I could continue epigraph quotations from other authors, but I would give myself only one – the one that is most often found in talking with adults about children. This question – rhetorically, emotionally intense, often disturbing than optimistic: – What happened to him next?
Psychology – the science. Serious, academic science, consisting of several sections, branches, each of which examines some age – from infancy to senile (child psychology, psychology preschooler gerontopsychology – it’s about an old man). Like any science, it discusses about his subject, methods, procedures, criteria of truth, argues the existence of this truth of a theory. Like any science, it seeks to describe his subject specific terms – scientific terms, separate it from the objects of the other sciences, even related, for example, general psychology, psychophysiology, also students ages: those big biological clock that begins its inception with person. Everyone knows the direction of movement of this watch – from birth to death. Course of their inexorable, it is defined by the nature, and it is clear that everyone is subject to this move. But this is more a digression than the description of the subject of developmental psychology.
Psychology tries to study the patterns of human mental development, a normal person. Thus, it raises important questions about the existence of the laws themselves, their degree of universality, that is compulsory for all. At the same time there is a question (and very specific) that is mental development and who may determine. In addition, there is the eternal philosophical question – about what a person is considered normal development.
If you take these questions to yourself in that, for example, the form, you will feel how much they may be important to your destiny:
1. Am I normal person?
2. I developed a man?
3. Does my development my age?
4. What will (and will change if at all) in my inner world with the aged?
5. Can I do to change yourself?
The same questions can be asked of any person. Accuracy of response to them can significantly affect the fate of a man – his proper-governmental solutions and solutions of others, may depend on its impor-tant personal events.
Psychology examines not only what happens to a man today, it has data that can be in a person’s life in general, as it seeks to study his life. It is natural that some age groups are given more attention and some – less. This occurs in part because the “scientists studying human, more than all other workers exposed to the social climate. This is because not only he himself, his way of thinking, its interests and its questions are determined by society (as is the case in natural sciences), but also the company itself is deterministic research subject – people. Whenever psychologist speaks of man, the model for it are people close to him – and above all he is. In modern industrial society, people are guided by reason, their senses poor, their emotions seem superfluous ballast, and the way it is and of the psychologist, and the objects of his study, “- said E. Fromm.
It is difficult not to agree. Recalls in this connection the words DB Elkonin, said at a lecture on child psychology: “I became a real psychologist only when the grandson was born.”
“I” is in contact with the researcher, “I” studied the faces of those who have each of them. Miracle of psychology is that it allows the researcher to live in my own life many events associated with the renewed understanding of the lives of others. Development, updating the vision can be seen in the texts of Freud and Piaget, Vygotsky and El’konin in the works E.Eriksona and Erich Fromm. This is a fascinating and, in my opinion, little studied page stories psychology.
Thus, psychology as a science starts from the moment when two people with different goals: first person – an adult who is committed to getting a true, accurate knowledge of the laws of mental development, and the second person can be a child, or adult contemporary someone older than his age – a man whom the psychologist would call the subject, investigated.
The very best in physical age difference creates a problem th understanding. This problem becomes increasingly complicated when it comes to the study of the child. How to do this is to get accurate information?
Leaf through old and new books, read clever names: experimentally-genetic method, clinical observation, longitudinal study set, the method of gradual formation, participant observation, laboratory experiments and the like. Leave the detailed description of these procedures, a special edition of this book I will try to highlight the main thing in all Me-todah (of course, most importantly from my point of view): they dissect, divide continuous flow of human life on individual situations, the patterns from the point of view of the researcher, the experimenter; strict fixing these situations in materials science allows us to analyze the protocols these situations, not a vision of the scientist. Although, if the protocol is not formalized (there is no standard form), then, of course, studied the situation will be seen and understood in different ways by all those involved and those who will try to repeat it.
Researcher in psychology deals with the protocol to fix the situation. It is for him an object of analysis and explanation – interpretation.
There is one kind of research, which seems to allow to overcome this fragmentation and situational understanding of man – this diary. Diaries of the people themselves, written in the first person, and blogs about the life of someone – famous mother’s diaries, for example, describes the development of the child. In these journals, especially in the diaries of the mother, is the material that does not allow the research to the eye. They may be something to do with a child that comes from personal experience, in light of which all that happens to your child is important, valuable. This is what K.Koffka called naive observation, what, in his opinion (in my too), psychology remains desperately need. This naive observation has an important property – it lacks selectivity Research sight, so totally, I would say, the heat, because the child does not evaluate, test, and included in the life of the test naturally, organically, as the emotional content of human relationships.
I think that is very strong in modern psychology, it is difficult to read many scientific texts because they are too overwhelmed pseudopsychological information.
I recall in this connection the example of the student’s diary of observations during the teaching practice: “It was dark. Out he turned the corner and disappeared from view.” Where is the pro psychic reality? The one that develops according to its own inherent to the law? Very difficult to determine. I think that the properties of this reality is just as difficult to find in a number of studies of people who call themselves psychologists. It remains only to pain join VP Zinchenko opinion expressed by a few years ago (I think, today, the situation is even more complicated), “said seriously and that broke away from the philosophical psychology, human culture, has become a servant of technocratic policy – that That’s when she lost her soul. Our science has come a lot of engineers, mathematicians, biologists, and physicists. This has not so much the development of interdisciplinary ties and more reduction of professionalism. ”
Psychology as a science, since its inception has been difficult to identify and retain their subject of study. One reason for this is to reduce the professional psychologists and that every person has a silt-lyuzornoy confidence that he will always be able to understand, analyze, control the other person, because he is to them. This phenomenon of projection, that is, the understanding of the other (events, phenomena, objects) on the basis of similarity to each other, we do not just stop there.