44 DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERIMENTAL AND APPLIED AREAS OF PSYCHOLOGY

The relation of traditional psychology to applied science still remains the same as to the half-time science. But there is no doubt that the main role in the formation of science for a given period belongs to applied psychology: it shows all the advanced, healthy, it represents the best methodological works. A look at the meaning of what is happening and the potential of true psychology can only be formed from the study of this sphere.

The center of the history of science turned out to be biased: what was on the periphery is now the defining support. This suggests three factors:

1) practice. Here (through psychotechnics, psychiatry, child psychology, criminal psychology), psychology for the first time united with highly organized practice — industrial, educational, political, and military. This puts psychology before the need to transform their positions so that they stand the test of practice;

2) methodology. Practice as a constructive principle of science requires philosophy, that is, the methodology of science.

L. Binswanger believed that the solution of the question of individual and objectivizing psychology should come not from logic, gnoseology or dialectics, but from methodology, i.e. the doctrine of a scientific approach;

3) psychology as an integral science.

I. N. Spielrein believed that psychology approached the moment when it was not able to isolate psychological functions from physiological ones, and was looking for a single concept.

According to L. C. Vygotsky, the thesis of practice plays a major role in the psychotechnical sciences. It is always a comparative science, limited, experienced. The connection with the physiological processes for this science is something so important that it is a physical psychology.

G. Munsterberg says that empirical psychology appeared in the middle of the XIX century. Even in those schools where dialectics were denied and facts were studied, the study was guided by a different interest. The use of experience was impossible until psychology had become a natural science; However, with the introduction of experience, a paradoxical situation was formed that was incredible in natural science: devices such as the first machine or the telegraph were led by laboratories, but were not used in practice.

L. Vygotsky understood the cause of the crisis of psychology as its driving force, and therefore possessing not only historical interest, but also guiding - methodological - value, since it not only led to the formation of the crisis, but continued to condition its further direction and fate.

Psychology, which is designed by practice to certify the truth of its thinking, which tried not only to clarify the psyche, how to realize it and master it, defined in a fundamentally different attitude of practical disciplines in the whole structure of science than the old psychology.