Cultural-historical psychology L.S. Vygotsky was born at Moscow University in collaboration with A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev. The semantic content of the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky's ideas were the following: the methodology of the systemic historical and genetic analysis of various mental phenomena in the context of biogenesis, anthropogenesis, sociogenesis and personogenesis, the search for mutual transitions between these vectors of historical and evolutionary development; the idea of signs (primarily of language) invented in the history of culture as means ("psychological tools") of mastering the behavior of a person and social groups; the hypothesis of interiorization as a constructive mechanism of human socialization that occurs in the course of cooperation, joint activities of the child with other people and leading to the transformation of the world of culture / world of “meanings” / into the world of personality / world of “meanings” /; the concept of a systemic analysis of the development and decay of the higher mental functions of a person as social in origin, culturally mediated by various signs in structure and arbitrarily regulated in the way of control forms of behavior; historical and genetic systemic concept of thinking and speech as a key to understanding the semantic dialogical nature of consciousness; the idea of dynamic semantic systems as a special unity of affect and intellect and the units of personality analysis; the concept of the "zone of proximal development" of the child's higher mental functions as a product of the child's cooperation with adults and peers in solving problems and substantiation of the idea of learning as a driving force of the child's mental development. The subject of Vygotsky's psychology was consciousness. However, it would be wrong on this basis to reject Vygotsky from the PTD, which has become in the 40s. XX century., The core of all scientific schools of university psychology. An analysis of Vygotsky's psychological system allows us to assert: he recognized activity as a form of human being. Activity is a whole in which behavior and consciousness exist in unity. "The psyche without behavior does not exist as well as behavior without the psyche, because at least it is one and the same," he said in his speech at the II All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in 1924. summarized some of the results of the research done ("Tool and Sign in the Development of the Child", 1930), in working discussions with collaborators known as "The Problem of Consciousness", L.S. Vygotsky noted: "In the beginning there was a deed (...), at the end there was a word, and this is the most important." Considering the question of the connection between words and deeds in the development of a child, he wrote: "... the word does not stand at the beginning of the development of the child's mind ... Practical intelligence is genetically older than the verbal one: an action is more primordial than a word, even a clever action is more primitive than a clever word." Remarkable are the concluding statements of the work "Tool and Sign in Child Development": "... if at the beginning of development there is a deed that is independent of the word, then at the end of it there is a word that becomes a deed. A word that makes a person's action free. "
The central fact of his psychology L.S. Vygotsky called the fact of mediation. Revealing its content, he turned to the analogy between the sign as a tool for mediation and the formation of higher mental functions and technical tools in human labor operations. This addresses two issues of major importance. Firstly, the qualitative difference between man and animals lies in the tool-like nature of labor and mental activity. Secondly, the psychological tool is compared with the tools of labor activity. According to L.S. Vygotsky, this comparison goes back to the ideas of F. Bacon, whose words (- "Neither the bare hand, nor the mind left to itself have great power. The work is done with tools and aids that the mind needs no less than the hand." They express his basic idea of a deep connection between the structure of human consciousness and the structure of labor activity. The concept of an instrumental act mediated, in contrast to a natural process, by a tool is introduced. member is a psychological tool that becomes a structural center or focus, that is, a moment that functionally determines all processes that form an instrumental act. Any act of behavior then becomes an intellectual operation. " or mathematical thinking, as well as the process s behavior.
Thus, mental activity (this term Vygotsky uses more than once) is related to the external activity of a person: it is also mediated by its (psychological) instruments. Various forms of mental activity were investigated, in particular, play. Analyzing the attitude of play to development, L.S. Vygotsky introduced the concept of leading activity: “In essence, it is through play activity that the child moves. Only in this sense can play be called a leading activity, i.e. determining the development of the child. " Later D.B. Elkonin, one of Lev Semenovich's students and a colleague of his other students, used his understanding, as well as developed by A.N. Leontiev, in the context of the activity approach, the concept of leading activity as key in his concept of the periodization of mental development. He substantiated the proposition that at each stage of development there is its own leading activity: it is in it that the development and preparation of the next stage takes place.
Historical psychology is a separate scientific direction that studies motivation, values, emotions, feelings, phobias of a person using the methods of psychology in a historical retrospective.
"Historical psychology can be defined as the study of the psychological makeup of individual historical eras, as well as changes in the psyche and personality of a person in a special cultural macro-time called history ... Historical psychology in the broadest sense of the word is an approach that places the psyche and personality in the connection of times ... psychology belongs to both the historical and psychological sciences. In the first case, it is a section of the history of society and culture, namely the social and cultural history of a person, his psyche and personality. In the second, it refers to developmental psychology. Development psychology is concerned with facts not only of cultural and historical Psychological phenomena differ in duration of existence.The time of the shortest is calculated in hours, minutes, seconds.The sequence of their development is called microgenesis, a longer development within the life of an individual organism, from its birth to death. genesis of the psyche. In years, centuries and millennia, the life of large human communities lasts: civilizations, peoples, estates, classes. This is the historiogenesis of the psyche. The largest scale, hundreds of thousands and millions of years, is in phylogeny - the origin of the human race from fossil primates. As part of developmental psychology, historical psychology studies historiogenesis. Her conclusions extend to genetic sequences of a different scale to the extent that the rhythms of historical time penetrate into the individual being of man and into the evolution of the higher primates. "
Historical psychology emerged as a separate area at the beginning of the 20th century, although the term “historical psychology” was proposed rather late (by the French psychologist Iñas Meyerson in his book “Psychological Functions and Creations” in 1948) - It is believed that research can be attributed to this area German psychologist Wundt of the psychology of peoples (in 1900-1920 he published on this topic a grandiose ten-volume work "Psychology of peoples. Investigation of the law of development of language, myths and customs"). Levy-Bruhl published a series of works on the psychology of primitive man: "Mental functions in lower societies" (1910), "Primitive thinking" (1922). "Primitive Soul" (1927). Soviet psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) in the 1920s. substantiated a theory that later became known as cultural-historical psychology. According to this theory, the psychological development of an individual is impossible without the development of culture and the assimilation of the results of this development by the individual. Assimilation and development takes place through transmission from generation to generation of sign systems (language, mnemonics, everyday and religious symbols, etc.). In the USA in the 1960s. the so-called psychohistory developed (Lloyd de Mose, Joel Covel, John Platt and others). Its methodological basis was neo-Freudianism - a continuation of Freud's doctrine of psychoanalysis.
All these versions of historical psychology agree on one thing: they consider all human activity in history as a manifestation of his psychological activity. Historical analysis is necessary for psychology, because with its help the genesis of certain psychological phenomena is established. For the psychological explanation of history, scientists used mainly behaviorist concepts, that is, the consideration of social processes according to the "stimulus-response" scheme (as in biology).
There are three directions in historical psychology today: 1) hermeneutic-phenomenological (interpretationism), based on the reading, interpretation, interpretation with the help of psychology of the sources of individual history (diaries, letters, etc.); 2) psychological and genetic (deduction of the causes of human behavior from related social and cultural phenomena); 3) neo-freudian (identification of the unconscious and conscious in human history).
Historical psychology is distinguished from historical anthropology, the history of mentalities, the history of private life and other areas of historical science, which study approximately the same phenomena and processes interdisciplinarity - appeal to the methods of psychology, biology, medicine. This is its undoubted advantage. The use of methods of medical and biological sciences about a person makes it possible to more effectively interpret information from sources.
Psychology aims to obtain scientific knowledge about the human personality as a whole, and in this complexity - the difference between historical psychology and the history of mentalities, the history of private life, because the latter consider some separate, special aspect of human existence in a historical context, and psychology tries to cover it entirely.
Explaining past events and trends in historical development using historical psychology makes it possible to identify cultural traditions, historical and psychological types, national types, social types, etc. The results of such studies are not only useful for reconstructing historical meanings, but also for making recommendations to modern politicians, political strategists, social services, etc.
The disadvantages of this direction include the complexity of using the sources. Still, any, even the most detailed, source is not a "case history": psychological and especially psychiatric studies are created according to different templates than chronicles and even memoirs and diaries. Psychology deals with surveys, observations, descriptions, tests, etc. Information in historical sources is structured on different principles, much more subjective. Historical psychology cannot operate with traditional psychological methods of collecting information - direct observation, testing, questioning, etc. Alas, one cannot test Ivan the Terrible or Aristotle.
“In historical psychology, we must [lose] the direct subject and go out into the vastness of history, where it is impossible to test the generations lying in the earth, in order to compensate for our loss in the long term by deepening knowledge about man, in order to transform the science of the psychology of one of the eras into the psychology of all eras. , of course, not in the name, but in how to interpret the human psyche: roofing felts as something that can be [removed] by measurements hicetnunc, whether as part of a wider circulation of direct and indirect. In the latter case, a person as a complex artificial-natural being is taken out of the present and perceived, but then the question arises about the range of permissible exits directly into artifacts (cultural products) and the ability of psychology to trace these movements. The main problem of all anthropologies is reduced by historical psychology to the research-methodological level. "
Hence the weakness of the method of historical psychology itself, its inconclusiveness for both historians and psychologists. There is a very large element of hypotheticalness in historical psychological research. The scientist needs to interpret the information of historical sources by the methods of psychology. The materials, as a rule, are not representative, they are not enough. Hence the weak degree of verifiability of works on historical psychology. They are often bright and interesting for the reader, contain beautiful hypotheses, but the evidence base often looks weak.
In the XIX-XX centuries. in historical psychology, the genre gained popularity pathography, or revealing the causes and origins of the work of prominent historical and cultural figures through their psychological experiences of an anomalous nature: deviations, manifestations of illness, sexual perversion, sexual problems, etc. The first such book is considered to be a study of the life of the ancient philosopher Socrates by the French physician Louis François Lelu (1804-1877), published in 1836. The author of the term "pathography" (description of pathologies) Paul Julius Möbius (1853-1907) argued that "... it is impossible to understand anyone without a medical assessment. It is unbearable to see how linguists and other armchair scientists judge people and their actions. not the slightest idea that it requires more than mere moralizing and average human knowledge. " Critics of pathography note that all diagnoses are made behind the eyes (after all, the authors are deprived of the opportunity to personally investigate the mental state of Socrates or Dostoevsky) and, therefore, are hypothetical in nature. And the tendency of the authors to speculate on the needs of not the highest instincts of the mass reader makes it possible to doubt the scientific nature of many constructions.
A special genre is psychobiography, that is, a biography of a historical figure, written with the help of psychological analysis. It is distinguished from pathography by taking into account all factors of the psychological development of the individual, and not by focusing primarily on painful pathologies. But striving for objectivity does not yet mean achieving it, and psychobiography is not free from subjective interpretations.
One of the experimental methods of historical psychology that is rapidly developing today is historical reconstruction. On the one hand, it solves the problem of recreating the material and spiritual culture of the historical era (costume, armor, craft technologies, etc.). But, on the other hand, the movement of reenactors is a role-playing game that can be seen as a kind of scientific experiment. For example, a scientist is trying to thoroughly reproduce the material life and life cycle of a medieval peasant (he settles in the same hut, finds food for himself like a medieval man, walks in the same clothes, etc.). Participants in such experiments argued that they were beginning to better understand the psychology of medieval people, the peculiarities of their thinking and perception of the world. The direction was named living history and is embodied both in numerous experiments and in the creation of open-air museums, imitating objects of historical reality with varying degrees of reliability.
- Shkuratov V.L. Historical psychology. Rostov on / D: City N. 1994.S. 15-16.
- Shkuratov V.L. Historical psychology. P. 21
- Cit. on: Sirotkina I.E. Pathography as a genre: a critical study // Medical psychology in Russia. 2011. No. 2 (7). URL: medpsy.ru/mprj/archiv_global / 2011_2_7 / nomer / nomerl0.php (date accessed: 01.06.2015).
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY, one of the leading schools in Russian psychology and an influential trend in world psychology, focusing on the teaching of the social, cultural and historical nature of human forms of the psyche - objective perception, voluntary attention and memory, consciousness, will, speech thinking, as well as speech, counting, writing, etc.
The foundations of cultural-historical psychology were laid in the late 1920s - early 1930s by L. S. Vygotsky in his cultural-historical theory of higher mental functions, the genesis of which in an individual includes one or another artificial act of organizing his psyche, consciousness, personality with help different kinds symbolic means (from the simplest "memory knot" to the most complex symbolic systems). Such psychotechnics and methods of their use are developed in history and fixed in culture, and only then are they transferred to an individual person and assigned to them (in specially organized training and education practices, or spontaneously). According to Vygotsky, any higher mental function initially develops in the space of communication and joint activity (that is, it is divided between people - parent and child, teacher and student, psychotherapist and patient, etc.) and only then, in the course of interiorization (“rotation "), Becomes the property of a separate individual, that is, it is carried out by him independently. First, as a rule, - with reliance on external sign means (for example, a "knot for memory" as a means of organizing memory, gesture as a way of organizing attention, or speech and external schemes as a means of organizing thinking) and only later - with reliance on purely internal means (mental images and schemes, inner speech, etc.).
In cultural-historical psychology, a fundamentally new type of genetic research is emerging (according to which the study of a phenomenon is possible only through tracing its genesis and development) - research through the formation and within specially organized development. At the same time, the psychologist finds himself in a special, non-classical research situation, when his presence not only cannot be excluded (as required by the methodology of classical natural science), but, on the contrary, turns out to be a necessary moment of the experimental situation itself and sets a new unit of study: distributed between the experimenter and the subject "Psychotechnical action". Within the framework of such a non-classical methodology, a special, “psychotechnical” type of description of the object under study, characteristic of cultural-historical psychology, is revealed, not so much fixing the laws of its “natural life” in knowledge as setting the conditions for its transformation. Cultural-historical psychology is also characterized by a new type of relationship between research and practice, when research is embedded in practice, ensuring its implementation, reproduction and development.
Vygotsky's ideas led to the formation of one of the most significant schools in Russian psychology (A.R. Luria, A.N. Leontyev, D. B. Elkonin, P. Ya. Galperin, A. V. Zaporozhets, V. V. Davydov and others), and also, as Vygotsky's main works are published in other languages, have an increasing influence on world psychology. Nowadays, cultural-historical psychology is regarded as one of the most promising programs for the development of psychology.
Since 2005 the international journal "Cultural-Historical Psychology" has been published.
Lit .: Sociocultural studies of mind / Ed. J. V. Wertsch. Camb. 1995; Davydov V.V. Theory of developing education. M., 1996; Verch JV Voices of Reason: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. M., 1996; Cole M. Cultural-Historical Psychology: Science of the Future. M., 1997; Vasilyuk F.E. Methodological analysis in psychology. M., 2003; Bubbles A. A. Psychology. Psychotechnics. Psychogology. M., 2005. See also the literature under the article Vygotsky L. S.
CI psychology initially arose only as a kind of dissatisfaction of certain philosophers and psychologists with the inhumanity of "objective" science. However, in addition to this, purely scientific conscientiousness prompted scientists that natural science psychology turns a blind eye to many important phenomena, without which understanding a person and his behavior is impossible. Nevertheless, until the twentieth century, all CI psychological statements and research are made by scientists, as it were, within a common scientific space. In other words, there was no independent science or independent branch of psychology with such a name.
CI psychology stands out as an independent approach first in post-revolutionary Russia. However, not for long. Under the conditions of the ruling communist ideology, it was dangerous for a scientist to have views other than the permitted ones. Therefore, in the mid-thirties, shortly after the death of the founder of the Cultural-Historical School, Lev Vygotsky, his immediate students and successors A. Luria and A. Leontiev left this direction. Luria goes into a politically independent "pure" science and creates neuropsychology, Leontyev, on the contrary, accepts the ideologized paradigm of Soviet psychology developed by Rubinstein and becomes a "fighter of the ideological front." After that, in Russia, CI psychology as an independent school dies, although the current trend with the name "Development Psychology" (Zinchenko, Asmolov, etc.), perhaps, can be considered its continuation. True, it seems to me that this is a completely independent school, only using similar concepts. CI psychological research and observation in the proper sense of the word is done only by individual researchers. Perhaps this was hindered by the fact that the entire Soviet psychology was built on the basis of historical materialism, thereby, as it were, initially taking into account the cultural and historical environment. However, this accounting, as we all know perfectly well, was at the same time a limitation, because it could only be taken into account in a permitted way, which in the twentieth century was outdated and hindered development. In many ways, this approach is still alive in the modern Russian psychological community. An example is the article by the famous Soviet psychologist A.V. Brushlinsky's "Activity and Mediation (about M. Cole's book" Cultural-Historical Psychology ")" in the main organ of the psychological community "Psychological Journal" (No. 6, 1998), to which he promptly responded to the publication of Cole's book in Russia.
In the West, CI psychological research begins in the framework of cultural anthropology also in the thirties and in this form survives to our time. All researchers in this area provide psychological sketches of different cultures and even make cross-cultural comparisons. However, very few of the works in this direction can be called strictly psychological. Even such as, for example, the work of Ruth Benedict "Psychological types in the cultures of the Southwest of the United States", did not create CI psychology as an independent direction.
The emergence of specialized psychological disciplines related to culture can be attributed to the early seventies, when the school of Cross-Cultural Psychology by Leonor Adler (Wolman, p. 141) and Michael Cole's Cultural Psychology were born in the United States.
Since that time in the West, a significant number of professional psychologists began to engage in some form of CI psychological research. However, in my opinion, this direction of psychology has not yet taken shape fully. This is evidenced by the subtitle that M. Cole gave to his book: Science of the Future. It probably won't be a mistake to say that science has already been born, but has not yet fully realized itself.
In order to understand what CI psychology is, one must first, at least in general, decide on its subject. Strictly speaking, the presence of its own subject and decides the question of the right of a scientific discipline to exist. Already from the name it is clear that CI psychology is one of the private psychological disciplines. This means that, on the one hand, it, while exploring its subject, solves with its help the tasks posed to the whole of psychology, but, on the other hand, it is singled out from general psychology by its special subject. Accordingly, a detailed story about the subject of CI psychology would make it possible to show its differences with other psychological disciplines and thereby determine its place in the general system of psychology.
The subject of CI psychology is defined by the concept of cultural and historical.
Perhaps it would not be a mistake to say that CI psychology draws its material mainly from the history of culture, although not only there. Among the scientific disciplines that emerged in the last century, when the basic concepts of CI psychology matured, the history of culture, including the material one, was occupied by anthropology, ethnography, ethnology and philosophy of history. Anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography, rather, provide material for CI psychology. The question of differentiating objects with them is not worth it. But with the philosophy of history, it is necessary to draw a clear distinction, since it deals with the comprehension of the same material. I mean not only the material of the history of culture, but also the psychological material itself - thinking and its history.
Perhaps the best modern definition of the concept of "philosophy of history" was given by the English thinker of the first half of this century, RJ Collingwood. By the way, he also introduces a distinction between the philosophy of history and psychology:
“[I] The term“ philosophy of history ”was invented in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, who understood by it only critical, or scientific, history, that way of historical thinking, when the historian independently judges a subject, instead of repeating history, read from old books. The same term was used by Hegel and other authors at the end of the eighteenth century, but they gave it a different meaning: for them it simply meant universal, or universal, history. A third meaning of this term can be found among some nineteenth-century positivists: for them, the philosophy of history meant the discovery of general laws governing the course of events that history is obliged to tell.<...>I use the term “philosophy of history” in a different sense from all of the above, and in order to clarify what I mean, I must first say a few words about my understanding of philosophy.
Philosophy is reflective. Philosophizing consciousness never thinks simply about an object, but, thinking about any object, it also thinks about its own thought about this object. Philosophy can therefore be called second-order thought, thought about thought. For example, determining the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a task facing a first-order thought, in this case the task of astronomy; To find out exactly what we are doing when we determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a second-order task of thought, i.e. the task of logic, or the theory of science.
This does not mean that philosophy is the science of consciousness, or psychology. Psychology is a first-order thought, it views consciousness in the same way that biology views life. It is not concerned with the relation of thought to its object; it is occupied directly with thought as something that is completely separated from its object, as a kind of event in the world, as a specific phenomenon that can be considered by itself. Philosophy never deals with thought by itself, it is always busy with the relation of thought to its object and therefore equally deals with both the object and the thought ”(Collingwood, pp. 5-6).
Talking in this book about how CI psychology was born, I would like to preserve the psychological approach outlined by Collingwood to the historical material of human consciousness. In the water and the same phenomenon of thinking, the psychologist is interested in how a person thinks, the philosopher - how he cognizes. This means that the first task of CI psychology is to provide a qualitative description of the phenomenon of thinking and, first of all, on the basis of the material of the history of culture.
However, the very concept of "culture" forces us to make some clarifications in the problem statement. Culture - that which is cultivated, nurtured, that is, made by a person different from the natural environment, is a concept both material and ideal, that is, stored, living and developing in the minds of people. The task of giving a description of the phenomenon of thinking is also faced by general psychology. What is the difference?
In general, the subject is the same, since CI psychology is a particular psychological discipline. But different approaches make differences in the vision of the subject. General psychology, like any natural Science, considers consciousness and thinking as a given given in front of the eyes and devices.
CI psychology adds genetic and historical methods to this, that is, it examines the origin of mental phenomena in development and historical development.
Research in development involves, as I understand it, a comparison of the various stages of development of a mental phenomenon during a person's life, that is, in growing up. Proceeding from the name, it is hardly possible to consider this as the own subject of CI psychology, because in general psychology a discipline called "Developmental Psychology" has long been established.
Therefore, in my opinion, developmental psychology within the framework of CI psychology is an auxiliary discipline, which is studied then in order to see how at different stages of life a person assimilates the corresponding parts of the culture in which he grows. In other words, developmental psychology within the framework of CI psychology is developmental cultural psychology.
As for the historical development of the psyche, it cannot be observed directly. And nevertheless, if we are talking about the assimilation of culture at certain age stages of the development of the psyche, then this is not an accidental slip of the tongue: each age assimilates a culture corresponding to this age. And by culture, I mean here, first of all, the models of thinking and behavior corresponding to this age.
But in order to correspond to certain ages, these samples had to be born one day, realized as corresponding to a certain age, stored as such, naturally changing and developing during storage, and in a certain way transmitted when the time came.
All this: birth, storage, development, transmission, as well as the methods of implementation and the material in which they are embodied - all these are the most definite phenomena of our consciousness. They are revealed through the study of age-related and historical changes in the psyche and the comparison of stages of different cultures. This is the main subject of CI psychology.
Another part of it, perhaps, can be considered the history of the development of all other phenomena of our consciousness, in addition to transmitting culture, but which are recognizably related to culture. In fact, this is an exit to ethnopsychological concepts of nationality, nation, ethnos, folk spirit, etc. I am not yet in a position to give this a more detailed definition.
So: The age-related assimilation of culture, the way it is transmitted to the personality and the ways of preserving and transmitting culture in society - these are the three main psychological phenomena that I would define as the subject of CI psychology.
Of course, each of them can be expanded through its material up to general and individual psychology.
The current state of cultural-historical psychology, as far as I understand this, allows us to speak about three of its main directions.
First, it is general CI psychology. The best textbook on general cultural psychology, in my opinion, is still KD Kavelin's book "The Tasks of Psychology", written in 1872. In her, the rationale for the possibility of studying the psyche in terms of objects and phenomena of culture, in terms of artifacts, as they are called by modern CI psychology, is perfectly given. And also a study was made of the ability of a person's consciousness and thinking to store, process and use these artifacts, or rather, images of objects and phenomena.
Kavelin followed a completely independent path, so his book lacks a historical outline of the work of his predecessors in CI psychology. I hope my work can make up for this deficiency.
In addition, the most serious development of the theory of General CI psychology was made by the American psychologist Michael Cole in the works of recent years. His historical outline of CI psychology is very short, but he tells in detail and seriously about those psychologists of the twentieth century who can be considered his immediate predecessors.
Second, it's experimental CI psychology. Experimental cross-cultural research was undertaken as early as the thirties by Alexander Luria (1931) and Margaret Mead (1932).
Among the modern psychologists who have made significant contributions to this method, in addition to M. Cole, obviously, Richard A. Schweder and L. L. Adler (Wolman) should be named.
Thirdly, the accumulation of general theoretical knowledge about the structure of thinking, the constant experimental research of traditional folk methods of influencing consciousness described by ethnography and ethnographic psychology lead to the fact that more and more often the CI psychologist is forced to act as a consulting applied psychologist or psychotherapist. The accumulation of relevant experience inevitably leads to the emergence of applied CI psychology.
It is possible that the further development of psychology is generally impossible without a full-fledged study of mythological and magical thinking within the framework of applied CI psychology. At least, its current state clearly shows that natural scientific methods based on quantitative instrumental measurements are not able to grasp something very important, essential in such a subtle matter as human consciousness. Perhaps the devices available today are simply too crude, and for this research it is necessary to use the most delicate and sensitive device at the disposal of mankind - the human consciousness itself. Within the framework of magical thinking, people have mastered it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. This significantly exceeds the age of modern science.
In modern psychology, there are several conceptual approaches to solving problems existing in this science. One of them is cultural-historical psychology, the founder of which is the famous Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky. According to his plan, psychology should study the psyche of the person being tested, which has not yet been formed and presented to the researcher, as was done in many other experimental areas of psychology, for example, behaviorism, and the psyche, which is in constant transformation, formation, since it is the most productive and only correct for a psychologist consider a developing, evolving person. Therefore, cognition of the psyche is most rational in the course of real practical work a psychologist, for example, in the field of pedagogy or medical practice, or psychological support by an employee of particularly responsible professions associated with the risk to the lives of large masses of people, etc.
In the course of its development, this theory has had different names, of which the latter is used in this book.