O.I. Motkov. Autobiography of knowledge and creativity

Motkov, Oleg Ivanovich — Russian psychologist, candidate of psychological sciences, associate professor at the Institute of Psychology. L.S. Vygotsky Russian State University for the Humanities

1. Childhood and youth background

Born on October 17, 1948 in Moscow under the sign of Libra, element — Air, space.

Left-handed in the hand and foot, older brother, father of four children.

I am about 8-9 months old. Summer. I am sitting in the grass. The feeling of a miracle from waving flowers, blue sky and floating clouds, flying butterflies. Since childhood, I live with a sense of admiration for nature. From this, most likely, the intuitive knowledge of the vastness and beauty of the World began. I was fused with a haze of greenery, blueness and flying dots. I sat and looked at the World, and the World looked at me and slowly revealed its richness and diversity. Later, this love for wildlife resulted in regular walks in parks and the Moscow region, amateur trips to the Caucasus, Pamir-Alay (Fanam, Dugobe, Matcha), the Northern Tien Shan and Pamir (see photos on the sites foto.mail.ru and vkontakte.ru), into photographing mainly landscapes.

The stimulating reasons for my self-development were probably adolescence, the seething sex hormones, and the operation to remove growths, polyps in the nose, around the age of 15. There was a strong activation from below, from the subcortex, the entire cortex of the cerebral hemispheres (and now it is becoming more and more clear that it is the subcortex that is the core of the personality, and the cortex is only a servicing service mechanism that obeys it) and the brain stem responsible for awareness in the operational field any relevant information. The flow of air into the brain also increased, which led to the expansion of the volume and power of awareness and analysis of any impressions. Perhaps the family situation also influenced. When I was 14 years old, my mother had a son from our stepfather. The feeling of a certain distance, distance from the mother became an additional internal incentive to independently build one’s life, to rely primarily on oneself in everything, and think about everything with one’s own head.

It was at the age of 15, when I was in the 9th grade with a biological profile of school No. 5 on Leninsky Prospekt (now it is school No. 16), that I had an important leap in development — I suddenly clearly realized that I don’t really know and don’t understand anything. What is this tree, these clouds, and what am I? I do not understand the main thing — the essence of things, the structure of the World. It’s like coming out of a hibernation. Although at school we wrote para-course papers from the 9th grade, we had practice in the biological institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences and at the biological faculty of Moscow State University in the summer. But the system of compulsory, without choice, school subjects and the race for topics without seriously thinking them through weighed heavily and caused internal rejection.

So, from this stunning insight — surprise at the World and its total misunderstanding — a period of more conscious knowledge of the World and oneself began. And it continues to this day. At first, since childhood, it was more unconscious deep contemplation, peering, rather than doing. The work began in the 10th and 11th grades. I began to write poetry, take more photographs, read books about Einstein’s theory of relativity and cosmology, about the evolution of living things and about genetics (some poems are available here: stihi.ru, www.tovievich.ru/friend/44.htm and in my collection «Life — this is poetry». M.: Samizdat, 1999 — 100 copies). He began to build his philosophy of the arrangement of the World. I realized that the basic unit of Nature is an integral object, and not matter and form. It is only thanks to the peculiarities of our thinking that we abstract, single out from objects these, always existing inseparably, components. And the question of the primary-secondary nature of matter and consciousness is simply absurd, since the Universe is eternal and infinite, and in such a general consideration, there is always both this and that at the same time, and only individual objects are finite, like, for example, you and I (see the generalizing article: MOTKOV O.I. Reflections on the General Laws of the World and Human Destiny. M., 2002 online: www.psychology-online.net. Also in the author’s book «The Nature of Personality: Essence, Structure and Development». M., 2007).

Therefore, only earlier integral objects and later objects are possible in time. I talked about this to the teacher in social studies lessons. Classmates rejoiced — at that time it was possible to calmly correspond, play sea battle, etc.

In the 11th grade in the spring of 1966, with my brother Sergei and friends, we made a handwritten literary magazine «Altar» with our stories and poems, pictures for them. After the creation of his “philosophy”, the question somehow arose by itself: how do thoughts, theoretical generalizations form in the brain? After graduating from school, I decided to enter the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, neurophysiology, in order to deal with this problem at the brain level. Mom wanted me to go to the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University as a photojournalist — I shot well and wrote essays well, her acquaintances were at the faculty. He learned that a new faculty of psychology was opening, and decided to firmly go to it, as he represented psychology as something in between, including a generalized philosophical view and biology. I was not an excellent student, but I believed in myself, romantically imagining that my star helps me go through life. As I now understand, this “star” was a strong inner principle, my “self”, the initial implicit faith in myself and in the best. This belief was reinforced by the praise of a physics teacher from FIAN in the 10th grade, when, unexpectedly for himself, he proved the problem of the path of rays in the section «Optics» in a way unknown to him. Also, the tutor (and I had to take physics!) told my mother that I have the ability to theoretical physics.

Thus, my cognitive interests matured and actualized from within, spontaneously, and more than once I had to make decisions in defiance of the “social” influences of close and distant people. The social environment could only spur internal aspirations to find answers to emerging questions and self-confidence, could contribute to their strengthening, but by no means to their emergence.

2. At the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University and at the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education

In 1966 he entered the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, at first in the evening, and from the 2nd year — in the full-time department. He wrote term papers at the Department of General Psychology on the peculiarities of thinking in ordinary people and dispatchers. I liked the atmosphere of free expression of thoughts at the seminars (which, of course, was not welcomed at the political Marxist-Leninist subjects). At that time, I was more interested in how the processes of thinking and creativity are organized in general, and what consciousness is. At seminars and consultations, he argued with A.R. Luria, Yu.B. Gippenreiter and other teachers on the essence of consciousness and personality, the presence of personality and thinking in animals, opposing traditional, ideological approaches. He offered his solutions. The last term paper and diploma was done under the guidance of Doctor of Psychological Sciences V.N. Pushkin. In the 5th year, in parallel with his studies, he worked as a psychologist at the Center for the Scientific Organization of Labor of the Ministry of Industry and Construction of the USSR on the practical topic “Professional selection of construction dispatchers” (a diploma was defended on the same topic and a collective departmental monograph was written in collaboration with his brother Sergey).

After graduating from the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, he began working as a junior researcher in the heuristics laboratory of the Research Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education) under the guidance of Veniamin Noevich Pushkin. (a wonderful essay about him, written by G.V. Shavyrina, an employee of our laboratory, published in a rare book “Psychologists of Moscow”). At first it was a scientific experimental and theoretical work in the field of operational and creative thinking. V.N. Pushkin sensitively grasped the peculiarities of my independent, freedom-loving nature and allowed me to do what the inner logic of cognition led me to do. Questions of the internal integral organization of thinking gradually began to come to the fore for me. After several years of painstaking and lengthy, multi-step analysis, I realized that the processes of thinking are always subject to a system of central organization and regulation of behavior. The realization came that this particular system is actually a person. The same aspects of the psyche as intelligence and abilities do not apply to personality. It is rather executive equipment, psychological means of the mental apparatus, personality, however, like all cognitive and psychomotor processes, like speech and consciousness. He experimentally proved that the success of solving complex, subjectively difficult, spatial-combinatorial tasks of «Game 5» largely depends on character traits and dominant states of the personality, and not on the level of operational thinking of the subjects. At that time, the understanding of the presence of two spheres in the structure of the personality, the “situational personality” and the “nuclear personality”, also came out brighter for me at that time. These conclusions were reflected in the Ph.D. thesis “The Correlation of Personal and Cognitive Components of Intellectual Activity under Conditions of Mental Stress” (Moscow, NII OPP APS of the USSR, research supervisor V.N. Pushkin, 1978. See the author’s abstract on the website psychology.rsuh. ru or in the RSL). For the first time in the USSR, the “bourgeois, American” MMPI test, adapted by L.N. Sobchik for the Russian-speaking norm (its name is the SMIL test), as well as the author’s «Stressogenic Game Method 5», etc. to study the dynamics of general and situational purposefulness of thinking in easy and unexpectedly difficult tasks.

At the same time, I participated in the «botanical» experiments of V.N. Pushkin on human interaction with a plant (non-flowering begonia). “After establishing the fact of the informational impact of a person on a plant, an employee of our laboratory O.I. Motkov conducted a series of experiments in which the subjects were people engaged in special training of the ability to concentrate and voluntarily control their autonomic functions. Experiments have shown that subjects who have reached a high level of control over the work of the vegetative systems of the body are able to cause plant reactions without hypnosis ”(A.P. Dubrov, V.N. Pushkin. Parapsychology and modern natural science. M : SP Sovaminko, 1989 — 280 p. See: Part 2, chapter 1 (PUSHKIN V.N.) “Bioinformational contact between man and plant” P. 89. psychology.rsuh.ru.doc & my.mail.ru.html). The subjects were students of the theater institute, systematically engaged in yoga. Plants regularly reacted (which was recorded with the help of electrodes on their leaves) to changes in the state of the subjects in the process of experiencing imaginary very unpleasant or pleasant events that happened to these plants.

In 1979, our V.N. Pushkin. He was only 48 years old. A couple of years later, according to malicious denunciations, the Institute was hit by inspectors from the Central Committee of the CPSU. V.V. Davydov was expelled from the party and removed from the post of director. Our laboratory quickly changed several heads. The last one was A.M. Matyushkin. We rebelled and wrote an open appeal to the leadership of the Institute with a demand to remove him from the heads. Soon, at the behest of the party bosses, he became the director of the Research Institute of the OPP of the USSR APN! As a result, the heuristics laboratory ceased to exist, it was disbanded. I had to leave the Institute in 1983.

After successfully defending my Ph.D. thesis, in the Great Auditorium under Art Nouveau lamps that have been hanging there since 1914, I switched to studying the processes of goal setting, as well as the relationship of various aspects of personality with the level of intellectual activity and creativity. Goal setting was widely considered by me as the desire to change the current state of «I» in a given situation and achieve the desired state of «I». Those. A situational goal always invisibly includes the state of a more stable «I» of a person. It is a personal means of «I», a concretization of the way of its change. The implementation of a situational goal also changes some piece of our “I”. One of the studied aspects of personality was the social status of the subject in a pair of friends. It turned out that people with a lower status show significantly higher intellectual activity in the course of solving the problems of Game 5 than their higher-status friends. It is important that this is their internal desire, and not imposed from the outside.

In addition, the question arose before me, how to live on? I sat down and thought about what dreams I have not yet fulfilled, but I would like to fulfill. I dreamed of flying and traveling! From that moment, since 1979, I began to organize and conduct amateur hikes in the mountains of increasing complexity, go to the mountain club. Subsequently, he fulfilled the norm of a master of sports in mountain tourism. In the mountains, he photographed a lot of landscapes, kept diaries of campaigns, wrote poetry, and meditated. Gradually, the question of how best to build your life became relevant. I saw that many of my relatives and friends live stereotypically and hard, especially not trying to escape from the fetters of their usual life. Inside, a feeling of protest and disagreement grew with such an impasse and a defeatist position. Those. the problem of a harmonious personality and a “good” life loomed more and more clearly. What it is? Is purposeful self-harmonization of one’s personality and life possible? What prevents this? Are there general laws of such self-harmonization? I started doing hatha yoga on my own 2-3 times a week, as I realized that a harmonious lifestyle is one of the foundations of a “good life”.

3. At the Institute for the Development of the Personality of the Russian Academy of Education and at the Center for the Development of Additional Education of the Moscow Region

Since 1984, he worked as a senior researcher at the Research Institute of General Problems of Education of the APS of the USSR (later — the Institute for the Development of the Personality of the Russian Academy of Education). He dealt with the issues of diagnostics and personality development of students in labor and in tourism and local history activities under the guidance of Dr. Ped. Sciences V.I. Petrova and together with Dr. Ped. Sciences A.A. Ostapts. For these purposes, conversations, questionnaires, special methods were developed — “Self-analysis of the personality”, “Moral and labor characteristics of a schoolchild”, “Questionnaire for a young tourist-local historian”, etc. The results of these studies are contained in several collective monographs, collections and articles (Motkov O I. Studying the results of upbringing schoolchildren in labor activity / Number of monographs «Education of a comprehensively developed personality of a schoolchild in the process of labor activity», edited by V. I. Petrova, V. I. Kozhokar, Chapter 2, pp. 30-69 . Chisinau: Shtiintsa, 1989, and others).

Later, in the laboratory of the psychology of life self-determination (it was headed by a subtle and deep psychologist Yu.A. Mislavsky), he studied the features, the harmony of implementation and the development of the personal potential of adolescents and high school students of Moscow schools and the school in Gorki Leninskie. An interesting topic was also the study of the specifics of self-actualization among schoolchildren and philosophy students (see the article in the book: Motkov O.I. The nature of personality: essence, structure and development. M .: Voskresenskaya printing house, 2007 — 248 p., in the journal «Master «. 1995, No. 6, pp. 84-95, and also here: On the paradoxes of the process of self-actualization of the individual). During this period, I created a package of methods for studying the level of harmony of various aspects of personality — «Basic aspirations», «Lifestyle», «Psychological culture of personality», «Personal biography», «Cultural tendencies», «Life purpose», etc. Then, in the mid-90s, they were standardized: their reliability, construct validity, internal consistency and normative data, their relationship with each other and with tests similar in theoretical construct were determined (see methods in the newspaper «School Psychologist»: 1988 — No. No. 21-22, 35, 36, 38; 1999 — No. 15, also on the websites: psychology.rsuh.ru, www.psychology-online.net, www.ucheba.com). A factorial analysis of the data on the indicators of the package of methods was also carried out. These diagnostic and research tools are increasingly being used in various psychological research in Russia, including dissertations and theses.

In 1993, with a circulation of 5 thousand copies. published my monograph “Psychology of self-knowledge of personality: Prakt. pos.” M.: Triangle, 1993 — 97 p. In it, after a brief description of one’s own ideas about the personality, there are chapters with specific methods for self-knowledge of the personality, creative features, organization of self-education, etc. Many of the methods posted in the book were developed by the author, including those listed above. At the end of the book, a description of the goals of creation, principles of construction and features of the methods and exercises of the Experimental Programs for the Development of the Psychological Culture of the Personality of Children and Teachers is given. At that time, the biocultural essence of the personality and its central place in the psyche as a control, organizing system had already become clear to me. However, the content of the main blocks of personality, its integral structure and general principles of development have not yet formed into a holistic gestalt. In 1994, my curriculum “Psychology of Self-Knowledge and Personality Harmonization” was published for students of the Philosophical Faculty of the ROU, which I taught there.

In 1996, he began working as a chief specialist in psychology at the Center for the Development of Additional Education of the Moscow Region. Here, mainly practical work was carried out on the diagnosis and development of psychological culture and creative manifestations among pupils and teachers. There were lectures on this topic. In practical classes, 9 express programs for the development of their psychological culture were tested: Five steps to creativity (6-11 years old), Development of creative abilities (12 years old and older), Personal self-knowledge (12-15 years old, 16 years old and older), Communication training and self-confidence (13 years and older), Development of mental self-regulation (from 12 years old), Development of attention, memory and thinking (7-11 years old, from 12 years old), Diagnostics and development of psychological qualities of a leader (from 15 years old). In parallel, mountain tourism instructors were given lectures on psychological readiness for extreme travel. Articles were published on psychological problems and main orientations in the development of additional education for children and adolescents, on the development of creativity in children, on the influence of tourist and local history activities on the development of personal harmony in high school students, etc. (see in the journals «Additional Education»: 2000 — No. No. 3, 4, 5; 2002 — No. 7 and No. 8; on the websites psychology.rsuh.ru, www.psychology-online.net, etc.). The newspaper «School Psychologist» No. 7, 1999, devoted to the problems of leftism, contains my biographical article «Behind my star» (see also: psychology.rsuh.ru). It describes the psychological and physical features of the author as a left-hander.

4. At the Institute of Psychology. L.S. Vygotsky Russian State University for the Humanities

From September 2000 to this day I have been working as an assistant professor at the Department of Personality Psychology at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He developed and taught a dozen of his own curricula: developmental psychology, introduction to the profession of a psychologist, personality theories in psychology, personality psychology, experimental psychology, general psychological workshop, psychology of the subject, gender psychology, psychology of creativity, a special course on the psychology of personality harmonization (see on website psychology.rsuh.ru). Some of them have been published. In the democratic and friendly atmosphere of our Institute, I never used ready-made curricula, but created my own.

In addition to teaching, theoretical work and experimental research have intensified here. I felt that I was ripe in order to solve big problems and not waste my time on trifles. What is the real content and correlation of the basic concepts of psychology that are not clearly formulated in our country: the psyche, personality, subject, consciousness? What is the content of managing (personal) and executive processes in the psyche? What is the integral structure of personality: its main components and their correlation? How do the “I”, the subject, the Situational personality, and other components of the personality relate? How are all these things represented at the neurophysiological level? I wanted to introduce some kind of logical order into the ongoing chaos of unrelated and unstructured into a single system, largely ideologized and vague ideas. In order to solve these theoretical questions seriously and independently, one had to muster up the courage and forget about all the authorities, start relying only on one’s knowledge, reason and intuition, one’s own logic of cognition.

As a result, after long reflections and a lot of correlations and analysis of information from the results of my own experimental studies and observations, psychology, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, psychogenetics and ethology, evolutionary psychology, psychological anthropology, I have developed a holistic scheme of the main functions and structure of the psyche and personality in a living organism, an idea of ​​the general patterns of development of the psyche and personality of a person and other living beings. It was possible to clearly define the essence of the basic psychological concepts and their differences from each other. He came to the conclusion that the personality, as the central organizing behavior and control system of the body, performs the main function of the psyche and is present in any organism that has needs (they form its core), including unicellular organisms and plants. It is possible that it is the personality that is the main feature, the main defining attribute of the living, and not the metabolism, etc. at all. Of course, such an approach, like any theory in general, is a more or less plausible hypothesis, a convenient integral construct for explaining the phenomena we are studying.

After a number of publications on these topics on websites and in scientific collections, in 2007 a book was published by a private publishing house: O.I. Motkov «Nature of personality: essence, structure and development». M.: Resurrection Printing House, 2007 — 248 p., circulation 500 copies. It outlines generalizing theoretical views on the features and development of the psyche and personality, presents their main functions, the content of the main components and their clear structure, logically separates the essential features of the most important concepts of «psyche», «personality», «subject», «I», » consciousness». Apparatuses of the “I”, generalizing and integrating all the aspirations of the personality and expressing their emotions, are located in me at all levels of personality, starting from the base level specified by the genotype of the “Primary Self” and ending with the “Operational Self” in the block of the Subject. The appendix contains a number of experimental and theoretical articles: On the psychological mechanism of goal-setting, On the paradoxes of the process of self-actualization of the personality (on the disharmony of self-actualization among high school students of the gymnasium and among philosophy students), Reflections on the structure of the World and human destiny, The influence of tourist and local history activities on the development of personal harmony high school students, Overcoming extreme situations as an aspect of male self-harmonization of personality (in mountain hikes), On the nature of higher mental functions, Integral model of the psyche and personality. The book is provided with explanatory diagrams and author’s photographs. Can be purchased online and from the author. In 2008, the same book, with minor revisions, and without attachments and photos, was released under the title “Personality and Psyche. Essence, structure and development” by the Samara publishing house Bahrakh-M, circulation 2 copies, 160 pages. He dedicated it to «Veniamin Noevich Pushkin — a brave and disinterested seeker of truth.»

He separately outlined his understanding of the essence of the subject as a “dispatcher” of the personality in the article “The Subject as an Operational Block of the Personality” / “D.A. Oshanin and modern psychology: to the 100th anniversary of the birth. YES. Oshanina». Ed. I.V. Panov and N.L. Morina. Psychological RAO Institute. M.; Obninsk: IG-SOTSIN, 2008 — 292 p. pp. 210-236. (See also: www.ucheba.com, psychology.rsuh.ru, hpsy.ru and www.portalus.ru). In continuation of the development of the idea of ​​the essence of the psyche, in 2009 he wrote a large article «Functions and structure of the psyche: a fresh look», which analyzes and criticizes various past, Soviet and modern views on the psyche, and proposes an author’s approach (see sites: hpsy.ru, www.ucheba.com). Conclusion: the main function of the psyche is a creative (organizing) and control function; «reflection», i.e. in psychological language, sensation and perception is also a necessary, but executive aspect of the psyche, subject to the demands of its control system — the personality. The core of the personality are three generalized, initially given to any living being, needs: in the preservation of oneself and relatives, in self-development, in harmonious optimal functioning. I refer cognitive processes, intellect, abilities, psychomotor skills, language as a symbolic system, a mechanism of consciousness (as a field of clear vision and a clearer understanding here and now of relevant external and internal information) to the executive apparatus of the psyche.

Standing in the shower and thinking about what people call God, I came up with interesting thoughts (see the article “The hypothesis that people call God”). God is the primary organizing and controlling center of Nature, its important part (by analogy with the place and work of the individual in the psyche). This is its control program, as eternal and infinite as the whole of Nature. Important attributes of the World structure are, in addition to the tendency towards world harmony, the maintenance of its diversity, endless development and interestingness. They are also built into the Primary Self of Nature and modulate its optimizing actions so that there is no absolute harmony in the Universe, there is no absolute homogeneity, etc. They maintain a certain amount of disharmony in each individual object and in Nature as a whole.

In recent years, new methods have been developed «Personal Self-Assessment» (see psychology.rsuh.ru), «Picture of the World» and «Value Orientations» (see: psychology.rsuh.ru). The latter is aimed at determining the significance and degree of implementation of external and internal values ​​among respondents (see: “Methodology for studying the external and internal values ​​of a person.” / Journal of the Psychological Society named after L.S. Vygotsky. 2009, No. 1 (3), p. 81-92 www.psychology-online.net).

I conduct experimental studies of the relationship between the general level of personality harmony (determined by the «Personal Biography» method) with the characteristics of temperament and character, self-esteem, values, psychological well-being, life satisfaction, etc. Also, according to a special methodology, the assessment of the importance of various signs of a harmonious personality by people of different ages, gender, and education is being studied. The analysis of these data will allow a deeper understanding of people’s ideas about psychological harmony and its personal and cognitive correlates. I am currently starting to work on a new book on the psychology of a harmonious personality and life. Not only an analysis of scientific approaches to this complex problem will be presented, but also the author’s proven methods for studying the harmony of various aspects of personality, as well as the results of numerous studies, a chapter on personality self-harmonization (something see psychology.rsuh.ru).

Summing up our story, I will note some more important points. In general, there is a subconscious, intuitive process of maturing new cognitive interests in me according to the logic of initial preferences and characterological accentuations, striving for a deeper understanding of everything, for stubbornly pulling out the essential moments of the subject, and craving for a more optimal life. I like all seasons, the feeling of flying, women and children, beauty in everything, literature and poetry, art, music and architecture, cinema and theater. I like to just look at the sky, wander through forests and fields, photograph landscapes, ride a bike, swim, sometimes do something with my hands, create new psychological theories and techniques. I consider myself a “citizen of the Universe”: my Motherland is the whole Earth, my people is all mankind. I adhere to liberal views on the structure of society. I have never been a member of any party, because I value inner freedom. I believe in the general laws of eternal and infinite Nature, which I intuitively feel in the surrounding world and in myself. I see the meaning of life in a creative game. Moral relations and love are not the ultimate universal goal of life, but only important conditions for a more harmonious implementation of the creative process. Nature rejoices when we create an interesting creative product, as it sees in it a new self-expression of another side of our own essence. The words of OSHO are close to me: “Life is a game. Enjoy it!»

05.02.2010