«There is no psychology, there are attempts to interpret it»
In 2007, a certain new classification of areas of psychology arose, which belongs to the outstanding modern psychologist A.V. Yurevich. To the well-known classification of academic and practical areas of psychology, Professor Yurevich added pop psychology, and attributed the author of this article to its brightest representative.
Without a doubt, there is nothing offensive in being a pop psychologist. It is important for us, if presented in this direction as an explicit figure, to have a clear understanding of this identity.
In order to clearly distinguish between the three territories (academic, practical and pop psychology), we need to unambiguously define these concepts themselves.
Unfortunately, these definitions are absent in the article by A.V. Yurevich, but it clearly follows from the text that academic psychology is scientific, the forerunners of practical psychology are Dale Carnegie and Vladimir Levy, and Nikolai Kozlov is a prominent representative of modern practical psychology.
The epithet scientific, in my opinion, is not a basic feature of academic science, including academic psychology. How many pseudo-scientific bourgeois trends in psychology were in the twentieth century, which in fact turned out to be more academic and scientific than many theoretical constructions of the «most scientific and advanced materialistic».
For this reason, in my opinion, it is necessary to strictly logically define what is hidden behind the concepts of academic psychology, practical psychology and pop psychology.
The concept of academic psychology is associated in Soviet and Russian psychology more with the epithets «state», «scientific», «research», «corresponding to the opinion of the majority», «generally recognized». The highest sign of recognition of the «academic» idea, concept is either the acceptance of the author into a «big» academy or his official publication in the thick central journals of this academy.
Thus, academic psychology is a system of theories, methods and research recognized by the majority of the scientific community and approved as a standard by the expert community of a state academy or other scientific specialized industry parent organization.
In any state, this state of affairs is a manifestation of a scientific corporate ideology, a single point of understanding of truth, truth, scientific character, a monopoly on objective knowledge.
The logic of state academicism has a long history. Initially, academies, in the sense of scientific communities, were either private, so-called free academies, or public institutions founded and maintained at the expense of the state. They were united by one common quality — that they are engaged in science not for practical purposes, but for science itself.
The first academy of this kind was founded by Ptolemy.
But the general veil of academicism, their spirit of elitism was undoubtedly introduced by the Jewish academies in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Babylonia (1st century AD). It was Talmudic scholarship, commitment and rigor in following the Torah, claims for a correct understanding and interpretation of the Law, then became the ideological core, spirit and style of the Academies.
The palm in the integration of «scholarship» and the state belongs to France. The Academy gained importance after Guichelier in 1635 turned a modest private society into a national institution, the Académie Francaise, which later, during the revolution, was merged with other related institutions under the common name of the Institut de France. This brilliant content at the expense of the state, but strongly influenced by the government and the court, the national institution had a profound influence on the development of social thought in France. Following its model, academies subsequently began to be organized in the capitals of other European states, some of which also received the character of national central institutions (in Madrid, Lisbon, Stockholm and St. Petersburg). In Russia, the plan for the Imperial Academy of Sciences was drawn up by Peter the Great and completed in 1725.
In a sense, the situation in academia and academia has not changed much since then.
As two thousand years ago, so today, «Talmudic scholarship» is the most popular — especially in the humanities: a million army of academic adherents are engaged in science not for practical purposes, but for science itself. Their endless isolation from life is the basis of their endless pride.
Without a doubt, many academic departments in modern states have a practical focus, and the research of these scientists is in high demand by society. They are often far from the postulated scientific character. Moreover, she is not interested in them. Calling them «academicians» is mostly pragmatic. It is they who demonstrate to modern society that science can be useful, and that, in the end, society can contain useless intellectual daffodils with academic badges, not out of mercy.
At a time when «God is dead», academic science should have been focused on social issues, in the center of which was a person and his pressing problems, needs, interests: pure science was transformed into a socio-political force. The function of academic science has changed: research, interpretation, integration of the intellectual achievements of social consciousness.
But this function could show the demand for academic science only if it contributed to the effective solution of current and fundamental problems facing an individual, social communities and humanity as a whole.
Russian academic science has been successfully implemented in solving three basic tasks of science:
- practical (meeting the economic, technological, military needs of the state);
- ideological (the formation of mass consciousness in line with the Marxist-Leninist philosophy);
- reference (formation of the methodological foundations of materialistic science and strict criteria of scientific character).
In the conditions of a totalitarian society, these functions were implemented completely and quite unambiguously.
Academic psychology, following the “big” science, successfully implemented the same functions.
There is no need to think that the situation has changed over the past 20 years. Despite the high dynamism of social processes, the functions of academic psychology have not changed, just as the content has not changed, the basic methodology stuck in Cartesian linear determinism.
Academic psychology has never been able to exert a meaningful influence on the lives of individuals and groups. Not because academic theories did not contain truth or were unsuitable as systems. Their rationality, intellectuality led to the fact that they have only theoretical value. What is born of the mind can only nourish the mind.
A situation that clearly demonstrates this can be called a situation of a gap between two worlds: the world of academic scientific psychology and the world of practical psychology. It is known how little psychology can help in a number of the most essential areas of human life, how great is the need for elementary psychological assistance, counseling, and the psychological culture of relationships. Moreover, how helpless academic psychologists themselves are in any more or less difficult life situation.
The culture of practical psychological help is not provided by either university education or advanced degrees. It is laid down from early childhood and develops in mysterious ways that are very difficult to reproduce intentionally, and it is very difficult to gain knowledge about these ways, on the basis of which it would be possible to cure the diseases of human relations.
Let us recall the situation that for many centuries has outlined the problem of the relationship between academic scientific psychology and practical psychological knowledge in European culture. It is known that R. Descartes — the great philosopher and one of the founders of European science, European rationalism — believed that there is no such science as psychology and cannot be. Our knowledge about the soul is fundamentally non-scientific in nature and cannot become the subject of theoretical scientific thinking. The source of this knowledge, according to Descartes, is practical experience, we gain it by “rotating in the light, traveling, etc.
Another great thinker, I. Kant, believed that scientific psychology is either impossible, or uninteresting, meaningless. Such a psychology is capable of expressing such a tiny part of human experience that it is of no practical use.
Omitting a lot of lesser-known names, I would like to recall the position of Freud, who argued that psychoanalysis cannot be learned: a true psychoanalyst is just as rare as a true artist, scientist, etc.
And, finally, let us cite the testimony of E. Berne, a well-known modern psychologist, the founder of transactional analysis. He wrote that the practical psychological knowledge of a five-year-old child far exceeds the theoretical knowledge of a professor of psychology.
We must state a strange situation: the insignificance and lack of demand for our scientific academic psychological knowledge, on the one hand, and the boundless field of practical psychology, on the other.
There is a gap between two worlds — academic scientific psychology and practical psychology. He outlines an immense field of practical skills that psychological science is unable to adequately describe in its conceptual apparatus. Academic psychology can give little to understand a number of key practical tasks facing a person: self-improvement, self-change, understanding the world and one’s place in it. This disproportion is fundamental and is connected with the fundamental principles of classical science as we understand it today. The fact is that these establishments were carried out in such a way that all our knowledge about nature from now on has a price: ignorance about the world of the soul, consciousness, personality.
Practical psychology is a system of methods, practices, skills, psychotechnics aimed at transforming social objects: restoring the integrity of consciousness, mental organization, personality activity, as well as influencing the state, attitudes, values of small and large groups.
We understand that any definition limits, but is not limited to, both the paradigm affiliation of practical psychology and the subject orientation. The range of problems dealt with by practical psychology is truly global: intra-group conflicts, the problem of team formation, political elections, the disorder of personal life, family troubles, adaptation problems, imageology, psychological and pedagogical problems at school, lack of self-confidence and self-esteem, frustration with decision-making, existential emptiness, difficulties in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships, age and situational crises, etc. The list is endless, because. it reflects all the possible diversity of the modern life of society and man in society.
We have to reconsider our views on the strategy of practical psychology and personal growth. This is not a trivial question. There are many areas of practical psychology, a lot of practical psychologists, and each school has its own, sometimes directly opposite views on where problems come from, what to do with them and offers its own style of working with a client. And, of course, each of these schools presents its position as scientific.
Imagine a person suffering from a situational crisis who goes first to a behaviorist, and then to a psychoanalyst, then to a body-oriented therapist. And again, what will happen to a person who successively addresses representatives of different areas of psychoanalysis? It is strange, but true, that no one is bothered by the lack of uniformity, a holistic picture in practical psychology, with the assertion that all paradigmatic approaches are rigorously scientific.
According to A.V. Yurevich, pop psychology is the third global socio-digm in psychology, not reducible to the other two — to research (academic) and practical psychology, and its main sources are:
1) academic psychology,
2) practical psychology,
3) esotericism,
4) common sense.
A.V. Yurevich refers the author of this article to the leaders of pop psychology, which, no doubt, is partly quite right.
Firstly, more than 16 thousand people have gone through the trainings and seminars of the author of the article. This is indeed a lot, this is already a people that reflects the socio-demographic, sex, age, and professional composition of Russia.
Secondly, among the directions that exist in the integrative paradigm of psychology, all four sources are clearly present.
Thirdly, integrative psychology, as well as the socio-digm of pop psychology, is addressed to the mass consciousness, and the principle of «accessibility of the mental map» is important for its theoretical constructions.
In our opinion, science is not only a system of principles, methods and means of theoretical knowledge of reality, but also of practical influence on it. Knowledge is «realized power» to the extent that it can serve the needs of society and the individual. Psychology must be «commensurate» with the everyday life of human existence and instrumentally adapted to its problems of life in society.
This is precisely the condition for its effectiveness.
However, there is a profound difference between the psychological and integrative vision of man.
The psychological paradigm (in both theoretical and practical aspects) is ultimately rooted in a mechanistic vision (be it a physiological, behavioral, or psychoanalytic schema). She works with the analytical picture of the psyche.
The integrative model, both at the explanatory and influencing levels, is rooted in a holistic, organic, holographic vision. It works with whole, gestalt states.
The ideological eye of the integrative methodology is the principle of integrity, which implies the understanding of the psyche as an extremely complex, open, multi-level, self-organizing system that has the ability to maintain itself in a state of dynamic balance and produce new structures and new forms of organization.
The concepts of «holistic approach», «holistic personality» have been used for a long time and by different areas and schools of psychology: from Gestalt and humanistic psychology to domestic trends (cultural-historical, activity approaches, etc.). Probably, the very concepts of “goal” and “whole” are etymologically related (in Greek τελός — accomplishment, completion; ending, highest point, limit, goal; τελειός — complete, complete, accomplished; final, extreme, perfect). Achieving the goal at the same time means the completion of the action, the closing of the circle, the ascent to fullness, perfection, beauty.
The goal is achieved when a perfect symmetrical whole is built. Only now, at the same time, when knowledge about the human psyche is replenished not only through purely scientific research (in the general sense of this), but also through esoteric knowledge that has always existed as hidden esoteric knowledge, we can talk about more a holistic understanding of what a person and his consciousness are. And in this sense, the task of a psychologist (no matter what socio-digmatic affiliation), who is trying to understand the integrative methodology, is to learn to perceive fundamentally non-analytical, holistic formations.
Integrative psychology is connected, first of all, with spiritual practices, with a developing person, with the creation of new zones of freedom for a person through the psychotechnical development of the world. In this process, for the first time, new opportunities for actions and circumstances are created, new free spaces, which, in fact, are tools for further development. And each next zone of freedom must be reconquered by creative acts, and not by manipulative or reproducing actions.
Failed attempts to distinguish between spirituality and religion seem to be the biggest source of misunderstanding of the relationship between academic psychology and religion. Spirituality is based on direct experience of non-ordinary dimensions of reality and does not necessarily require contact with the divine to be made in a specific place or through an officially designated person. It implies a very special relationship between the individual and the cosmos, and is essentially a personal matter of man.
Mystics base their beliefs on empirical evidence. They do not need churches and temples: the environment in which they experience the sacred dimensions of reality, including their deity, is their body and nature, and instead of an official priest, they need a supportive group of aspirants or the guidance of a teacher who is experienced in the inner journey, than themselves.
All great religions stem from the visionary experiences of their founders, prophets, saints, and even ordinary followers. All the greatest spiritual scriptures (Vedas, Upanishads, the Buddhist Pali canon, the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormons, and many others) are based on direct personal revelation. As soon as a religion becomes organized, it completely loses its connection with the spiritual source and turns into a secular institution that uses the spiritual needs of a person without satisfying them. Instead, it creates a hierarchical system centered on power, control, politics, money, possessions, and other worldly interests.
The biggest obstacle to the study of spiritual experiences (what Yurevich calls esotericism) is the fact that academic psychology is dominated by materialistic philosophy and methodology and lacks a true understanding of religion and spirituality. In their emphatic rejection of religion, they make no distinction between the primitive beliefs of the peoples or the literal fundamentalist interpretations of the scriptures and the elaborate mystical traditions or spiritual philosophies of the East.
Academic psychology has indiscriminately denied any spiritual concepts and activities, including even those that have not been based on a systematic introspective study of the psyche for many centuries. Many of the great mystical traditions have developed special methods for inducing spiritual experiences, and achieved as good a correspondence between observations and theoretical conclusions as in modern academic psychology.
There is no need to think that when we talk about spiritual practices, we mean only meditation, deprivation techniques, austerity or prayer. In modern conditions, work, study, are methods of self-improvement, transformation, service and achievement of peak, creative states of consciousness.
The complexity of the subject of integrative psychology lies in the fact that the personality, its content, is not determined only by a set of characterological traits or some problematic state. As a rule, deeper unconscious structures (gestalts, COEX systems, suppressed integrity, subpersonalities, scripts, etc.) are behind the problems. Moreover, from an integrative point of view, they are a simultaneous consequence of the entire psychic reality, including not only personal, but also interpersonal and transpersonal megastructures.
Integrative methodology proceeds from the postulate that a person is an integral being, i.e., independent, capable of self-regulation and development. But man is not the only integral entity in the world. Everything in nature has integrity, nature itself is integral and represents a hierarchy in which each element is a «whole» in relation to its parts and a «part» in relation to a larger whole. Both of these aspects of existence: both the part and the whole must be fully expressed in order to realize the potential of any being. This explains the desire of a person to go beyond his limits, to transcend, to be, to feel, to realize himself as a part of the universe.
The fundamental integrative thesis is that the world is not a complex combination of discrete objects, but a single and indivisible network of events and relationships. And although our direct experience seems to tell us that we are dealing with real objects, in fact, we are responding to sensory transformations of objects or reports of differences. As Gregory Bateson argues in his writings, thinking in terms of substance and discrete objects is a serious epistemological error. Information flows in circuits that go beyond the boundaries of individuality and include everything around. Thus, with an integrative view of the world, the emphasis shifts from substance and object to form, pattern and process, from being to becoming. Structure is the product of interacting processes, no more durable than the pattern of a standing wave at the confluence of two rivers. According to the integrative approach, the Universe is like a living organism, whose organs, tissues and cells make sense only in their relation to the whole.
The general meaning of the integrative approach lies in the fact that the human psyche is a multilevel system that reveals in personally structured forms the experience of an individual biography, birth, as well as an unlimited field of consciousness that transcends matter, space, time and linear causality. Consciousness is an integrating open system that allows you to combine different areas of the mental into integral semantic spaces.
The integrity of the personality implies taking into account all its manifestations (at least those that have already been described, perhaps studied, but not fully explained): biogenetic, sociogenetic, personogenetic, interpersonal and transpersonal (the last two, in our opinion, include a number of features, still few accepted by official science, but no longer denied as non-existent). If we talk about the existence of such a personality, then it has existed for centuries and exists in our time (regardless of scientific inventions and educational systems, although more often distorted by them, but functioning integratively and holistically).
Practical methods of socio-psychological work using an integrative approach include a wide range of psychological techniques, common to which is the use of personal resource potential. The current stage in the development of psychology puts forward a number of cardinal tasks for the scientific and methodological understanding of the established approaches and the search for new fundamental ideas that integrate various scientific areas.
In a sense, it can be argued that psychology is experiencing a kind of «growth crisis» similar to the crisis of physics at the beginning of the XNUMXth century. In our opinion, the resolution of this crisis is associated not so much with the search for new facts or patterns, but with new methodological approaches and a new level of understanding of human consciousness as an integral system.
The integrative approach is a fundamentally new semantic space both for professionals (psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists) and for their clients.
Any theory, concept, therapeutic myth, doctrine, idea, worldly judgment about psychic reality, despite their often seeming completeness and universality, are fair only under certain circumstances and with a certain degree of probability. It should be remembered that both the most ingenious psychological theories and the statements of some clients about the «evil eye», «damage» are, first of all, an attempt to structure and broadcast their own inner experience.
The ultimate awareness of the relativity and at the same time the truth of any understanding of the mental frees the specialist from dogmas and brings him closer to the point of integration, and reflexive understanding and acceptance — to integrative psychology. Our mind produces explanations, and reality indulgently accepts any of them.
As a first approximation, we want to state that integrative psychology is not a set of rules that defines the process of psychological work, but rather a direction of professional thinking, a philosophical and psychological trend that has practical application.
At the end of the 20th century, being deprived of its habitual materialistic methodology and being influenced by many areas of foreign science, Russian psychology risked losing the definiteness of purpose and clearness of reference points with an uncritical perception of everything foreign. Today, more than ever, historical continuity and methodological predetermination are needed when choosing the paths for the development of psychology. These conditions are fully satisfied by integrative psychology.
We already understand that our representation of a person as a living, open, complex, multi-level self-organizing system that has the ability to maintain itself in a state of dynamic balance and generate new structures and new forms of organization is a new categorical understanding of traditional holistic approaches in theology and philosophy. In our opinion, any psychological practice should adhere to the integrative paradigm of building a science, that is, a system whose methodological basis is based on a holistic model of the Universe and human consciousness.
It was the integrative approach that to a large extent changed the philosophy of the natural sciences at the beginning of the XNUMXth century.
The development of such fields as quantum mechanics, relativistic physics, catastrophe theory and models of strange attractors in mathematics, laser technology has greatly transformed the approach to scientific research. The very idea of the object and subject of scientific experience has undergone significant changes. The fundamental impossibility to separate the observer from the object of observation and the fundamental relationship between objects and phenomena, traditionally considered completely independent in the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of science, revolutionized the scientific view of the world.
In the field of the science of consciousness, new approaches, originating in the philosophy of quantum mechanics and relativistic physics, surprisingly merge with the philosophy and methodology of Eastern philosophical schools. First of all, it should be noted the ideas of Buddhism about the interconnectedness of all phenomena, mutual existence and the impossibility of isolating the fate of an individual.
In our opinion, it is the integrative paradigm that can become a methodological basis, both in the development of psychological practices and in the academic psychological science of the XNUMXst century.
Integrative psychology is an approach that restores a holistic vision of mental reality that was temporarily destroyed in the XNUMXth century with the help of varieties of materialistic reductionism (from scientific materialism to behaviorism and Marxism), including not only the person, but also interpersonal and transpersonal levels of functioning. We must take into account the bitter lesson when the attempt to reduce mental being to its lowest level, matter, had a particularly unpleasant effect on psychology, which first lost its spirit, then its soul, then its mind and was reduced to the study of only empirical behavior and bodily desires. .
The main task to be solved in the first place is to develop a model of the methodology of psychological science, focused on integration, i.e. reflective and empathic connection:
— various paradigms, directions within the framework of academic scientific psychology;
— various areas of practical psychology;
– academic, scientific psychology and practice-oriented concepts, concepts of psychotherapy;
— scientific psychology and those branches of psychology that do not belong to traditional academic science (transpersonal, exoteric and esoteric circles of knowledge in spiritual traditions);
— scientific psychology and art, philosophy, methodological and technical delights of the exact sciences.
The first step is the development of an integrative scientific model and methodological apparatus that makes it possible to actually correlate various approaches both within psychological science and those that implement other semantic forms of psychological knowledge, including everyday, profane knowledge, which Yurevich designates as “common sense”.
The first step in the formation of an integrative methodology and at the same time a way of professional development of a psychologist is integrativity, openness to knowledge as a backbone principle.
The second step is the formation of that psychological worldview, in accordance with the positions of which various schools of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, psychotherapy, both academic and all other forms of psychological knowledge, are understood not as competitive, mutually exclusive disciplines, but as approaches that are fair and applicable in certain areas of mental reality, in a certain culture, in certain spatio-temporal sense-activity situations of the functioning of the mental — integrative psychology.
And the third most important step is the formation of that multifaceted educational environment in which a holistic, universal personality of a psychologist can grow — the bearer of integrative methodology as a model of the world.
Without a doubt, the carriers of integrative psychology will be those who can expand their horizons, pushing their boundaries outward (working through their persona to self-realization) and in depth (through perinatal matrices, interpersonal and transpersonal), all the while rebuilding the map of their soul and expanding its territory to levels of «complete identity» (Grof), Full Consciousness (Kozlov), Mind (Wilber).
And it seems to me that the integration of such a level should be evaluated as the highest achievement of psychological knowledge, for which we must recognize the same privileges that the creative genius of W. James, Z. Freud, K. Levin, A. Maslow, K. Rogers, St. .Grof.
In all small and large psychological teachings there is a unity in intention that embraces differences.
The unity of the theory and practice of psychology must be built on the basis of productive diversity and vitality.
Let all the trees and flowers grow. It is foolish to strive to make the flowers and trees of the same garden the same, and to judge their differences by imperfections.
May all theories and practices of psychology flourish. In their multiformity and multicolour, multiplicity and polyphony, they constitute the flavor and beauty of modern psychology.
And, if our mental gaze suddenly manages to collect the diversity of psychologies into a single mandala of science.
And, if suddenly psychologists are filled with the power to transcend and unite the greatest opposites.
And, if suddenly the eyes of a psychologist are opened to other (foreign) relationships and understandings of the subject of psychology, just as the eyes of a child are opened to the action of life.
Then we’ll meet a psychologist.
and integrative psychology.
Literature
1. Yurevich A.V. Pop psychology. // Questions of psychology.2007. T. 26. No. 1. S. 79-87.
2. Yurevich A.V. Science and parascience: clash on the «territory» of psychology // Psikhol. zhurn.T. 26. No. 1. S. 79-87.
3. Yurevich A. V. Systemic crisis of psychology//Vopr. psychol. 1999. No. 2. S. 3-11.