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At the practical conference «Psychology: Challenges of Modernity» the «Laboratory of Psychologies» will be held for the first time. We asked our experts who participate in it what task they consider the most relevant and interesting for themselves today. Here is what they told us.
«Understand how irrational beliefs arise»
Dmitry Leontiev, psychologist:
“The challenges are personal and general. My personal challenges are personal, besides, I do not always try to reflect and put them into words, I often leave them at the level of intuitive sensation and reaction. As for a more general challenge, I have long puzzled over how people’s beliefs, their images of reality, are formed. For most, they are not connected with personal experience, are irrational, are not confirmed by anything and do not bring success and happiness. But at the same time, it is much stronger than beliefs based on experience. And the worse people live, the more confident they are in the truth of their picture of the world and the more inclined to teach others. To me, this problem of distorted ideas about what is real and what is not, seems unusually difficult.
«Create an integral psychology and psychotherapy»
Stanislav Raevsky, Jungian analyst:
“The main task for me is the creation of integral psychology and psychotherapy. Connection of modern scientific knowledge, first of all, the data of cognitive sciences, and psychotherapy of different schools. Creating a common language for psychotherapy, because almost every school speaks its own language, which, of course, is detrimental to the common psychological field and psychological practice. Connecting thousands of years of Buddhist practice with decades of modern psychotherapy.
«To promote the development of logotherapy in Russia»
Svetlana Štukareva, speech therapist:
“The most urgent task for today is to do what depends on me to create the Higher School of Logotherapy at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis on the basis of an additional education program in logotherapy and existential analysis accredited by the Viktor Frankl Institute (Vienna). This will expand the possibilities of not only the educational process, but also education, training, therapeutic, preventive and scientific activities, will allow the development of creative projects related to logotherapy. It is extremely exciting and inspiring: to contribute to the development of logotherapy in Russia!”
«Support children in the new realities of our world»
Anna Skavitina, children’s analyst:
“The main task for me is to understand how the child’s psyche develops in a constantly changing world.
The world of today’s children with their gadgets, with available information about the most terrible and interesting things in the world has not yet been described in psychological theories. We do not know exactly how to help the child’s psyche to cope with something new that we ourselves have never dealt with. It is important for me to create synergistic spaces with psychologists, teachers, children’s writers, specialists from different sciences in order to advance together in the incomprehensible realities of this world and support children and their development.”
“Rethink the family and the child’s place in it”
Anna Varga, family psychotherapist:
“Family therapy has fallen on hard times. I will describe two challenges, although there are much more of them now.
First, there are no generally accepted ideas in society about what a healthy, functional family is. There are many different family options:
- childless families (when spouses deliberately refuse to have children),
- bi-career families (when both spouses make a career, and children and household are outsourced),
- binuclear families (for both spouses, the current marriage is not the first, there are children from previous marriages and children born in this marriage, all from time to time or constantly live together),
- same sex couples,
- white marriages (when partners knowingly do not have sex with each other).
Many of them are doing great. Therefore, psychotherapists have to abandon the expert position and, together with clients, invent what is best for them in each particular case. It is clear that this situation imposes increased demands on the neutrality of the psychotherapist, the breadth of his views, as well as creativity.
Secondly, communication technologies and the type of culture have changed, so socially constructed childhood is disappearing. This means that there is no longer a consensus on how to properly raise children.
It is not clear what the child needs to be taught, what the family should give him in general. Therefore, instead of upbringing, now in the family, the child is most often raised: he is fed, watered, dressed, they do not require anything from what they demanded before (for example, help with the housework), they serve him (for example, they take him in mugs).
Parents for a child are those who give him pocket money. The family hierarchy has changed, now at its top is often a child. All this increases the general anxiety and neuroticism of children: parents often cannot act as a psychological resource and support for him.
To return these functions to parents, you first need to change the family hierarchy, «lower» the child from the top down, where he, as a dependent being, should be. Most of all, parents resist this: for them, demands, control, management of the child mean cruelty towards him. And it also means giving up child-centrism and returning to a marriage that has long been “collecting dust in the corner”, because most of the time is spent on serving the child, trying to be friends with him, on experiencing the insults inflicted on him and the fear of losing contact with him.