6. IDEAL TYPES AND EMPIRICAL EXPERIENCE PROCESS

Here it is necessary to complete the comparison of experiences of various types already begun when analyzing the first three types of life worlds. The most significant differences in experiences of different types are manifested in their relationship, on the one hand, to the accomplished event of being that created the critical situation, i.e. to reality, and on the other - to the vital need affected by this event.

Hedonistic experience ignores reality, distorts and denies it, forming the illusion of actual satisfaction and general preservation of the disturbed content of life.

Realistic experience ultimately takes reality as it is, adjusting to its conditions the dynamics and content of the needs of the subject. The former content of life that has now become impossible is discarded by a realistic experience; the subject has the past here, but has no history (cf. 123, p. 682).

Valuable experience recognizes a reality that contradicts or threatens values, but does not accept it, it rejects claims of immediate reality directly and unconditionally determine the inner content of life and tries to disarm it with ideal, semiotic procedures, deducing the event of being out of equality to itself with their help, turning it into subject of interpretation and evaluation. A completed event as a fact of being is reality that is irreversible and not subject to man, but it is translated by a value experience into another plane of existence, transformed into a fact of consciousness and as such is transformed in the light of the system of values ​​that has become or is becoming. The spoken word and the perfect action can not be returned and changed, but; realizing that they were wrong, to obey and repent means to accept them as the ineradicable reality of one’s own life and at the same time to reject them with value. As for the impossible content of life, the value experience keeps it in an aesthetically complete way, making it a moment in the history of life.

If the hedonistic experience rejects reality, the realistic unconditionally accepts it, its value ideally transforms it, then creative experience builds (creates) a new life reality. A completed event, for example, its own offense, is only ideally transformed, transformed by a value experience, a creative experience, sensually-practically, materially overcomes the attitude towards it. This sensual-practical, bodily character is the realization of creative experience from the value; because of its essential connection with values, it is distinguished from a realistic experience by a deep symbolism. The unrealizable past of the content of life is not only aesthetically preserved by creative experience in the history of life, but also ethically continues in the plans and deeds of the new life reality under construction.

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If so far we have analyzed experiences as ideal types, then in conclusion it is necessary to touch upon the problem of the complicity of the patterns we have identified in actual concrete experience processes.

In this area of ​​reality, as well as “in all the others, laws are purely empirically manifested extremely rarely: several principles are usually involved in the actual process of experiencing. Their conjugations can take on different forms and be built on a different basis. As the simplest example of such conjugation, one can cite the defensive denial by a young woman of the death of her father, described by R. Stolorov and F. Lechman (247), although the dominant principle in this experience was the pleasure principle, having survived of it could be effective, ie, to keep faith in the woman that his father was alive, just rearranging it created the illusion in accordance with the actual facts and obedience, thus, at least partially, the reality principle.

The developmental capabilities of a process largely depend on which principle underlies the specific synthesis of various types of experience. If it is dominated by the principle of pleasure, then experience, even if successful, can lead to a regression of the personality, the reality principle at best keeps it from degradation, and only on the basis of the principles of value and creativity is it possible to turn potentially destructive events of life into points of its spiritual growth. and improvement.

However, there is no one-to-one relationship between the dominant principle of experience and its consequences for personal development. With a small personal significance of the events experienced (say, with physical pain), the pleasure principle can be the most adequate. On the other hand, attempts to value and creative experience of events can have extremely negative consequences, for example, in the case when the value structures implanted by the experience do not correspond to the personality of the person and the life situation in which she finds herself. Just as even the best medicine can bring great harm if its purpose is not consistent with the characteristics of the patient's body and the course of the disease, the way of experiencing ideally should strictly correspond to the unique situation of this life world.

Creative experience, taken not as an ideal type, but as the basis of an empirical process, taken as creativity in an experience, is to create a unique synthesis of different types of experiences corresponding to this and only this critical situation. Moreover, the first creative step is taken even before the beginning of a positive process, it consists in clarifying the measure of the need for experiencing in general. The fact is that in the past experience a person, faced with situations of impossibility, developed various mechanisms of experience, and as soon as they already exist, then, like all kinds of mechanisms, can be used where it seems convenient, and not only where without they can not do. Creativity in experience, therefore, consists in part in that it is experienced primarily as necessary, i.e. do not artificially reduce the thresholds of critical situations.

In the actual implementation of the complex process of experiencing, creativity often manifests itself not so much in the processes specific for the ideal type of creative experience as in the granting of freedom, and sometimes dominating at some point the principles of pleasure, reality and value.

But, of course, such an experience, like any real process of creation, cannot be creative in all its points. Creative consciousness is not able to continuously monitor the entire course of the process, then one or the other principle from time to time out of its control. Therefore, the complex, long, generally creative and leading to the harmonization of life, the process of experiencing itself is not at all something harmonic. Every wil of life principles - pleasure, reality and values ​​- which the principle of creativity should ideally synthesize, are such strong and independent tendencies and their goals in a given situation can be so divergent that, within the framework of the ongoing process of experience, sometimes serious internal conflicts arise between principles . They are often resolved inadequately and one-sidedly. And although at the same time temporary and partial harmonization of consciousness takes place, in general, the resolution of this conflict can have such negative consequences that are no less destructive for the personality than the events experienced themselves. Therefore, experiences are often long-term chain processes, at which each subsequent stage we have to deal not only or even not so much. with the initial critical circumstances themselves, as with the adverse consequences of previous attempts at coping with them. By itself, this fact of the chain character of the experience process has been repeatedly noted in psychological literature, but due to the nondiscrimination of the heterogeneous principles of experience, these chains were thought, so to speak, linearly: if the psychoanalyst speaks of "protection against protection" (232, p.92; 241, p.28), it means an attempt to experience the consequences of unsuccessful defense by protective measures. Undoubtedly, such phenomena exist, but the more important from both theoretical and practical points of view is to understand and explain the internal conflict and inconsistency of the processes of experiencing in terms of the struggle of heterogeneous principles. And in this regard, “protection against protection” does not solve particular situational tasks, motivated ultimately by the same desire for pleasure that failed protection, the negative consequences of which are directed, but is a fundamental struggle of the higher principles of life against the domination of the pleasure principle. This fight against defenses as such, with their automaticity, i.e. unconsciousness and involuntariness, with distortions of reality and self-deception, and it is all the more difficult because it does not promise any immediate benefit, convenience, comfort. Psychoanalysis Z. Freud could not rise in the theory of experience above the reality principle, and even then understood as a modification of the pleasure principle. In reality, the struggle against protection is not carried out for the sake of subjugating reality, or even from abstract love for truth. It expresses the human desire for real life (87), for authenticity, for which a person is able to sacrifice his physical, social and psychological well-being.

So, the “life worlds” that we have identified analytically are not sections of psychological reality that are closed on themselves, but are components of a single psychological world of a person. Therefore, in real life there is no unequivocal relationship between the type of critical situation and the type of its experience. Say, frustration as a critical situation specific to. "simple and difficult world", a specific subject is not at all "doomed" to experience realistically, it can take the path of hedonistic, and value, and creative experiences. To help him choose the best path is the main task of psychological help.