54 E. B. TITCHENER'S STRUCTURAL SCHOOL

Edward Bradford Titchener, famous as the father of experiential psychology in America, opened up a fundamentally “new psychology” in the USA, an experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and others, influencing in this way the transition from mental philosophy to psychology lives on today. His most important contribution is undoubtedly that he gave psychology a scientific status. He formed operational methods and a scientific apparatus and insisted on the need for rigorous training of experimental psychologists. He portrayed the object of psychology in the form of a system of primitive conscious states (sensations, ideas, perceptions), from which all the diversity of the inner life is created.

The task of psychology, in his opinion, is not analyzing the role that the intellect performs in behavior, but revealing simple structures of consciousness that cannot be further divided, clarifying the laws of integration of these elements, as well as detecting the connection of psychological components with physiological processes. The central method of psychology in this case is analytical introspection, in which the observer who takes part in experience is required to depict the elements of consciousness not in terms of external objects, but in terms of feelings. The structural school that emerged as a result of the work of E. B. Titchener regards as its object the consciousness comprehended through the division into components of what is given to the subject in his introspection, in order to then reveal the general laws by which the structure is formed from them.

By introspection you need to understand not ordinary self-observation, but a special ability, formed by special training, to depict the phenomena of consciousness as such, abstracting from external objects represented by the given consciousness. E. B. Titchener divided three categories of components: sensation (elementary process, having quality, intensity, clarity, work), image and feeling. Rejecting the conclusions of the Würzburg school that true thinking regardless of images, Б.. B. Titchener put forward a contextual theory of meaning, according to which all knowledge of the subject is based on a complex of sensual elements.

The structural method of E. B. Titchener was of great importance for the formation of the main currents of his time. Functionalism emerged as a reaction to the structuralism of E. B. Titus-chener (and V. Wundt), who focused their attention on the content of consciousness, but not on its function and excluded adaptation, personal differences, mental formation, zoopsychology, and other trends connected with them . Behaviorism began as a protest against the exceptional interest of E. B. Titchener to the content of consciousness. Gestalt psychology to some extent also appeared as a reaction to the atomism of the supporters of E. B. Titchener in Germany