Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 4, JulyAugust 2009, pp. 2858. 2009 M.E.

. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 10610405/2009 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405470402

L.I. BOZHOViCH

The Struggle for Concrete Psychology and the Integrated Study of Personality
This chapter from L.I. Bozhovichs book Personality and Its Formation in Childhood (1968) extends Vygotskys analysis of the general crisis in psychology to personality-oriented pedagogical psychology. The historical background of attempts to solve the challenge of pedagogical psychology is analyzed. Two main dilemmas prevent the solution: how to relate (contradictory) empirical results to a holistic model of personality and how this model relates to the real life of each person.

The emergence and crisis of pedagogical psychology The history of psychology shows what a long and difcult path child and pedagogical psychology had to travel before it was able to offer any help at all in solving the problems that confront pedagogy. Even today this help is extremely inadequate, especially when it comes to working on the issues faced by educators. It is well known that psychology has long been primarily a theoretical science. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century did it became an empirical and, later, an experimental science. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt set up an experimental laboratory and in so doing essentially laid the groundwork for the development of the new natural science of psychology.
English translation 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text Borba za konkretnuiu psikhologiiu i tselostnoe izuchenie lichnosti, in L.I. Bozhovich, Lichnost i ee formirovanie v detskom vozraste (Moscow: Piter, 2008), pp. 5479. Published with permission of Elena Dmitrievna Bozhovich. Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov.
28

JULYAUGUST 2009 29

The introduction of experimental method into psychologywhich made it possible to penetrate the inner structure of mental processes, to nd the causes behind mental phenomena, and to establish the laws governing these changesplayed a decisive role in transforming psychology into a true science. At the same time, tremendously important for the science of psychology were the ideas concerning development that had penetrated it, ushering in the study of child psychology. Nevertheless, a great deal of time passed before child psychology was able to begin serving pedagogical practice. In the early twentieth century, the city of Paris asked the French psychologist Alfred Binet to use his psychological research methods to select pupils for a special school. This was one of the rst major tasks assigned to psychology in addressing problems of practical life. And Binet fullled his commission. Of course, we know today how awed Binets aptitude tests were and that they served as a means of discrimination against many children from segments of society with few cultural or nancial resources. However, it is important to note here that, by this time, child psychology was sufciently well-developed and well-recognized by science that it was asked for practical assistance and had been able to provide it. At approximately the same timeduring the rst decade of the twentieth centurypsychology had already made an organizational and structural entry into pedagogical practice: a special branch of psychology had split off that was now called pedagogical psychology. This period saw the appearance of numerous works by West European, American, and Russian scholars aimed at a particular problem: discovery of the psychological foundations of the pedagogical process. In 1906, the First All-Russia Congress of Pedagogical Psychology was convened.1 It proclaimed that its primary mission was to nd a way to apply psychological knowledge in the classroom. Speaking to the congress, Academic V.M. Bekhterev lavished praise on the achievements of contemporary psychology. He felt that since psychology had begun to rework itself in the soil of experiment, it had rapidly acquired theoretical stability that allowed it to apply the conclusions of this science to various sectors of practical life, among which pedagogy occupied a place of particular importance. However, Wundts experimental psychology was unable to nd the right path for studying pedagogical phenomena and facts. At rst, pedagogical psychology was not engaged in conducting its own research or striving to help pedagogy formulate its problems scientically at all; it was only engaged in producing popular works on general psychology for teachers to help them better understand children and evaluate their pedagogical experience.

30 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Typical along these lines was the book by William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology. But my main desire, he wrote, has been to make them conceive . . . the mental life of their pupil . . . and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedekers handbook of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. He also comments, Now, that I have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed scientic in psychology, and are practical and popular in the extreme.2 This sort of relationship between psychology and pedagogy was also evident at the 1906 All-Russia Congress of Pedagogical Psychology, where there were almost no talks attempting to apply a psychological approach to solving practical problems associated with nurturing and teaching children. Most papers were either on pedagogy (independent of psychology) or on general and child psychology (independent of pedagogy), but the majority asserted and argued the need for a connection between both sciences and proclaimed hope for close collaboration between them. In the near future, the congress resolution stated, society will build the rational cultivation and education of children on the ndings of experimental psychology. However these hopes were not soon realized. Psychology remained on the sidelines when it came to solving actual problems of pedagogy. It continued to promote psychological knowledge and offer pedagogy ndings and laws that, while solidly established through experimentation, were deprived of concrete applicability. Such a situation could not satisfy either psychologists or pedagogues, and their dissatisfaction soon made itself known. By the Second All-Russia Congress of Pedagogical Psychology, which was convened just three years after the rst (in 1909), some papers expressed disappointment and doubt as to whether experimental psychology was capable of helping solve real-life problems posed by pedagogical theory and practice.3 One featured presentation of the congress, a paper by professor N.D. Vinogradov, expressed dissatisfaction with psychology particularly starkly. Vinogradov said that if the results that psychology had given pedagogy in the past years of intensive experimental work were to be summed up, it would not amount to much:
[M]any of us, having heard our ll of papers from the area of psychology and experimental pedagogy, will leave here with a rather gloomy sense that in our everyday practical work we will have to be guided by the same traditional pedagogy that we practiced in the past.4

At the congress, the reasons for the impotence of pedagogical psychology, which was obvious to everyone, were discussed. Two reasons were mentioned most often. The rst was that pedagogical psychology had not yet found its own object

JULYAUGUST 2009 31

of study; it was not supposed to pose and solve general questions of experimental psychology. Its task was to address problems suggested by pedagogy. The words of G. Miunstenberg, who felt that pedagogical psychology should not live off crumbs from the table of experimental psychology, but instead bake its own bread became a catchphrase at the congress. The second reason that congress attendees attributed to the impotence of pedagogical psychology was the inadequacy of its method. Many of them spoke about the fact that complex mental processes that arise in the course of upbringing and learning cannot be studied the same way that isolated mental functions can. They have to be studied through combined activity. So even at that time a more or less correct course was being plotted in investigating what was preventing psychology from providing real assistance to pedagogical theory and practice. Of course the causes were not yet fully understood (even today they are not always understood correctly), but the notion that the study of isolated mental processes and functions cannot help solve pedagogical problems was very important. True, participants in the second congress were not aware that pedagogical psychology cannot bake its own bread, or rather nd its own object and method of study, until the general psychological theories on which it was based underwent substantial changes. In other words, at that time it was still poorly understood that the failures of pedagogical psychology that were so clearly evident during the second congress were merely a reection of the general crisis in psychology. This crisis began in the early twentieth century and has still not been fully resolved. The main problem with Wundts experimental psychology and all the other psychological research that continued to bear its stamp was that in breaking down the complex mental life of man into its simplest elements so that it could be experimentally investigated, psychology lost its most important object of studythe actual living human personality. Psychology as it has developed up to this point, wrote L.S. Vygotsky in the 1930s, took a metaphysical approach to the internal world of man. . . . It tore mental processes away from real personality as a whole and investigated them in this isolated form. This is why it was doomed, willy nilly, to the study of empty abstractions.5 Furthermore, it is important to note that psychologys failure could be traced back to principle. Psychology claimed, for example, that the content of the mind (the content of interests, goals, intentions, human experience, etc.) should not be the subject of psychological research: it relinquished its rights to the integrated human personalitywith all the distinctive features of its inner spiritual lifeto the literary arts. For a while, psychology found consolation in the facade of precise academic science and the ability to break down complex mental phenomena

32 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

into their component elements and experimentally investigate regularities in the connections between these elements. Gradually, however, this sort of empty abstraction ceased to satisfy psychologists and pedagogues. Having discovered their complete inability to understand and explain complex forms of human mental life, traditional psychology reached an impasse. This was most evident when it came to pedagogical psychology. This is why the great hope placed on pedagogical psychology during the rst congress vanished by the second, even though only a few years separated the two. After all, in order to correctly organize learning, it is not enough to know the particular features of a childs attention, memory, or thinking. Pedagogy needs information about the psychological structure of schoolchildrens learning activity and what laws govern the process by which they assimilate knowledge (all the more so as different laws govern the acquisition of different sorts of content). And in order to organize education correctly, we must know the agespecic features of childrens personality: we must know what they aspire to, what kinds of emotions they are experiencing and how they experience them, the features of their moral sphere and the laws governing its development. In other words, pedagogy needs the sort of knowledge that cannot be obtained using the study of individual mental processes and functions, however painstaking this study might be. The assimilation of knowledge and the process of forming convictions have their own laws that are intrinsic to them as integrated processes, and discovering these laws demands a particular approach, a particular method. Furthermore, even when it is necessary to know how pupils attention, thinking, or memory operates when they perform a specic learning task, this cannot be achieved with knowledge of the general laws governing these processes. hey must be studied within the context of the learning activity being performed, the content and nature of which determine the specic features of these processes and the laws governing their performance. Traditional psychology had particularly little to offer in solving the problems of education. Therefore, the need to fundamentally revise psychological theory and the methodology of psychological research can be seen specically in these problems. The only way psychology can contribute to the solution of these problems is if it adopts child personality as the object of its study. However, psychology that follows in the footsteps of traditional Wundtian psychology in understanding its object and designing its methods is not well equipped to study personality. Following the principle of breaking down the whole into its component parts, this psychology studied personality not as a unity, but as the aggregate of its different propertiestemperament, character, abilities, aptitude, and so on. All these properties were studied as independent mental phenomena, not

JULYAUGUST 2009 33

tied into the overall structure of childrens personality and not dependent on their directedness, on the life experience that is determined by the specic circumstances of their lives. So, in order for pedagogical psychology to become not only an independent science but also a science capable of solving vitally important practical problems, it had to fundamentally change its overall theoretical position. It had to change from a science focused on the isolated study of separate mental processes and functions to a science focused on childrens specic mental activity during actual pedagogical processes and on the particular features of the integrated personality of the child, who is, as A.S. Makarenko put it, is not only the object but also the subject of education. The approach to studying personality in general and individual psychology The struggle for verisimilitude and concreteness in the science of psychology, and, consequently, the striving to nd new ways to study the psychology of human personality, began around the dawn of the twentieth century; but it really got under way in the 1920s and 1930s, when new psychological views and conceptions began to take shape. During this period, all the great psychologists of the day (K.N. Kornilov, L.S. Vygotsky, P.P. Blonskii here, and K. Bhler, E. Thorndike, E. Spranger, S. Freud, K. Lewin, and many others abroad) spoke out with criticisms of empirical psychology and attempted to come up with a new understanding of both the object and method of psychological research. A great variety of psychological schools emergedreexology, reactology, cultural-historical theory, behaviorism, gestalt theory, psychology of the spirit, Freudianism, and others. All of them were aimed at nding new content for and new methods of psychological investigation. But not all of these works are of interest here. We will examine only those that attempt to nd new approaches to the psychology of personality and the problems of educational psychology. Analysis of psychological investigations into personality, which will be the focus of our discussion, is also not intended to give an exhaustive description or even an exhaustive overview of this research. Our intention is to look into the recent past in order to assess what has already been achieved in this regard by our predecessors and to better understand the efforts that even now must be made in order to break out of the connes of tradition in studying child psychology while maintaining rigor and objectivity. This is the only way that child and pedagogical psychology will succeed in giving pedagogy the knowledge it needs when it comes to both childrens age-related features and the laws governing personality formation.

34 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

If we take even a cursory look at the history of research into the psychology of personality, it becomes clear that, unlike other problems, which have attracted more or less constant interest throughout the history of our science, attention to the problems of personality has had its peaks and valleys. This is partly related to the demands of society and partly to the logic governing how the science of psychology has developed. The interest in the psychological study of personality that arose during the rst quarter of this century was rst and foremost a reaction to traditional experimental psychology, which had become bankrupt in the eyes of practitioners. The central problem of any psychology, wrote E. Stern in the 1920s, must be the problem of human personality. The psychology of elements has proved itself useless when it comes to human personality; this is why it has thrust this problem, for the most part, into the background, believing that science has not yet matured to the point where it would be able to solve it. However, The reason for this, Stern stipulates, lies not in the immaturity of science, but in its main mindset: it is never possible to build an integrated personality out of simple component parts that are alien to meaning (Sinnfremden); we should instead begin with the whole, with the structure.6 Similar sentiments were expressed by O. Tumlirtz during this period. Experimental research, he writes, at least to the extent it has adhered to Wundts ideal, is insufcient since it has limited itself to formal examination and furthermore to the study of mere formal elements. True, he notes, experimental psychology has become . . . immeasurably more productive than it was not long ago; nevertheless, it is natural that, having become weary of researching elements, the results of which were disappointing, psychology began to strive toward expanding its perspective and methodological boundaries.7 What Tumlirtz had in mind here was the emergence during this period of many new psychological theories that attempted to incorporate into psychological research the content-specic nature of processes and the study of the psychology of human personality: eidetics, personalism, characterology, gestalt psychology, as well as Freudianism, which had a tremendous inuence on Tumlirtz himself. In Soviet psychology of this period, Vygotsky came out with the assertion that personality is the main object of psychological science. He wrote that for child psychology:
[T]he greatest problem in all of psychologythe problem of personality and its developmentstill remains closed. Child psychology, in the person of its nest representatives, has concluded that describing the inner life of the person as a whole belongs to the art of the poet or the historian. In essence, this implies a testimonium paupertatistestament to the bankruptcy of child psychology, a recognition of the fundamental impossibility of study-

JULYAUGUST 2009 35

ing the problem of personality within the connes of those methodological boundaries where child psychology arose and took shape. Only by stepping decisively outside the methodological limits of traditional child psychology will we be able to study the development of the higher mental synthesis that can rightfully be called the personality of the child.8

Along these same lines, there was a great deal of interest at the beginning of this century in questions of individual psychology. Those working in this direction felt that the study of human idiosyncrasies had the potential to be the method able to overcome traditional psychologys lack of real-life applicability and abstractness. G. Allport saw this clearly in his own approach. He believed that Wundtian psychology was too focused on explaining the uniformity of common psychological phenomena. In so doing, it pushed to the side individual mental features, viewing them as random bothers that interfered with the study of what was most importantthe generalized human mind. And so, Allport continues, within psychological science there gradually arose a new movement, the goal of which was to add to this abstract portrait another, more life-like one. Through various means and from many perspectives it tries to draw and explain the individual nature of the mind. This new movement soon became well-known (in America) as the psychology of personality.9 Contemporaries have assigned tremendous signicance to all these attempts to overcome the crisis of traditional psychology through study of personality, its distinctive features and experiences. Psychology, wrote the Freudian psychologist S. Bernfeld in 1926, is now in a state of rapid transformation; it is breaking free of the fetters placed on it by Wundt. It is no longer satised with the narrow eld of peripheral phenomena that constitutes the sphere of experimental psychology, and it is beginning to grab hold of genuine mental phenomena as the object of its research.10 However over time it would become clear that the psychological research into personality and its theoretical basis that emerged during this period were not able to save psychology from the crisis that had befallen it. Furthermore, some of these views even slowed scientic progress in studying personality for quite a long time. The inability to overcome the traditional atomistic way of studying personality was rst and most clearly seen in the area of individual psychology. During the rst quarter of the twentieth century this direction (the various branches of which included differential psychology, psychographics, typology, characterology) was among the most active areas of the psychology of personality. Even now it continues to exist and develop, using new research methods such as factor analysis.

36 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

However, here as well, the approach to studying individual features remains traditional. In some cases (this is typical of differential psychology), researchers selected some individual personality property that could somehow be isolated from the others (e.g., outgoingness or the lack thereof, aptitude, a tendency toward perseveration, etc.), and research was done into the particular features of this property among different people. Sometimes this was combined with study of the interrelationship between features of this property and certain other properties and functions that were studied with the same degree of isolation. In assessing differential psychology from the perspective of its role in overcoming the old Wundtian psychology, Allport rightly notes its shortcomings. The interest in individual psychology, he indicates, just as in traditional psychology, was focused on isolated functions, and not on the people who possess these functions. This, he states, is a bottom up approach using categories of mental elements rather than a top down approach using categories based on how they are organized and structured.11 But we nd the same thing in other cases, where the object of study is the individual personality with all its individual features. After all, it is not just a matter of what to study, but of how to study it, from what position study is approached. In other words, however carefully we might study all the separate properties of personality, if we study them in isolation, as independent phenomena, we will never be able to understand personality that combines them, that connects these separate isolated properties. Neither different ways of interrelating them nor different ways of combining them will help. It is impossible to understand the psychology of personality from aggregates of separate elements because no given property, function, or aspect of personality can ever be equated with itself. The forgetfulness or, for example, absentmindedness of one person is not the same as the forgetfulness and absentmindedness of another, since the etiology of these features, their manifestation and their role in the mental life of a subject can be absolutely different in one case as compared with the other. Studying a particular property as something isolated and independent, we are studying only the surface aspect of the phenomenon, leaving its true psychological nature unstudied. This is why when we have studied all the features of personality as such, we are still unable to assemble a living person out of them. G. Allport provides an eloquent illustration criticizing this method of studying individuality. His book offers examples of the failures that aficted E. Toulouse in his study of the mathematician Poincar. Toulouse stated that Poincar had a memory capable of retaining eleven-digit numbers, that he was capable of incredibly productive numerical association,

JULYAUGUST 2009 37

that he displayed the highest level of auditory imagery, that he was plagued by insomnia, loved music, loved hunting, and so on. Nevertheless, according to Allport, Toulouse, in assessing his own efforts, admitted that in the synthesis of the qualities he identied the genius Poincar is demonstratively absent. In this connection it can be said that however strange this may seem at rst glance, in differential psychology (all its varieties), the characterization of a living, specic psychology is also absent, as it is in general psychology. Personality is constituted here out of the aggregate of different properties, while a true personality approach requires quite the opposite: examination of each separate property in terms of personality as a whole. The need for this approach was expressed well by V. Keller, who said that a given heart has more in common with a pair of lungs than with other hearts. So, both in terms of its theoretical and its fundamental methodological approach, individual psychology was not able to escape the connes of traditional psychology and bring the study of personality any closer to solving specic real-life problems. So much space has been devoted to this question because even today we see confusion between the psychological study of personality and the study of individual human traits. Furthermore, many psychologists feel that the study of individual traits in and of itself makes psychological research more concrete, more substantive, and brings it closer to life and to practice. But at the same time, even in 1957, S.L. Rubinshtein correctly stated that individual personality properties are not the same thing as personality properties of the individual, in other words, the properties that characterize his personality.12 And in 1959, in a small popular book for parents that was well written on a good scientic level, V.S. Merlin offers a convincing argument against confusing personality and individual traits. In particular, he points to the fact that distinctive features of the mind are intrinsic not only to humans but also to animals, who have different temperaments, different degrees of intelligence, and so on. Animals, Merlin writes, possess individuality, but not personality. Only a human can be a personality. Individual features of the animal mind are a result of animals adaptation to their environment. The environment leaves its individual mark on the mind of each animal. But to the contrary, we understand personality to be that which on its own leaves its impression on surrounding reality as a result of the creative productive activity of a person.13 However, these are just individual assertions, individual points of view that are not shared by all. Moreover, even now we see attempts to replace research into the psychology of personality with research into individual character traits. A.G. Kovalev even attempted to resurrect A.F. Lazurskiis little star, that is, the graphic expression of different combinations of individual properties,

38 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

and thereby sought to nd ways and means to study personality (true, by the second edition of his book he was no longer pursuing this work).14 It deserves mention that in his time Lazurskii undoubtedly played a progressive role in this regard. He, like many other psychologists of the time, strove to bring scientic psychology closer to real life, to bring it down to earth from its metaphysical heights and treat psychology as the science of human personality.15 The method of natural experimentation that Lazurskii designed was also progressive for that time. He permitted ordinary experiments investigating individual mental processes to be incorporated into actual pedagogical situations and in so doing freed them of the articiality that they acquire in the laboratory. Another undoubted achievement was Lazurskiis little star, which vividly expressed the distinctive combination of the processes and functions (or inclinations as Lazurskii put it) considered most important from the perspective of empirical psychology. It could be said, therefore, that Lazurskiis characterology, while it did not overcome the traditional separation of personality into individual functions and did not aim to do so, it nevertheless made it possible, within the framework of empirical psychology, to provide a description of individual traits of specic people and nd typical correlations for different human characters. But while we recognize the progressiveness of Lazurskiis work for early twentieth-century psychologyhis natural experiments, including his little starwe nevertheless feel that bringing his methods into the modern study of personality does nothing to advance this research. Psychology as science of the spirit* and its approach to studying personality Early in the century, the struggle for a concrete psychology and a psychology of personality was also taking place in other arenas. In particular, E. Spranger, E. Stern, and many other (primarily German) psychologists came out with criticisms of the natural sciences approach and experimental method of Wundtian psychology. They proclaimed study of the spiritual structure of the integrated human personality to be the main object of psychological investigation, but they were unable to nd either the correct methodology or technical approach to achieve this. Having challenged traditional empirical psychology and renounced its natural scientic approach to studying mental
*Throughout this section the Russian dukh is translated as spirit, although it could also be translated as mind. Like the German Geist, the Russian dukh shares common semantic ground with both English terms.Trans.

JULYAUGUST 2009 39

phenomena, they disengaged the spiritual from the material and took a principled stance against the possibility of scientic and especially experimental study of the psychology of human personality. Stern expressed this point of view clearly and concisely.
It seems to me that psychology that has an exclusively natural sciences orientation is incapable of doing justice to the distinctiveness of spiritual life; the spiritual is somehow substantially distinct from purely natural existence and demands special examination. The natural sciences constitute only one group of sciences, from which sciences of the spirit are unquestionably independent. They address different problems and involve different methods. . . . It is true both that human beings are tied to nature, being subject to its laws, and that studying them from this perspective using natural scientic method is completely justied and essential. . . . However, the distinctive feature of human beings is specically that this biological existence is not all of their being, that they are in every way able to rise above nature, that they are involved in another sphere, which we call the kingdom of the spirit. On the foundation of what we dene as the natural principle, a special realm rises up, the content of which can in no way be described as mere existence in the natural sciences sense of this word.16

This is how the need for two psychologies emerged: one that approaches the study of the mind from a natural scientic perspective, and another, a new psychology, psychology as the science of the spirit, of the spiritual structure of human personality that has its own object and method of study. In this way, Sternhaving been unable to identify the essence of the human minds social development and thereby nd a way out of the impasse by scientically restructuring Wundtian psychologyperformed an act of vivisection on both psychologyseparating it into two different sciences (the psychology of the body and the psychology of the spirit)and human beings themselves, separating the natural, biological principle from the social and spiritual one. Spranger developed very similar views regarding the impossibility of understanding purely mental, spiritual phenomena by studying them using natural scientic experimentation. However, having broken out of the connes of natural scientic psychology, he, like Stern, fell into another captivity, no less restrictive: the metaphysics of W. Dilthey. As Vygotsky put it, he, like Stern, was in a hurry to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and unto God the things that are Gods: to divide the mind into a corporeal and spiritual principles and attribute to each of these spheres of human psychology an existence that is elemental and relatively independent of one another.

40 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

In summarizing these attempts to overcome the atomism of the old psychology and turn to integrated experiences, incorporate a content-specic aspect of mental phenomena into psychological research, and, most important, to place spiritual life at the center of the psychological study of personality, it is fair to say that they were unsuccessful. In examining these attempts, which were particularly numerous during the early twentieth century, certain Soviet psychologists and philosophers were even inclined to assess them as reversing the achievements of psychology during the previous stage. In particular, N.S. Mansurov in a critical essay titled On Contemporary Psychological Science Abroad [O sovremennoi psikhologicheskoi nauke za rubezhom] presents things as follows: he believed that at the dawn of the twentieth century, psychology, under the pressures created by the demands of production, had made a decisive leap forward in its development.17 The most important thing from his perspective, was that branches of psychological research had started to develop on the basis of Wundts physiological experimental psychology. The development of applied branches of psychology were extremely important, in Mansurovs opinion, since the ndings they generated reinforced materialism and promoted triumph over idealistic thinking. He writes:
Idealist psychologists could not make peace with the situation taking shape. Therefore, both as a reaction to physiological psychology on the one hand and applied directions on the other, a number of idealistic schools emerged within psychology at the end of the past centurythe Wrzburg School, gestalt psychology, psychology as science of the soul and the spirit, Freudianism, personalistic psychology, and so on. Adherents of these schools actively spoke out against materialist ideas that have gained acceptance among psychologists, in particular they object to the union of psychology and physiology and the natural sciences overall, to materialist ideas concerning associations, and so on.18

For Mansurov, the fact that psychology of this period had again returned to the tight embrace of philosophical idealism served as evidence that these directions had taken a step backward in developing the psychology of thought. However such an assessment of the psychological seekings characteristic of the early part of the century seem to us to be unfair in many ways, not to mention the fact that they are fraught with inaccuracy and sweeping accusations.19 In order to understand the true place of this period within the development of psychological science, we must delve deeper. Above all it must be understood that old associative psychology, due to its abstractedness and scholasticism, was completely unable to meet the needs

JULYAUGUST 2009 41

of practice. This is an issue we addressed in detail above, when we examined the uselessness of pedagogical psychology and disappointment in it after the second congress of pedagogical psychology. Thus, attempts to nd a new object and means of investigation were not a reaction to the practical successes of psychology, as Mansurov thinks, but, quite the contrary, a reaction to its shortcomings.20 Specically in trying to overcome the ineffectualness of the old psychology, to bring it closer to life, to the possibility of understanding ordinary human suffering and actions, psychology of this period constructed its own theories. It strove, as Dilthey, who laid the philosophical foundation of psychology as the science of spirit, put it to go beyond the bounds of school psychology and encompass the entire mighty reality of life, and in so doing achieve an understanding of the complex manifestations of the human spirit. For this reason, in terms of its intentions, strivings, and demands to advance toward studying the psychology of personality and the integrated processes intrinsic to it, the strivings we refer to here might perhaps deserve to be described as progressive rather than reactionary phenomena within the history of psychology. Indeed, Spranger does sound progressive within the context of how the science of psychology developed when he says that within the whole of mental experience each part and each separate function carries out work that is essential for this whole and that the structure and activity of every function, in turn, are conditioned by the whole and, consequently, can be understood only in terms of this whole. Furthermore, whether or not these ideas are progressive must be judged not from todays perspective, but from the perspective of that time, when psychology was striving to view any, even the most complex psychological phenomenon, as a mechanical aggregate of feelings, the diversity of which could be reduced to an insignicant number of simple associations. Consequently, Stern and Sprangers undoubted contribution is their assertion that higher forms of mental life cannot be reduced to more elementary mental processes and that they identied specically human forms of mind as the special object of psychological research. Furthermore (and this should be emphasized), they were by no means supporters of subjective psychology. On the contrary, one of Sprangers central theses was that however accurately we might reect our subjective being in intro- and retrospection, we cannot explain the subjective world of human beings through such reection. Spranger (like many other psychologists of this period) essentially asserted that mental processes are determined by nonmental reality. He did not see any way to understand conscious mental phenomena through these phenomena themselves. From his perspective, broader conceptual connections exist that

42 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

determine subjective life without penetrating subjective experience. Spranger did not include physiologythe study of which, according to his own assertions, cannot explain complex mental phenomenaamong such extramental connections; what he had in mind here was the dening inuence of ideology and culture, ethics and philosophy, on a persons mind. According to his views, mental development is a single minds growing in to the objective and normative sprit of a particular epoch. Bearing these points in mind, we are unable to agree with Mansurov regarding the reactionary role supposedly played by psychological theories that emerged around the turn of the century in the development of the science of psychology. On the contrary, from our perspective, they made certain contributions to this development as pointed criticisms of Wundtian psychology, as well as through a number of positive assertions, the most important of which concerned the specic uniqueness of human psychology and the impossibility of reducing it to more elementary forms of mental life, to say nothing of physiological processes. Also important was their attempt to establish a link between human psychology and the spiritual culture of their epoch. Of course those psychological teachings that recognize the substantiality of the mind are profoundly idealist. But they stood for objective idealism and opposed mechanistic materialism, and in this regard they were, in a sense, closer to the truth than psychologists of the physiological school. By then, they had already succeeded in seeing a psychological reality that could not be reduced to the physiological and must be understood not so much in relationship to the brain as in relationship to the historically emerging social environment and in proclaiming this reality to be the central object of psychological research. However, in recognizing a certain historical contribution to the development of the science of psychology by early twentieth-century teachings on personality, we nevertheless must agree with Mansurov that in some ways they were taking a step back from the scientic research that distinguished Wundtian associative psychology. And this step was by no means insignicant, since it concerns the understanding of the main methods of psychological science. After all, associative psychology was also experimental psychology; this is actually why it became associativeit was attempting to approach the study of complex phenomena of mental life strictly scientically, observing, therefore, the experimental method of the natural sciences. In advancing the idea that complex processes cannot be reduced to elements and demanding that the human mind must be studied as a whole, Spranger and Stern jettisoned methods usual in any scientic discipline that were being used in the old psychologyobjective observation and experimentation; they asserted that these methods were not applicable to understanding the psychological distinctiveness of personality.

JULYAUGUST 2009 43

In summing up our description of the attempts by certain prominent early twentieth-century psychologists to bring the study of mans spiritual world to the forefront of psychology, we conclude that they did not achieve their objective. They correctly pointed to the impossibility of reducing the human mind to elementary processes or even to physiology; they correctly demanded that personality be studied as a whole, and that every part of the whole can be understood only in association with the function that it performs within that whole. But they did not nd the correct methodology for understanding the specicity of human psychology or the correct scientic path toward its study. A very interesting attempt to surmount the problem of two psychologies that emerged over the course of psychologys development as a science that has yet to be adequately appraised was undertaken from a Marxist perspective by Vygotsky. He set out to apply experimental research to closing the gap between elementary and higher mental processes that was opened up by empirical psychology. Empirical psychology, Vygotsky asserted, either refused altogether to distinguish between lower and higher mental processes and functions, or mechanically divided the rst from the second, creating a separate psychology and research for each of these two layers. The dilemma that empirical psychology saw as fatal and unavoidable, Vygotsky wrote, consists in choosing between physiology of the spirit or metaphysics. Psychology as a science is impossiblesuch is the historical conclusion of empirical psychology.21 In confronting the crisis that had arisen in empirical psychology, Vygotsky, unlike other psychologists, did not reject the spiritual world of personality as completely unknowable or inaccessible to the tools of scientic psychology. He also did not reject experimental method in psychology as being supposedly incapable of discovering the psychology of human personality. He undertook the restructuring of the very science of psychologyits theory and its methodso that it would be able to trace the path along which child personality develops. Vygotskys entire scientic career consisted in his using the most precise psychological experiments based on a specially developed double stimulation method to demonstrate the law governing the transition from natural mental processes, which are also characteristic of animals, to complex forms of mediated human mental activities. He thus fundamentally solved for psychology the same problem that Charles Darwin solved for biology: he bridged the gap between the mind of the animal and the human mind, demonstrating that those higher mental processes and functions that distinguish humans from animals and that give humans supremacy over nature, are the result of the sociohistorical (cultural) development of those mental processes and functions. And although Vygotsky himself did not

44 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

have time to get to the bottom of the psychology of personality and did not construct a nished theory of its formation, his research into higher mental functions dealt a devastating blow to idealist theories of personality and at the same time made it possible to overcome the atomistic approach of Wundtian psychology. In so doing, he laid the theoretical groundwork for research into the psychology of personality. Freuds approach to the psychology of personality An important attempt to study the psychology of personality around the turn of the century was made by Sigmund Freud and his followers. Although Freudianism was remarkably consistent in ignoring everything that had been established by psychology before him or without him and was completely focused on Freuds own theories and ndings, it nevertheless played and even now plays an exceptional role in the construction of personality theory and in how this theory is designed. At the same time, criticism of psychoanalysis continues, primarily from the standpoint of those negative (philosophical and social) consequences of Freuds theories, rather than from the perspective of the scientic inadequacy of the psychoanalytic conception of personality on which these theories are based. Perhaps this is why our psychology does not make use of Freudianisms experience studying personality, both positive and negative, or take full advantage of the essential lessons it offers. However, psychoanalysis is perhaps the most important attempt to understand and explain the psychology of an actual person. Therefore, regardless of the fact that this explanation relates in essence (whatever the Freudians themselves might say) only to pathological forms of human experience and behavior, psychoanalysis cannot fail to have a tremendous inuence on many areas of science, art, and practical life, including, of course, education. Of all the psychological research into personality that we have discussed so far, Freudianism is distinguished by having a method that is appropriate to its theory. This method permitted it to delve deeply into the complex web of human experience, extract a system of psychological ndings, and somehow even test the accuracy of the theories being advanced in practice. Freudians themselves were proud of the fact that they had a genuine research method, as it seemed to them, and they constantly pointed to this advantage. When Alfred Adler broke with Freud over a number of essential questions and attempted to limit the place and role of sexual attraction, Freud showered him with rebukes, among which the most important was that Adler had betrayed science by rejecting truth for the sake of absolutely arbitrary theoretical inventions devoid of authenticity. And since during the early days of psychoanalysis it

JULYAUGUST 2009 45

was harshly persecuted by ofcial science and public opinion, Freud viewed any disagreement among his followers as betrayal of scientically established facts and a sign of weakness and treachery. This was also Freuds position when he was reproached for exaggerating the role of sexual attraction and for his appalling portrayal of the wellsprings of human behavior. He wrote:
Now it is inherent in human nature to have an inclination to consider a thing untrue if one does not like it. . . . Thus society makes what is disagreeable into what is untrue. It disputes the truths of psychoanalysis with logical and factual arguments; but these arise from emotional sources and it maintains these objections as prejudices against every attempt to counter them. We, however, Ladies and Gentlemen, can claim that in asserting this controversial thesis we have had no tendentious aim in view. We have merely wished to give expression to a matter of fact which we believe we have established by our painstaking labors.22

In one of his lectures on the question of why he reassesses the etiological role of sexual attraction in neurotic diseases and does not consider the role of other feelings, Freud replied:
I do not know why other, nonsexual mental disturbances should not lead to the same results, and I would have nothing against this; but experience shows that they have no such signicance. . . . This position was not established by me theoretically. . . . I was compelled to adopt this point of view when my experience became richer and I penetrated the subject more deeply.23

Not only Freud himself, but his disciples were deeply convinced of the scientic genuineness of the psychoanalytic method and in the full validity and objectivity of its conclusions. Such was the attitude toward psychoanalytic method and the purity of psychoanalysis as a scientic system among the Freudians themselves. And in a certain sense they were right: whatever problems there might have been with it, psychoanalysis studied integral mental experience rather than separate elements devoid of real-life meaning, and, using active intervention, doctors practicing psychoanalysis often helped people rid themselves of difcult experiences and obsessive behavior. This gave Freudians a basis for believing that the ideas they were advancing (on the basis of which they built their therapeutic practice) were scientically grounded and valid and to dismiss all other psychological theories of personality that were based on research that did not use this specic method. This is why we must rst and foremost focus on critical analysis of the psychoanalytic method itself and then demonstrate the errors and weaknesses of the psychological interpretation of the ndings derived using this method.

46 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Proud as Freudians were of their method, it is this method that in a certain sense led Freudianism astray. Psychoanalysis turned out to be a deceptive research technique: it delivered into Freuds hands many valid facts regarding the source of neurotic diseases and helped cure these diseases; he demonstrated that even in a healthy mind, deep psychoanalytical probing can nd foci of disease that explain the pathology of daily life. Psychoanalysis thus created an illusion that it had nally found an objective method for exposing the essence of human experiences and behavior, their roots, deeply hidden from immediate observation. The huge demand placed on this new psychology to create, on the one hand, a psychological conception of personality and, on the other, a scientic research method appropriate to its tasks, led Freud and his followers to stretch their conclusions beyond what the science could support. As a result, it was not that false psychological ideas about personality led Freud to his distorted view of man, but rather that his ideas on personality were built on a foundation of mistaken interpretations of ndings derived using psychoanalytic methods. Having arisen as a way to treat and explain neurotic symptoms, psychoanalysis eventually began to be viewed by Freud and his followers as a method for exposing the inner world and behavior of healthy people, and later as an all-encompassing principle explaining the course of humanitys social and cultural development. Psychoanalysis was thus transformed from a concrete psychotherapeutic method into a biologically based mechanistic theory of human personality and then into a metaphysical philosophical system. Once it became an ever-present theoretical conception, psychoanalysis began to provide slanted interpretations of every possible phenomenon of reality, to squeeze facts into the Procrustean bed of its theories and, in so doing, it was gradually transformed from a science into an antiscientic, speculative system, and its interpretation cast the human mental world in monstrously distorted form. And this is understandable: due to its origins and nature, when psychoanalytic method was used to delve into the mental world of even healthy people, it inevitably found only what constitutes the source of pathological phenomena, specically, the inappropriate needs and desires that people themselves suppress. Such a method led Freud to the sorts of errors that were characteristic of him. Always dealing with needs and strivings taken from the depth of the human subconscious and rejected by people themselves (needs and strivings that, evidently, really do play a signicant role in mental and nervous disease), Freud decided that it was these very suppressed, base instincts that ll the entire realm of the unconscious and are the only sources of human behavior. All other human impulsesmoral feelings and aspirations, free will, and nally, life that is controlled by consciousnesswere a mere screen concealing the true,

JULYAUGUST 2009 47

unappealing human essence or all those infantile emotions disguised through mimicry that psychoanalysis is sooner or later bound to expose. Having constructed such a theory of human personality, Freud found himself in its clutches. He often encountered ndings that obviously did not t into his system of psychoanalytic interpretations. But this could not change Freuds overall perspective. Such ndings were pointed to by his disciples who subsequently left psychoanalysis (they had used them in an attempt to dispute Freuds theory). It must be acknowledged that Freud himself never challenged ndings that contradicted his understanding: he was too honest and great a scholar for that. But he performed a rather elaborate mental balancing act in order to reconcile these ndings with his theory. Among such ndings should be included the fact that the unconscious comprises not only those feelings and impulses that humans reject but also very elevated and socially and morally valuable thoughts and experiences. About this, Freud says:
Accustomed as we are to taking our social or ethical standard of values along with us wherever we go, we feel no surprise at hearing that the scene of the activities of the lower passions is in the unconscious; we expect, moreover, that the higher any mental function ranks in our scale of values the more easily it will nd access to consciousness assured to it. Here, however, psychoanalytic experience disappoints us [emphasis added]. On the one hand, we have evidence that even subtle and intricate intellectual operations which ordinarily require strenuous concentration can equally be carried out preconsciously and without coming into consciousness. Instances of this are quite incontestable; they may occur, for instance, during sleep, as is shown when someone nds, immediately after waking, that he knows the solution of a difcult mathematical or other problem with which he had been wrestling in vain the day before. There is another phenomenon, however, which is far stranger. In our analyses we discover that there are people in whom the faculties of selfcriticism and consciencemental activities, that is, that rank as exceptionally high onesare unconscious and unconsciously produce effects of the greatest importance [emphasis original]. . . . But this new discovery, which compels us, in spite of our critical faculties, to speak of an unconscious sense of guilt, bewilders us far more than the other and sets us fresh problems. . . . If we come back once more to our scale of values, we shall have to say that not only what is lowest but also what is highest in the ego can be unconscious.24

All of this was, in Freuds own words, something that must be gone into,25 and he attempted to provide that explanation, marshaling his entire arsenal of psychoanalytic concepts and arguments in the effort. How did he manage

48 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

this? In his later works, Freud divided the ego into two parts: the ego and the superego. Furthermore, he made the rst part completely conscious, capable of reason, guided by the principle of reality, while the second part is fused, by means of a complex and very doubtful series of assumptions, with the unconscious id. The superego, in Freuds opinion and in terms of its content and function, is the very best, that which is highest within human beingstheir ideal, their conscience. However it owes its origins to the Oedipus complex and, therefore, remains unconscious. To somewhat simplify it, but by no means distort its essence, we would summarize the course of Freuds reasoning as follows. If erotic attraction cannot be satised through possession of its object, it can somehow imbibe this object into itself, identifying with it and thus achieving satisfaction. The emergence of the superego is attributable, in Freuds opinion, specically to this mechanism: it is formed as the result of childrens identication with the parent toward whom a libidinous desire is felt. The person with whom children identify thus becomes for them the highest moral authority, an example to be imitated that constitutes the essence of their ideal ego. It was on the basis of this analysis that Freud gave those critics who asserted that within man there must be a higher principle the response cited below. This higher principle, from his point of view, is the superego (or the ideal ego), which expresses childrens special relationship to their parents. When we were little children, he wrote, we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves. The ego-ideal, Freud continues, therefore, is the heir of the Oedipus complex and thus it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important vicissitudes experienced by the libido in the id. By setting up this ego-ideal the ego masters its Oedipus complex and at the same time places itself in subjection to the id.26 Consequently, while the ego remains a representative of the external world, the superego becomes the property of the unconscious. It is also its internal and very despotic censor. Furthermore, the superego is not content, according to Freuds thinking, with power over only the unconscious id. It is no less severe and strict with the ego itself if the egos desires should come into conict with the moral strivings of the superego. Such is the psychoanalytic theory of the origin of human ideals and convictions, moral strivings and feelings. According to this theory, the role of the father is eventually transferred to teachers and other authority gures, and sexual attraction is thus gradually transformed into moral worldview, into superego. So in the end, Freuds original theory pays a certain tribute to the social principle in humans. True, for psychoanalysis the social and moral aspect of human personality was always somehow extrinsic in relation to its true, natural

JULYAUGUST 2009 49

essence. It was a small, conscious island in the world of unconscious raging passions, and the function of consciousness, in essence, was limited to that of mere censor, consciousness served only as a means of inhibiting infantile desires. Nevertheless, this was something taken from reality and contrasted with the human instinctive principle. Of course on this level as well, Freuds psychoanalysis was deeply and essentially mistaken: it viewed people biologically, deprived their mind of genuine development, presented their spiritual world in distorted form. But ndings that did not t into Freuds initial conception forced him subsequently to destroy the sole social island within his theory. His interpretation saw what is most socially valuable in peopletheir ideals, moral views, and convictionsas no more than a form of existence for those same infantile sexual instincts, just a special means of satisfying them. But given such an understanding, Freuds theory, which had been clear up to this point and well-constructed in its own way, becomes absolutely muddled. The understanding of the unconscious as a world of amoral, base emotions becomes muddled, since moral motives for human behavior also start to enter into it. The concept of censorship as a conscious antagonist of amoral needs and impulses is muddled, since the subjects morality itself turns out to be the property of the id. Understanding of conicts that arise between different affective tendencies also becomes muddled, since it is by now impossible to sort out from what reservoir of energy in the nal analysis a particular instinct draws its strength and just what people repress and in whose name they repress it. But Freud preferred to live with this lack of clarify and muddle rather than have the edice of psychoanalysis that he worked so hard to erect come crashing down under the weight of facts. What we describe here shows how Freud wound up being a slave to his own system of ideas. One might think that, having been confronted with such striking and indisputable ndings as the presence in humans of very powerful moral motives of behavior, of which they themselves are not conscious, and having uncovered another content of the unconscious sphere that has no relationship to its instinctive impulses, Freud should have fundamentally reevaluated the main tenets of his teachings, rst and foremost everything that relates to understanding the unconscious. The facts introduced above ought to generate doubt in any unbiased scholar concerning the original theory of the origins, content, and function of the unconscious and inspire them to develop new hypotheses: is it true that the unconscious is primarily composed of instinctive impulses? Is it true that it is lled with thoughts and urges that are forced out of awareness or not allowed in to begin with due to their amoral character? Is it true that a censor suppresses only what is incompatible with peoples moral demands? Perhaps

50 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

moral motivations for behavior due to their decisive importance for people as social beings are acquired so immediately and organically that they take on the appearance of instinctive impulses that are independent or even resistant to consciousness? If such is the case, there is no need to portray them as a modication of biological urges in order to explain their power and autonomy. Instead what we have is the need to discover the mechanism that forms them, in other words to determine the circumstances and human behavioral and activity structures that lead to their being assimilated without awareness or acquire the characteristic of being unconscious. The assumption suggests itself that perhaps no affective tendencies that conict with other such tendencies are allowed into consciousness if this conict is painfully experienced. After all, we are well aware of instances when people, due to particular circumstances or ideas, decide to commit a crime, but cannot carry it out due to immediate inner resistance based on a deeply and organically assimilated moral principle.27 In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky offers a literary analysis of conscious amoral and unconscious moral urges, as do many modern writers who portray Nazis unable to endure their own barbarity committed in the name of Fascist ideals. In the end, perhaps the realm of unconscious mental processes and experiences is much broader and more multilayered than Freud imagined, and the sphere of the unconscious that Freud probed using psychoanalytical methods is just an insignicant portion of it that is not essential to normal human behavior? If this is the case, then we would have to nd some other mechanisms and laws to explain the origins of unconscious mental processes and discover what their content and function really are. However, all these questions shake the very foundations of Freudian teachings and he does not even raise them. Confronted with ndings that contradict his views, Freud did not choose to reexamine his views, but to adapt them to these ndings. In so doing he made assumptions that are absolutely not supported even by the ndings of psychoanalysis. For example, he was forced to assume that not only neurotics, but all people are aficted with the Oedipus complex. Freud had absolutely no factual basis for making this assumption, but he was forced to make it, since otherwise the theory he had advanced about the origins of unconscious moral strivings and feelings (which, to a certain extent, all people possess) could not hold together, and, consequently, the entire psychoanalytical system would have been beyond saving. There were other questions Freud did not touch on, for example the question about the time when human spiritual ideals are most intensively formed. After all, if the ego-ideal forms in reaction to the Oedipus complex impulse,

JULYAUGUST 2009 51

then why does it develop and form primarily during young adulthood and even during adulthood, instead of during early childhood as might have been expected from the perspective of the explanations offered by Freud himself? He also was completely silent about the fact that perfectly rational and productive processes of thinking can be unconscious. We are left with a pillar of psychoanalysisthe theory of the unconsciousthat is irreparably undermined by facts. But Freud had no desire, and was unable, to reject his idea about the origins of the unconscious and its function and role in human life. He understood that if that idea was destroyed, the entire psychoanalytic theory of personality and Freudianism in general as social and philosophical theory would follow. Let us return now to analysis of the methods of psychoanalytical research into personality and the scientic validity of ndings that Freud used to justify applying conclusions concerning neurotics to normal, healthy people. It seems safe to say that he had no scientic grounds for this; this transference was baseless. However Freud himself was convinced that all his conclusions were built on factually solid ground: rst of all, on the basis of interpretations of dreams, and second, on analysis of peoples errorsslips of the tongue, slips of the pen, misplacement of things, stumbles, and so on. Let us look more closely at the rst method, which is central to psychoanalytic research. Let us assume, for arguments sake, that we accept the premise that techniques for interpreting dreams are legitimate and convincing and that we join Freud in concluding that during sleep, when activity in the cortex is greatly reduced, people truly are freer and some primitive needs and desires become active. But this begs the questiondoes this really justify the contention that the behavior and activity of normal, healthy people in an awakened state will be guided by these primitive needs and desires? What exactly is this deep, genuine essence of humans? Freuds conclusion is not justied primarily from a logical perspective, since it involves circular thinking: in order to prove that conscious processes are not dening in human life and activity and that in fact unconscious, instinctive processes predominate, people are studied in a state where these very conscious processes are turned off. And this conclusion is even less justied when examined from the perspective of facts. In introducing the results of his analysis of those few dreams of normal people that Freud managed to perform, he notes that the dreamers to whom we are led to attribute such wishful purposes by the interpretation of their dreams reject them most emphatically and for good reasons.28 In objecting to Freuds interpretation, one of them is quoted as saying:

52 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

What? says one of them, you want to convince me from this dream that I regret the money I have spent on my sisters dowry and my brothers education? But that cannot be so. I work entirely for my brothers and sisters; I have no other interest in life but to fulll my duties to them, which, as the eldest of the family, I promise our departed mother I would do. Or a woman dreamer would say: You think I wish my husband was dead? That is a shocking piece of nonsense! It is not only that we are most happily marriedyou would probably not believe me if I said thatbut his death would rob me of everything I possess in the world.

In other words, Freud himself claims that those to whom he tried, based on analysis of their dreams, to attribute certain unconscious desires felt in themselves the precise contrary of the wish we have interpreted to them and . . . are able to prove to us by the lives they lead that they are dominated by this contrary wish.29 It follows that Freud himself understood perfectly well that people in their real lives do not feel that which dream analysis exposes in them, and, most important, they live and act not in accordance with the laws of unconscious needs and impulses, but in accordance with absolutely different laws: they are guided by social motivations and perfectly realistic, practical considerations. And truly, if people in a state of wakefulness began to act on the affective logic that governs their dreams, they would very quickly be conned to psychiatric hospitals, since under the conditions of normal life in society they follow (and can do nothing but follow!) absolutely different motivations. So why must we consider the true human essence to be that which, let us assume, really does lurk in the realm of the unconscious, rather than that which constitutes real human life? And why should we view the reluctance Freuds subjects feel to acknowledge that they have the base impulses he attributes to them based on dream analysis as something other than the natural protestation of normal people who, through their entire way of life, demonstrate that they have different motivations that really condition their behavior, rather than as resistance that supposedly serves to conrm the truth of psychoanalytic interpretation? Even if we follow the logic of the material that Freud had at his disposal, we must reach the exact opposite conclusions to those that he himself reaches. A normal, healthy person in a state of wakefulness lives and acts in accordance with absolutely different laws than a sleeping person or someone aficted with neurosis or in some other pathological state (Freud had good reason to call his work analyzing erroneous actions The Psychopathology of Everyday Life). Furthermore, those primitive urges and desires that are discovered in the unconscious sphere of the ill or anyone with reduced cortical function can only serve as evidence that these primitive urges and desires exist in people in sublated form, that they are subordinated to consciousness and do not play

JULYAUGUST 2009 53

an essential role either in shaping personality or in shaping behavior. Freud had no scientic basis for claiming that in relation to the id, the ego is like a horseman who must rein in the superior strength of the horse and who, if he does not want to part with that horse, is forced to lead it where it wants to go.30 The primacy of the deep-seated pathology of infantile feelings over all conscious life in humans, its decisive role in forming human character and moral worldviewthis is a Freudian myth that has no scientic basis. Allport was right when he said that Traits and interests, like plants, are capable of casting aside the shell of the seed from which they grew. Their direction of growth is upward into the future and downward into the past. And he was right in three ways when he claimed that the full complexity of personal motives and traits cannot be understood simply by the art of deep-sea diving.31 However those who adhere to Freuds theories have always had and still have one last argument: if psychoanalytic theory is false, then how does psychoanalysis that is based on these theories cure the ill and rid healthy people of painful pathological feelings? In this context, let us examine Freuds therapeutic successes and the extent to which they serve as proof of the correctness of his psychoanalytic theories. One wonders: what could possibly be more convincing proof of a theory than testing it in practice? However for such practice to be convincing it has to be proved that it is unambiguously associated with the theory on which it is supposedly based, that is, that this practice realizes specically this system of views and its success cannot be attributed to any other factors that have not been sufciently taken into account. Before we analyze Freuds psychotherapy from this perspective, it should be noted that Freuds treatment success, while signicant, has nevertheless been greatly exaggerated. It deserves mention that psychoanalytic treatment can take years and that it by no means always ends with a cure, and in those cases where a cure is achieved, it often does not last. Freud himself had good reason for reaching the pessimistic conclusion that the instincts on which neurosis is based are so strong and untamable that no psychoanalysis is capable of changing them. The rst thing one notices upon examining psychotherapeutic practice treating neurosis is that it achieves a positive treatment result both in cases where erotic impulses are supposedly repressed and in cases where some other sort of feeling is the presumed cause. Two conclusions can be drawn here: either in both cases we are really dealing with feelings of a different nature (which undercuts Freuds thesis that neurosis has an exclusively sexual origin), or in this case there is no clear-cut relationship between psychoanalytic interpretation of disease and success curing it. As for the rst conclusion, it seems to us that it is undoubtedly correct,

54 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

although Freud himself tried to dispute it, marshaling completely arbitrary explanations to this cause. However what seems more interesting to us are certain ideas associated with possible explanations of his therapeutic success that differ from those offered by Freud. Some of these considerations have been pointed out by J.B. Furst.32 According to Furst, any system of psychotherapy involves inculcating certain attitudes in patients toward the environment, toward themselves, and toward those phenomena that are disturbing them. The doctor-psychotherapists are able to cure their patients suffering from neurosis because they help them adopt a certain attitude toward their suffering, that is, shape how they feel about its cause in order to eliminate the difculties that confront them. The patient, Furst writes, is sent to the doctor specically to hear an assessment and receive help in solving his personal problems.33 If we approach psychoanalysis from this perspective, if we take its techniques into account (specically the fact that psychoanalysts are constantly and persistently interpreting for their patients the true meaning of what they are saying and gradually impose a certain understanding of the causes and sources of their suffering on them) and if we take into account that Freuds psychotherapy often takes years, then it becomes obvious that here we are dealing with a certain reeducation of the patient. Recovery may come due to the fact that psychoanalysts instill in their patients their own view of the life situation that triggered the corresponding affective conict and provide them the opportunity, although at times by following a false path, to escape their conicted state. In short, perhaps the cure offered by psychoanalysis is analogous to the cure religion might offer. Psychoanalysis becomes something akin to patients religion, a religion that offers a way out of inner conict. This sort of treatment mechanism is supported by the following testimony from Furst. According to Furst, a patient who undergoes a course of psychoanalytic treatment as a rule becomes more individualistic and egocentric than he was beforehand. He has much less understanding of the outside world and its people; he is convinced of male superiority, obsessed with a mythical understanding of gender, he has been inculcated with a philosophy and worldview that has focused his attention inward.34 In Other words, the patient who has been subjected to long-term psychoanalysis becomes a person with a particular mindset: it is as if he embodies the traits of Freuds image of man.35 Such a characterization of the outcome of psychoanalytic treatment supports the notion that psychoanalysis is more a method of reeducating a person than a treatment method, the cure being a mere byproduct of this process. With this we conclude our critical examination of the psychoanalytical

JULYAUGUST 2009 55

approach to study of human personality as a whole. As we continue, in conjunction with discussion of our own research ndings, we will refer back to various aspects of the teachings of Freud and his followers. For now we would merely like to emphasize that analysis of just one methodological aspect of psychoanalytic research and treatment convinces us that neither Freud nor his comrades-in-arms had any basis for vaunting the scientic validity and soundness of their claims. From this perspective, psychoanalysis is extremely uneven. Freud undoubtedly succeeded, mainly through clinical practice, in identifying a certain system of psychological phenomena and their mechanisms specic primarily to people aficted with neurosis. Freuds main contribution, it seems to us, is his effort to discover the dynamic of motivational forces governing human behavior, their interdependence and conict. Also very important is the discovery of a realm of unconscious mental processes and their effect on behavior. Of course, neither the presence of intense affective tendencies and the pathogenic nature of their conict nor the signicance of unconscious processes for human mind and behavior were anything new. Even before Freud and, most important, independent of him, certain ndings were known relating to this area that were achieved both in experimental clinical research and through hypnosis. However the systematic development of this entire set of questions, the consolidation and generalization of materials obtained in the process, the discovery of a number of specic psychological laws, and, most important, the attempt to understand everyday human experience from the perspective of these laws are undoubted contributions of Freud. And however we might criticize psychoanalytic theory overall, in our specic psychological ideas, Freuds theories have played a positive role in the search for a scientic approach to the psychological study of human personality and what people actually experience in life. We have analyzed and criticized Freuds theories in such detail because of the tremendous popularity Freudianism has gained. It is no longer simply a current in psychiatry or psychology, it is a school of philosophy that determines the worldview of its adherents, their views on humanity and its activity, on the fate of society, their attitude toward everything that surrounds them and toward themselves and the entire structure of their sense of the world. And even though Freud considered himself only a scientist and nowhere explicitly formulated his ideological and political positions, they are objectively contained in his teachings, which are deeply reactionary in essence, pessimistic, and devoid of faith in mankind and the possibility of the progressive development of society. It is this aspect of Freudianism that forced many, including Soviet scholars, to recoil from it and reject the possibility of deriving any useful scientic laws

56 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

from Freudianisms ndings or even learning from its mistakes. Furthermore, Freudianism turned many scholars against not only psychoanalysis itself but also the problems associated with these theories. For a long time, the problems of the affective life of human beings was forgotten in the Soviet Union, along with the problems of the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness. Human beings were represented in one dimensionthe dimension of conscious mental processes and actions, and for this reason they were studied rather one-sidedly. And peoples conscious activity, due to the fact that it was being viewed in isolation from needs and impulses, from feelings, from the entire sphere of the mental processes that take place outside of awareness, was incorrectly interpreted. The genuine and mighty role of consciousness as a source of specically human activity was not sufciently fully psychologically discovered; the result was an intellectualization of mans entire mental life divorced from the laws that govern it. Only now, in recent years, research has begun to appear in Soviet psychology that is focused on the study of the unconscious, affective phenomena that Freud interpreted in his own unique way. However, these studies have been very limited in number. Analogous separate studies are being conducted in other areas, primarily psychopathology. So far, this research is proceeding piecemeal, unsystematically, and has yet to be united by a common psychological theory of personality. It is therefore difcult for it to stand up to the onslaught of theories and facts coming from foreign psychologists. This situation in psychology has a negative effect on pedagogical theory and practice. Pedagogy has overemphasized the inuencing of childrens conscience, exaggerated the role of the word and verbal persuasion, and underemphasized the organizing of childrens experience, the formation of their needs, impulses, and feelings. Notes
1. Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo sezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii (St. Petersburg, 1906). 2. U. Dzhems [W. James], Besedy s uchiteliami o psikhologii (Petrograd: Mir, 1919), pp. 34 [quoted from Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Lifes Ideals, http://mirror.pacic.net.au/gutenberg/1/6/2/8/16287/16287h/16287-h.htm]. 3. Trudy Vtorogo Vserossiiskogo sezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii (1909), (St. Petersburg, 1910). 4. Ibid., p. 33. 5. L.S. Vygotskii [Vygotsky], Pedologiia podrostka (Moscow, Leningrad: Uchpedgiz, 1931), p. 471. 6. E. Shtern [Stern], Psikhicheskaia struktura podrostka, in Pedologiia iunosti (Moscow, Leningrad, 1931), p. 78.

JULYAUGUST 2009 57

7. O. Tumlirts [Tumlirtz], Edinstvo psikhologii i ego znachenie dliia teorii perekhodnogo vozrasta, trans. from German, in Pedologiia iunosti, p. 174. 8. L.S. Vygotskii, Razvitie vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1960), p. 60. 9. Gordon Willard Allport, Personality and Social Encounter ([Boston: Beacon Press], 1960) [retranslated from Russian]. 10. Z. Bernfeld [S. Bernfeld], Psikhologiia iunosti E. Shpangera, in Pedologiia iunosti (Moscow, Leningrad, 1930), p. 122. 11. Allport, Personality and Social Encounter [retranslated from Russian]. 12. S.L. Rubinshtein, Bytie i soznanie (Moscow: ANSSR, 1957), p. 309. 13. V.S. Merlin, Ocherk psikhologii lichnosti (Perm: Permskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1959), p. 12. 14. A.G. Kovalev, Psikhologiia lichnosti: Uchebnoe posobie, 2d ed. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1965). 15. A.F. Lazurskii, Estestvennyi eksperiment i ego shkolnoe primenenie (St. Petersburg, 1918), p. vi. 16. Shtern, Psikhicheskaia struktura podrostka, pp. 7778. 17. Sovremennaia psikhologiia v kapitalisticheskikh stranakh (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1963), p. 9. 18. Ibid. 19. For example, one should not lump together such different schools of psychology as the psychology of spirit and Freudianism, as personalism and the experimental personality studies of K. Lewin. It should also not be claimed that all these directions had a disdain for physiology and did not want a union with the natural sciences. Wundt himself probably did not want a union between psychology and the natural sciences, as Mansurov mentions elsewhere (Sovremennaia psikhologiia v kapitalisticheskikh stranakh, p. 8); Freud, on the other hand, can sooner be accused of biologism than philosophical idealism. 20. This, incidentally, was pointed to by many adherents of gestalt psychology. In particular its most prominent representative, M. Wertheimer, lamented how fruitless associationist psychology was, stating that you can read hundreds of pages on psychology, get from them information about how associations are built, but not learn in the process the meaning of something as simple as the pupil understood. Furthermore, even the rapid pace of societys capitalist development demands practical usefulness from psychology, and it is unlikely that we can assume that idealist directions in psychology were reactions to practical successes of branches engaged in applied psychology. 21. L.S. Vygotskii, Razvitie vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1960), p. 25. 22. Z. Freid [Freud], Lektsii po vvedeniiu v psikhoanaliz (Moscow, Petrograd: Gosizdat, 1923), p. 30 [quoted from Sigmund Freud, James Strackey, and Peter Gay, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: 1989), pp. 2728]. 23. Z. Freid, Vlecheniia i ikh sudba [Instincts and Their Vicissitudes], in Psikhologicheskaia i psikhoanaliticheskaia biblioteka, 3d ed. (Moscow, Petrograd: Gosizdat, 1923), p. 47. 24. Z. Freid, Ia i Ono (Leningrad: Academia, 1924), pp. 2324 [quoted from Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (London: 1927), pp. 3233] [emphasis added]. 25. Ibid., p. 25 [pp. 3435].

58 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

26. Ibid., pp. 3435 [pp. 4748]. 27. See V.G. Korolenkos marvelous pages on this topic (Istoriia moego sovremennika, books 1 and 2 [Moscow, 1948], pp. 38990) [available in English as The History of My Contemporary]. He describes and analyzes the phenomenon of a person who cannot raise his hand to commit an act that seems correct and necessary to him, but that contradicts unconsciously assimilated moral experience. It has often occurred to me, he writes on this subject, that much would be different in our world if there was more of that unconscious, nonlogical, but deeply rooted moral culture that does not permit certain feelings too easily, almost without resistance, to go the way of Raskolnikovs formulas. 28. Freid, Lektsii po vvedeniiu v psikhoanaliz, p. 150 [p. 177] [emphasis added]. 29. Ibid. [emphasis added]. 30. Freid, Ia i Ono, p. 22 [p. 30]. 31. Gordon Willard Allport, Personality and Social Encounter, p. 13 [quoted from John Cuthbert Ford, Depth Psychology, Morality, and Alcoholism (Weston, MA: Weston College, 1951), p. 30]. 32. J.B. Furst, Nevrotik, ego sreda i vnutrennii mir (Moscow: Inostrannaia literatura, 1957) [originally in English as The Neurotic, His Environment and Inner World]. 33. Ibid., p. 266. 34. Ibid., p. 204. 35. It should be emphasized that Fursts testimony can be completely trusted since his opinions are based on signicant experience. As a well-known practicing American psychiatrist, Furst has had extensive experience treating patients who had previously been treated by doctors practicing psychoanalysis.

To order reprints, call 1-800-352-2210; outside the United States, call 717-632-3535.