Personal development. Psychology and psychotherapy. Preface (Andrey Kurpatov)

The concept of personality theory

Definition 1
Personality theory - systematized and scientifically verified provisions about human personality and the patterns of its behavior.

The main theories of personality are:

behaviorism;
cognitive theory;
Gestalt psychology;
psychoanalysis;
humanistic theory;
activity theory.

Each of these theories aims to show the process and patterns of personality development, its main sources and driving forces. Let's look at each of them in more detail.

Education theory

The theory of education is a system of techniques that explains the formation and change of personality under the influence of education, substantiates the content and reveals the essence of education.

The concepts of education of the 21st century are based on several well-known theories:

humanistic psychology (K. Rogers, A. Maslow);
behavioral theory (D. Watson, D. Locke, B. Skinner);
cognitive theory (D. Dewey, J. Piaget);
biological theory (K. Lorenz, D. Kennel);
psychoanalytic theory (S. Freud, E. Erikson).

Behavioral theory of personality

The main idea of behaviorism is to consider human behavior as a process of adaptation of the simplest living creature to the world around it. From the point of view of this theory, human behavior is simply a system of reactions to an incoming external stimulus.

The main objectives in personality research in this theory were:

identification and description of various types of human reactions to environmental influences;
study of the formation process of these reactions;
predicting human behavior, his reactions and determining the stimulus that caused this reaction.

Finished works on a similar topic

Course work Psychological theories of personality development 440 rub.
Abstract Psychological theories of personality development 280 rub.
Test work Psychological theories of personality development 220 rub.

Receive completed work or specialist advice on your educational project Find out the cost

Note 1

According to the views of researchers who adhere to this theory, the main process in personality development is mechanical learning, which does not require human activity and volitional efforts.

What is the concept of education?

A concept is a specific method of perception, a system of views on an action or object. This concept can be confused with a plan, but a plan is a set of specific steps, thought out to the smallest detail, that will lead to a certain result. A concept is a system of principles that should form the basis for the implementation of the final plan.

Education is the result of actions aimed at instilling in an individual, through school, family, and the environment, the desired traits, properties and behavioral skills that he will exhibit in later life.

The educational process is an interaction between subjects organized by professionals, which is characterized by joint activity, mutual respect and has the goal of transferring values, norms and experiences that are alien to the student into the internal plane of his personality.

The concept of education is an indivisible perception of the main components of education: goals, objectives, content, forms, methods and intended results.

Cognitive theory of personality development

This theory is characterized by identifying the main feature of personality development - cognitive processes occurring in the process of human functioning.

This theory is based on a philosophical position – constructive alternativeism.

This position is of the opinion that any thing in the world, phenomenon, process is ambiguous and regarding each of them there may be two or more opinions. Reality is a person’s awareness of the processes occurring around him, and for each person these awarenesses are unique and inimitable. Nothing in our world is permanent, final and indisputable. All facts and events and all the experience accumulated by humanity exist only in the human mind and there are many ways to interpret them.

Too lazy to read?

Ask a question to the experts and get an answer within 15 minutes!

Ask a Question

According to this, each person perceives the world through the prism of models formed in his mind - constructs, and for each it is unique and inimitable. Personality is equivalent to the personality constructs used by a person to predict the future.

Personal development. Psychology and psychotherapyAndrey Kurpatov

Preface

This job occupied me about ten years ago. Then I worked under O.N. Kuznetsov - Doctor of Medical Sciences, professor, outstanding domestic scientist. Psychiatrist, neurologist, psychologist, psychotherapist - Oleg Nikolaevich was an amazing scientist with a huge breadth of scientific interests. The last years of his life he devoted himself almost entirely to the problem of the work of F.M. Dostoevsky, one of the best - if not the best - psychologist in world literature. It was during this period, in the early 90s of the last century, that I had the opportunity to meet Oleg Nikolaevich.

As a scientific supervisor, it was literally in the corridor of the Psychiatry Clinic of the Military Medical Academy, he immediately gave me a task - to count the number of words “hysterical” in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. The activity, as you might guess, is very simple, but the effect, I must admit, was special and unforgettable. Soon I saw on the pages of the novel nothing but “hysterical fits,” “nervous laughs,” “idiotic” facial expressions, and so on. The whole work appeared before me in a special way - desperate inner tension, exposed nerve, trembling of feeling.

And, of course, I could no longer limit myself to just recalculating psychiatric terms. A most complex picture of personal experiences, tragedies, crises and transformations appeared before me. And the first place, of course, was taken by Alyosha Karamazov, who, before the reader’s eyes, transforms from a homely young man with a naive view of the objects of faith into an amazing, strong personality full of real inner life. But here there was also the withdrawn cynic Ivan Karamazov, and Grushenka, who is in an eternal state of emotional distress, and, of course, Liza Khokhlokova, tormented by internal contradictions, the broad-minded Mitya, the holy elder Zosima... And most importantly, the interactions of the novel’s heroes, extremely rich in feelings.

This is how my first scientific works on psychology and psychotherapy appeared (before that I was studying the history of medicine) - “Artistic-psychological and neurological understanding of hysteria” and “Hysterical mechanisms of personality development” [1], reports were made both at medical forums and in within the framework of the International Conference “Dostoevsky and World Culture”. The mechanisms of personality development that were intuitively understood at that time, the inner sense of the essence of this phenomenon, of course, could not remain within the framework of artistic and cultural analysis. At that time, I was engaged in projective tests, studying the personality psychology of academy cadets, as well as patients in the neurosis department of the Psychiatry Clinic, where I began my psychotherapeutic practice.

At the same time I met A.N. Alekhine - Doctor of Medical Sciences, professor, a real scientist and an amazing, unusually deep thinker, who became my best scientific supervisor. It was a truly happy meeting. In those years, Anatoly Nikolaevich dealt with the problem of human mental adaptation, in particular as part of long-term experiments on sealing. We did a lot of scientific work together, the enthusiasm, scope and seriousness of which still gives me a nagging sense of nostalgia. We had an amazing opportunity to observe psychological crises in experimental conditions, which, of course, seriously advanced the work.

At some point, it became clear that the principles underlying the process of personal development are, in a certain sense, universal. Theoretical and computational models that were built on the basis of these meaningless principles gave amazing results. In experiments, all these principles and models worked with fascinating precision. And, of course, after this the methodology fascinated us much more than the essentially private aspect of its application - the theory of personality, as well as the processes of its formation and development.

And so “psychosophy” was born - a neologism designed to denote a new approach to scientific knowledge. The essence of this approach, if we try to formulate it very briefly, is as follows. Firstly, everything the researcher deals with is his psychological experience, since everything he operates with appears before him in mental form - in sensations, images, language. Therefore, without understanding that there is this psychological experience and the human mental apparatus, it is impossible to talk about the reliability of knowledge. And secondly, the researcher deals with content, the patterns that he identifies relate to this content, but, as a scientist, he must see not only what is put into form, but also what is put into form, that is, what what is behind the content of the problem. The meaningless principles identified by psychosophy reflect the system of relations between the world and man, give, so to speak, their internal structure and thereby protect us from unjustified generalizations based on patterns identified simply from the content of certain processes.

Thus, psychology and psychotherapy temporarily faded into the background, and our scientific interest was focused on methodology, where methodology is understood as a way of human interaction with knowledge. The result was a strange situation: psychosophy was born from the theory of personality development, and then was somewhat transformed by it. At the same time, in presenting the received material, we, of course, started from the methodology that took first place, and only then turned to the psychology of personality, the phenomena of its formation and development. In general, it turned out that we harnessed the cart before the horse, which was probably not entirely correct. In this form, our first joint book with Anatoly Nikolaevich was published. This was the first edition of “Philosophy of Psychology”, which was published with the subtitle “Psychosophy. The Science of the Human Soul" in a modest edition of two hundred copies.

Work, of course, did not stop with the publication of this book. And we set to work on a new book, which developed the ideas of the first, but for a number of reasons was never completed. The opportunity to reprint this monograph appeared only in 2001, and the book was published in 2002. We could publish only one monograph, and therefore a kind of compilation was made from the first two - one complete and the second unfinished. At the same time, the entire part that was devoted to personality, the processes of its formation and development, was significantly reworked - supplemented and corrected. This book was published under the title “Psychosophy: Methodology, Personality Development and Psychotherapy.” The horse continued to stand behind the cart.

Now that we have the opportunity to publish all the texts we have on this issue, the task has arisen to once again structure the material that was once written. This turned out to be not as easy as we would like. In the ten years that have passed since the book was written, both the authors themselves and their ideas about what they did then, ten years ago, have changed. As a result, we are confused by both the quality of the presentation and the logic of the presentation of the material.

But the trouble is that it is impossible to rewrite these books. With each new attempt to change their structure and manner of presenting material, something very important is lost - something that can be called the logic of thinking. These books were written at a time when the new methodology was just being developed; the reader was thus invited to discuss what knowledge is and how we—scientists and ordinary people—interact with it. This manner of presentation has its obvious advantages, since it has a certain anti-dacticism, but, on the other hand, the structure is weak and objectively sags in many places.

Now, after so many years, we could write another book about the same thing. To this point, a large number of studies have been carried out on the basis of the new methodology, it has been applied in various fields of science and practice, with its help, for example, systemic behavioral psychotherapy has been created. We have retained the old way of thinking - the one that psychosophy gave us then, but we have changed the form that the movement of thought takes in the process of scientific research. Obviously, the new book would have turned out better, but it would definitely have been completely different, and therefore much that seems important would have been left behind the scenes.

As a result, the decision was made to split the source material into three books, roughly thematically. One book is devoted to the new methodology (“Philosophy of Psychology”); the second, which you are now holding in your hands, deals with issues of personality psychology and psychotherapeutic support for the process of personality development; the third - individual relationships (“Individual relationships (theory and practice of empathy)”).

This division of material has its obvious advantages and its own obvious disadvantages. The disadvantages are the endless references from one book to another (“read about this there, about that there”) and, perhaps, some lack of consistency of presentation. But there are also advantages, because now the horse and cart, as well as the additional carriage, stand separately, and the reader has the opportunity to pair these elements in the sequence that seems most successful to him and meets his interests.

For our part, we are changing the sequence of publishing books. The second one will be released first - “Personality Development”, although formally it is generally the last, since it was remade, unlike the other two, in 2001-2002. The second is the first (“Philosophy of Psychology (new methodology)”), the third is the third (“Individual Relationships”). However, this is probably not so significant.

This monograph, which is entirely devoted to the theory of personality, the processes of its formation and development, as well as psychotherapeutic support for the process of personality development, is preceded by a “Methodological Introduction,” which is intended to somehow compensate for the lack of methodological justification for the conclusions made in the main part of the book. The methodology itself is published in the monograph “Philosophy of Psychology”. This is partly due to the fact that personality development is only a special case of the use of this methodology, while reader interest in the new methodology cannot be limited only to those who study personality theory. Moreover, readers who are interested in personality development theory may not be very interested in learning the logic of methodological research.

For our part, we have tried, as far as possible, to smooth out the misunderstandings caused by the “surgical” division of this incomplete, but unusually expanded two-volume work into a three-volume set. However, unfortunately, it was not possible to avoid all the problems, for which the authors sincerely apologize to their readers. Perhaps if these works arouse reader interest, this will encourage us to create another

a book more in line with our current ideas. A new methodology is developing, its use in the field of psychology and psychotherapy gives new and new results. We, it seems to us, have found the opportunity to describe open systems, obtaining as a result of this work knowledge that can be used as technology, which seems important and interesting to us.

Sincerely,

Andrey Kurpatov

Basic principles of Gestalt psychology

According to this theory, in the consciousness of each person there are special integral structures - gestalts, which cannot be decomposed into elements and which are characterized by their own laws of flow and development.

Note 2

The mental process that determines the level of development of the psyche, from the point of view of Gestaltists, is perception. It is on the development of this process that human behavior and understanding of the surrounding situation depend.

The process of mental development is divided into two independent and parallel processes - maturation and learning. During perception, there is first a “grasping” of the integral image of an object, and then its differentiation. Learning leads to the formation of a new structure and, consequently, to a different perception and awareness of the situation. The moment phenomena enter another situation, they acquire a new function. This awareness of new combinations and new functions of objects is the formation of a new gestalt, the awareness of which is the essence of thinking.

Psychoanalysis as a theory of personality development

The term "psychoanalysis" can be considered in three meanings:

as a theory of personality and psychopathology;
as a method of treating personality disorders;
as a method of studying unconscious thoughts and feelings of an individual.

The leading role in this theory belongs to the interaction of instincts, motives and drives, competing with each other in the process of regulating human behavior. According to this theory, personality is a dynamic and ongoing conflict of processes and, in accordance with this, human behavior is unstable and deterministic.

According to psychoanalytic theory, each person is a complex energy system, and his behavior is activated by a single energy according to the law of conservation of energy. The source of this energy for a person is a state of excitement. Each person has a certain amount of energy that fuels his mental activity, and the goal of any human behavioral model is to reduce the tension that is caused by the accumulation of this energy.

Humanistic theory

Proponents of this theory attach great importance to the subjective experience of a person as the main phenomenon in the study of the development of the individual and society as a whole.

Each person must be studied as a whole, in the system of his behavioral reactions and attitude to the world around him. Each person has enormous potential for development and self-improvement, and the processes of destruction and degradation of personality are the result of dissatisfaction with basic life needs or frustration.

Culturological concept of personality-oriented education (Bondarevskaya E.V.)

Education is a part of culture that feeds on it and influences its preservation and development through man. To ensure a person’s ascent to universal human values and cultural ideals, education must be culturally appropriate.

The main method of design and development should be a cultural approach, which prescribes a turn of all components of education towards culture and man as its creator and subject capable of cultural self-development.

The purpose of education is to find, support, develop a person in a person, to lay down everything necessary for the development of an original personal image and a worthy life for a person, dialogical interaction with people, nature, culture, civilization.

Components of a cultural approach to LOO:

attitude towards the child as a subject of life, capable of cultural self-development and self-change;
attitude towards the teacher as a mediator between the child and culture;
attitude towards education as a cultural process, the driving forces of which is the search for personal meaning;
dialogue and cooperation in achieving the goals of cultural self-development;
attitude towards school as an integral cultural and educational space.

Principles of organizing the learning and living environment: - conformity with nature; cultural conformity; individual creative approach; life creativity; cooperation.

LOO technologies: meaning-searching; personal development; pedagogical support technologies.

Values of humanistic pedagogical culture:

not knowledge, but the personal meanings of a child’s learning;
not individual (subject) skills and abilities, but individual characteristics, independent educational activities and personal life experience;
not pedagogical requirements, but pedagogical support and care, cooperation and dialogue between student and teacher;
not the amount of knowledge, not the amount of information learned, but the holistic development, self-development, personal growth of the student.

The content of the LOO should include: mandatory components: axeological, cognitive, active-creative and personal.

The purpose of the axeological component is to introduce students to the world of values and provide assistance in choosing a personally significant system of value orientations and personal meanings.

The cognitive component of the content of education provides scientific knowledge about man, culture, history, nature, and the noosphere as the basis of spiritual development.

The active and creative component contributes to the formation and development of students’ creative abilities necessary for personal self-realization in various types of activities.