Personality theory A.N. Leontief

​​​​​​​Author D.A. Leontiev. Source Psychology Online.Net

If in Western psychology the formation of personality psychology can be dated to the end of the 1930s, when the first generalizing books on the personality of K. Levin, G. Allport and G. Murray were published, then in our country this problem was actually closed for real research for a long time due to its heightened ideological sharpness, together with such disciplines as psychodiagnostics, psychotherapy, social psychology and sociology — their “defrosting” began only in the late 1960s, when a serious conversation about personality in the humanities became possible again. Before that, in textbooks for pedagogical institutes, sections about personality were limited to general words, personality, in fact, was reduced to character, and character to temperament and other individual typological features, such a characteristic of personality as its orientation was actually reduced to the ideological parameter individualism-collectivism.

Almost the first domestic book in which personality problems were revealed professionally, and not through ideological idle talk, was I.S. Kon’s book «The Sociology of Personality» (Kon, 1969), and questions of personality psychology began to come to the fore only in the 1980s .

One of the few original domestic approaches that can be legitimately considered as a relatively holistic independent psychological theory of personality is the theory of A.N. Leontiev. All his publications on personality psychology fit into a very short period of time — in fact, five years. The first publication on this topic was a small article «Some psychological issues of influence on personality» (Leontiev, 1968); shortly after that, the well-known chapter “Activity and Personality” was written, which was first published in a magazine version, and then entered the book “Activity. Consciousness. Personality” (Leontiev, 1974; 1975). It is what is now known as the personality theory of A.N. Leontiev. However, the relatively recently published “Methodological Notebooks” from A.N. basis of publications in the 1940s. Their publication was impossible for many years, but their very presence refutes the first impression that Russian personality psychology lags far behind the Western one.

In his relatively small texts, A.N. Leontiev, of course, could not develop a theory of personality in all details and details. However, he managed to build a rather harmonious and logically coherent framework of personality theory, which served as the basis for the work of a number of his students, whose names are now primarily associated with domestic psychology of personality. The most notable contribution to the development of this line of work over the past three decades was made by A.G. Asmolov, B.S. Bratus, F.E. Vasilyuk, B.V. Zeigarnik, V.A. Petrovsky, E.V. Subbotsky.

Personality as a special reality

From the very beginning, Leontiev introduces in these notes a fundamental separation from the views of the majority of contemporary psychologists.

“In the usual, everyday sense,” writes A.N. Leontiev in “Methodological Notebooks” (1994, p. 194), “this is what controls the individual processes of activity and behavior. This is the «master» of the processes. Leontiev emphasizes that we are talking about everyday understanding. In fact, this is not so: personality is not a special quality or relationship of mental processes, it has a different nature: “the problem of personality is the problem of unity, the relationship of individual activities” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 194; highlighted by us — D.L.) .

The difference between these formulations is very significant. The interconnection of mental processes is what relates to mental reality. Thus we bring the personality under the general category of the psyche; personality is one of the structures of the psyche. A.N.Leontiev, on the contrary, fundamentally brings the concept of personality beyond the concept of the psyche into the plane of relations with the world; as he formulated later, “the problem of personality forms a new psychological dimension: different than the dimension in which studies of certain mental processes are conducted” (Leontiev, 1983, p. 385). This position, coming from Vygotsky, radically distinguishes the approach of A.N. Leontiev from the views of A.F. Lazursky, S.L.u.e.shtein, V.S. authors. According to the ideas of A.N. Leontiev, personality is a special reality that deserves a special subject, “personality is not a simple biological unity, it is a higher unity, historical (social) in nature. This unity — personality — is not given initially. Man is not born as a person. The personality of a person arises in the course of the development of his life” (1994, p. 195).

Leontiev, thus, defines personality as a connection, a hierarchy of activities, and not mental processes. “The individual becomes a person … in the course of his biography. In this sense, a person is a “clot” of biography” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 196). In other words, personality is not biological and not social, not conditions and not factors, but biography, life experience! Personality is the result of the «crystallization» of biography. This is the first thesis of A.N. Leontiev.

The second thesis: the personality develops, i.e. there are qualitatively special stages of personality development that are not related to the development of mental processes.

The third thesis is that personality has a structure. From the very beginning, a breeding of the individual and the personality is introduced. If an individual is a kind of biological unity, a connection of natural organs and their functions, then personality is a non-biological unity. It gradually arises, is formed in the course of life, therefore there is the structure of the individual, and there is the structure of the personality independent of him.

In fact, the same general idea, albeit in slightly different words, is reproduced more than three decades later in the book “Activity. Consciousness. Personality.» Leontiev begins his analysis of personality by stating an important thesis that personality is not everything in a person. There is also something that has nothing to do with the personality, there is something that has, but this is not known in advance. “The same features of a person can stand in a different relation to his personality” (Leontiev, 1975, p. 165). Our task, writes A.N. Leontiev, “requires to understand the personality as a psychological neoplasm, which is formed in the life relations of the individual” (ibid., p. 172). Everything else — natural and social — are preconditions for the development of personality, from which development itself cannot be deduced.

Personality first appears when a person enters history, and he becomes a personality only as a subject of social relations. “The personality of a person is in no sense pre-existent in relation to his activity, like his consciousness, it is generated by it” (ibid., p. 173).

A.N.Leontiev’s position on personality as an “internal moment” of activity caused a lot of criticism, in which he was reproached for allegedly reducing personality to activity, depriving it of its specificity. However, Leontiev nowhere said that the personality is only a moment of activity. The meaning of this thesis is that activity has a “subject-object” structure; it cannot be carried out without a subject, which is a personality. Activities are constituted by motives, and motives are associated with the personality, but not with the individual.

Personal development. Personality and biography

An individual is a connection of natural organs and their functions, which arises on the basis of differentiation and at the same time integration of living schemes. This is the connection of natural needs, which determines the natural hierarchy of activity. Personality, on the contrary, is “a connection and a hierarchy of activities determined not biologically, but historically” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 196). It is determined by the process of differentiation of activities and their resubordination, new hierarchization, new, secondary, higher connections arise.

This thesis clearly shows continuity with Vygotsky’s line. According to his views, along with natural, natural functions, there are higher human functions. They arise during life, become individual, move from the interpersonal space to the intrapersonal space (this is the essence of the process of internalization). Personality is formed in the process of individual history, in the process of communication with other people.

This is followed by the paragraph «Phylogenesis of personality». “The initially emerging personality…,” writes Leontiev, “is not yet an individual personality. People under a primitive tribal society … have not yet come off … from the umbilical cord of primitive society ”(ibid., p. 197). They form a single whole. Historically, personality develops as the isolation and autonomization of individuals from the primary total personality. Initially, a community, a social group is a single person, then an autonomous individual gradually crystallizes out of it (see Leontiev D.A., 1989).

The following fundamental thesis characterizes the direction of personality development: “From “acting to satisfy your natural needs and inclinations” to “satisfying your needs in order to act, do your life’s work, fulfill your life human goal” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 198) . The causal structure is reversed: first, actions for the sake of needs, then needs for the sake of actions.

A.N.Leontiev speaks further about the inclinations as conditions and prerequisites for the development of the personality, which influence what has become, but do not predetermine it. The inclinations themselves change throughout life, abilities are also formed on the basis of inclinations, but abilities are truly created only in activity, and as long as there is no activity, they remain inclinations. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a discussion in the psychological literature on the problem of abilities between B.M. Teplov, A.N. The essence of the discussion was what exactly to call abilities, what to refer to this term: either to the inclinations that have not yet manifested themselves, or to what has manifested itself and formed in activity. A.N.Leontiev argued that the inclinations still do not determine anything, therefore the concept of abilities is correctly attributed to the already formed operational skills. B.M. Teplov, on the contrary, considered individual innate inclinations to be true abilities, in contrast to operational skills. S.L.u.e.shtein also disagreed with A.N. Leontiev, believing that operational activity structures are not included in the subject of psychological study at all.

What determines the personality of a person, A.N. Leontiev asks himself, and writes: “not internal conditions, taken by themselves, as well as not external conditions, as well as not just a combination of both. Personality is the process that will “connect” them together” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 200). And quite briefly: “Personality is determined by life” (ibid.).

The views of A.N. Leontiev on the development of personality are also reproduced in his publications of the 1970s, but with significant additions. The concept of personality, he notes, expresses the integrity of the properties that are formed in the process of ontogenesis, that is, the integrity is not predetermined, in contrast to the individual, but becoming. “Personality is a relatively late product of the socio-historical and ontogenetic development of a person” (Leontiev, 1975, p. 176). A.N.Leontiev’s metaphor about two births of a personality is well known. Personality «is born twice: the first time — when the child manifests in explicit forms the polymotivation and subordination of his actions, … the second time — when his conscious personality arises» (ibid., p. 211). The first birth coincides with the crisis of three years, when for the first time there is a hierarchization and subordination of actions, a delay in satisfaction. The second birth — with adolescence crisis, when there is a mastery of one’s own behavior through awareness, mediation. It can be said that these two «births of the personality» represent the critical points of the progressive emancipation of the personality from symbiotic ties. The “first birth of the personality” is the operational emancipation of the personality, when the child feels himself as a kind of autonomous unit; “second birth” is a semantic emancipation, awareness of oneself as a semantic unit, when a teenager’s worldview becomes individual, ceases to coincide with the semantic field in which he was formed (Leontiev D.A., 2002).

At the end of the chapter, A.N. Leontiev introduces a fundamentally important idea of ​​the inner work of the individual. “At every turn of the life path, he (a person) needs to free himself from something, to affirm something in himself” (1975, p. 216). A person is, to a certain extent, a crystallization of biography, but it is impossible to consider a person completely the result of a biography, because this misses the main psychological fact — «a person enters into a relationship with his past, which in different ways enters into the cash for him — into the memory of his personality» ( ibid., p.217). At the level of the individual, past impressions do not appear as resting layers of his experience, in this past one dies, loses its meaning, another opens up in a new sense. These changes happen all the time; the past can be re-evaluated and a person “sheds off the burden of his biography” (ibid.). Thus, he takes a significant step forward compared to what he wrote in 1940.

Of course, a person is to a certain extent a crystallization of biography, but it is wrong to consider a person wholly a product of his biography. On the one hand, a personality is formed in the process of life, biography, on the other hand, it is not only the result of what happens, but also the result of what a person makes of himself. “Like the past, the future is present in the individual. The life perspective that has opened up to a person is … his property ”(ibid., p. 218).

Personality structure

The “Methodological Notebooks” also contain everything that in the 1970s became known as the concept of the personality structure of A.N. Leontiev, although Leontiev is still talking more about the hierarchy of activities rather than the hierarchy of motives. Personality, according to A.N. Leontiev, characterizes, firstly, “the wealth, the diversity of the actual relations of the subject that make up his life. This is the foundation, the real basis of the personality” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 201). Leontiev, however, makes a reservation: not every actual activity of a person is a part of his life. Individual activities may be alienated from the person. We do a number of things that may have nothing to do with our life, be something external to it.

The second characteristic is “the degree of development of “secondary”, higher connections of actions (motives) among themselves — their hierarchization. “This is precisely the degree of personality development” (ibid., p. 202), its genetic characteristics. Thus, the vector of personality development is at the same time the vector of its hierarchization, ordering. This idea resonates with the theories of personality of a number of authors, such as G. Allport, S.L.u.e.shtein, K. Levin, K.G. Jung. And the third characteristic is the type of personality structure: mono-vertex, poly-vertex, etc., that is, the general structural profile is meant. Not every motive or life goal is capable of becoming the peak, enduring the entire load of the peak of the personality. It is said that while lecturing on personality psychology in the 1970s, he said that in fact there is not a pyramid with a wide base at the bottom and tapering upwards, towards a higher life goal, but rather, on the contrary, an inverted pyramid standing on top — the purpose of life bears all its weight. And on what the main life goal, the leading motive, will depend on whether he will withstand the entire structure on himself, or not. The leading motive of a person should be such as to hold the whole structure on itself.

Quite a lot is said in the Methodological Notebooks about the problem of meaning, in the context of the regulation of activity, in the context of consciousness, in particular, in line with the formula “development of life = development of motivation = development of meaning” (ibid., p. 210). It is through meanings that psychology merges with concrete history. “Psychology has become the science of personality — a real personality, acting, asserting his life. Psychology now merges with the problems of human ethics… Therefore, the doctrine of activity is the alpha, the doctrine of meaning is the omega of psychology!” (ibid.).

A separate paragraph is devoted to the consideration of the problem of character. A.N.Leontiev clearly breeds character in the broad and narrow sense of the word. By character in a broad sense, he understands almost all individual differences, everything that characterizes a person, does not allow him to be confused with another. Character, personality, individuality — these three words, in this understanding, actually express the same thing. A.N. Leontiev does not define character in the narrow sense of the word, but indicates that “only such use of the term “character” in psychology is justified” (Leontiev, 1994, p. 201).

The interpretation of character not as a synonym for personality, but as its particular substructure, was revealed in a number of works in the 1980s-1990s (A.G. Asmolov, B.S. Bratus, D.A. Leontiev, etc.).

If in 1940 A.N. Leontiev wrote about personality as a hierarchy of activities, then in the works of the 1970s. he slightly simplifies this construction — since activity is set by a motive, a person can be described more simply as a hierarchy of motives. A.N.Leontiev describes the personality structure as a hierarchy of motives, “a relatively stable configuration of the main motivational lines, hierarchized within themselves” (Leontiev, 1975, p. 221). Different things. On the one hand, the motive is interpreted as a situational stimulus of a specific activity (A.G. Asmolov, S.D. Smirnov), on the other hand, as something stable and generalized, rooted in the structure of the personality (V.A. Ivannikov, H. Heckhausen ). This is not about radical differences in explanatory models, but about the fact that the term “motive” is assigned in some cases to some, and in others to other elements of this model of the motivation structure (for more details, see Leontiev D.A., 2004). A.N.Leontiev himself used the concept of motive in both meanings, without diluting them. Many of the new concepts that he introduced into his apparatus are undifferentiated, and one and the same word means different things that were later differentiated. Thus, when he characterizes personal meaning as the relation of a motive to a goal or speaks of the motivating and meaning-forming functions of a motive, he means the motive of a concrete activity unfolding at a given moment; when he speaks of the hierarchy of motives as the basis of personality structure, he obviously has in mind generalized motivational formations.

A.N.Leontiev distinguishes three main personality parameters: “the breadth of a person’s connections with the world, the degree of their hierarchization and their general structure” (ibid., pp. 223-224). Here, in fact, he reproduces, with some clarifications, the structural model that was outlined in the Methodological Notebooks.

One of the most interesting aspects of A.N. Leontiev’s theory of personality is the analysis of what happens as a result of the “second birth of a personality”. First of all, there is a mastery of one’s behavior, the formation of new mechanisms for resolving motivational conflicts associated with will and consciousness. “Only the ideal motive, i.e. a motive lying outside the vectors of the external field is capable of subordinating actions with oppositely directed external motives” (ibid., p. 209), i.e. to act as a mediating mechanism for mastering one’s behavior, to resolve the conflict in the external field, to resolve the very Buridan conflict. It is in the imagination, A.N. Leontiev believes, that we can find and build something that will help us master our own behavior. “The psychological mechanisms of life-feat must be sought in the human imagination” (ibid.), because the achievement is determined by a motive that is not in the external field, and a person transcends the immediate field, goes into another layer of reality, which allows him to act independently in relation to to the current external field. This is the act, which A.N. Leontiev, back in the Methodological Notebooks, defined as “an action whose fate is not determined from the current situation” (1994, p. 182).

Theory of A.N. Leontiev and existential psychology

It was this last side of the personality that most occupied the thoughts of A.N. Leontiev in the last years of his life, and their most concentrated expression was handwritten notes published posthumously under the title “On the subject of personality psychology” (A.N. Leontiev, 1983, p. 384-385). “The problem of personality forms a new psychological dimension: different than the dimension in which research is conducted on certain mental processes, individual properties and states of a person; it is a study of his place, position in the system, which is a system of social connections, communications that open up to him; it is a study of what, for what and how a person uses what is innate to him and acquired by him” (ibid., p. 385). Even earlier, A.N. Leontiev wrote: «Personality … acts as what a person makes of himself, asserting his human life» (1975, p. 224).

In fact, these formulations, summing up and formulating as rigidly as possible the novelty of A.N. Leontiev to personality, express an existentialist position on the question of the relationship between personality and factors or prerequisites for its development. Indeed, in recent years, a number of A.N. Leontiev noted the closeness of his approach to existentialist views in psychology. E.V. Subbotsky (2003) directly calls him “an existentialist in Soviet psychology” (p. 186), F.E. Vasilyuk (2003) states that through the principle of objectivity A.N. Leontiev “potentially introduced the phenomenological category of the “life world” into Russian psychology” (p. 239), A.G. Asmolov (2003) calls the activity approach “the psychology of existence”. But representatives of existential-phenomenological psychology also notice this similarity. A.G. Asmolov recalled that when in 1977 a German translation of the book “Activity. Consciousness. Personality”, A.N. Leontiev received a letter from Hans Thome, a prominent West German psychologist of an existential-phenomenological orientation. Tome wrote to Leontiev: how wonderful it is that the traditions of existential-phenomenological thinking are developing and continuing in the Soviet Union. Recently, the well-known psychotherapist Alfried Langle, a student of V. Frankl, who spoke at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, stated the same thing, writing in the guest book of the Department of General Psychology: “Here in Moscow there are more traditions of existential psychology, and you go even further in this than in Austria and Germany. You are our hope” (Quote. Bratus, 2003, p. 13).

Existential psychology and philosophy have a key principle in common with the theory of activity, which was succinctly formulated by J.-P. Sartre: «Existence precedes essence.» In the activity approach, a similar principle says that all mental and personal structures initially exist as structures of activity, being realized in real relations with the world, only after that they crystallize in the form of some kind of stable structures. For A.N. Leontiev, starting from the 1940s, activity, first of all, is a form of interaction with the world, and then with everything else. And this interaction itself is not derived from something else — traits, motives, dispositions — on the contrary, the structures of the psyche, consciousness and personality are derived from it. Both innate and acquired turn out to be only raw materials, clay, tools; neither the biological nor the social determines personality; they are «equidistant» from the personality, which is not reducible to either one or the other. “The “center of personality”, which we call “I”,… lies not in the individual, not behind the surface of his skin, but in his being” (Leontiev, 1975, p. 229).

Literature

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