: you should wish for exactly what a person really wants to give up and what, unfortunately, he possesses. One of Frankl’s patients, an accountant by profession, suffered from muscle cramps in his arm and wrote very poorly. Professional unsuitability led him to an extremely difficult general condition. The way out turned out to be unexpected: the patient was asked to write something as bad as possible, i.e. to show that he can scribble such scribbles that no one can make out — and the person was cured of the disease. Then this technique was generalized in the theoretical concept of «paradoxical intention (aspiration)».
The influence of scientific concepts and concepts on everyday ideas of people about their mental life is interesting. The means of such a representation were, in particular, some concepts of psychoanalysis (affective «complex», «archetype», «internal censorship», etc.), terms proposed to describe the emotional sphere («stress»), protective mechanisms of personality («compensation» , «substitution», «rationalization», «crowding out»). Getting into colloquial speech, these terms receive content that is not always related to their original meaning, but they turn out to be effective means of understanding and even discovering (building) a person’s own individual means.
It should be noted that a scientific psychologist sometimes professionally has to become an everyday psychologist: preparation for working with certain methods of personality diagnostics, training in the correct and complete interpretation of the results takes about two to three years. The practice of conducting psychological experiments is sometimes a subtle art that requires skill and intuition.
Finally, there are psychological texts where the line between scientific and worldly psychology is difficult to establish.
So, in the guidelines for business communication, specific practical advice is given on adequate social behavior, interaction with other people, which make contacts successful. On the one hand, these are a kind of «textbooks» of everyday psychology, on the other hand, a systematic list of results that provides material for scientific research.
Thus, the position of psychological science is determined by its two divergent traditions. The first of these is the desire to become a natural science discipline, the second is to take the place of everyday psychology. Both of these goals are fundamentally unattainable, but each of them generates its own specific tasks.
On the one hand, in comparison with worldly psychology, scientific psychology is a special discipline that has a conceptual and methodological apparatus for studying the mental life of a person, the laws of its organization and development. The accuracy and regularity of recording the experience gained, the possibility of strict verification and directed reproduction bring it closer to the natural sciences.
On the other hand, psychological science has features associated with the specifics of the object of study — its ability to internally reflect its states. The everyday ideas of a person about himself, being the means and results of solving real life problems, can be stable and exist regardless of their scientific explanations. The humanitarian aspect of psychology lies not only in the study, but also in the practice of creating these ideas as ways to overcome conflict situations, comprehend and productively develop life experience.
Scientific and everyday psychology, while maintaining fundamental differences, enter into the necessary mutual connections. Psychological science, the development of which, following L.S.u.e.shtein, can be presented in the form of a pyramid, is strong in its basis. Everyday comprehension of a diverse mental reality does not disappear with the advent of special science, but, on the contrary, is a constant source of its vital activity. At the same time, scientific achievements are actively penetrating into everyday life, offering new effective means of understanding its laws, education and development of the individual.
Scientific psychology as a whole is an attempt to comprehend, comprehend, reproduce and improve the existing and constantly developing experience of the mental life of modern man.