21 PROGRESSIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS IN THE USA

In the second half of the XVIII century. The struggle of the American colonies against the subordination of England began. This determined the main shifts in the ideological life of the country.

1. A strong enlightenment movement is rising with its apology for the innate rights of people and the "light of reason."

The philosophical concepts of B. Johnson (1696–1772) and B. T. Edward (1703–1758) that defended religious knowledge are opposed to the teachings of a different kind.

They were distinguished by the understanding of man as a natural being, the psyche of which has a terrestrial genesis and is subject to the same laws of the material world. Natural scientific aspiration is inherent in the works of B. Franklin, T. Payne, T. Jefferson, B. Rush, and others.

2. The views of the American doctor B. Rush. He was an initiative participant in the revolutionary army, one of those who signed the United States Declaration of Independence, the pioneer of many economic and educational ideas of the young bourgeois state, is considered the “father” of American psychiatry.

The most significant from the point of view of scientific psychology is his work “On the Influence of Physical Causes on the Human Moral Ability”. The deterministic aspiration of B. Rush’s teaching was also expressed in his interpretation of thinking and will. He focused on the fact that the process of thinking takes place with the natural necessity inherent in all other functions, suggesting that those who doubt this, try to delay the operations of the mind according to their will. It will turn out no more than to delay the work of the heart or the movement of the planets. As for the will, without arguments it is just as impossible as seeing without light or hearing without sound.

On the one hand, B. Rush gave evidence of the primacy of physical causes in relation to internal processes and properties, on the other - the opposite effect of mental states on physical ones. In other words, he stood up to protect the psychophysical interaction. By the inextricable link between mental and material processes was meant their influence on each other, and not parallelism. B. Rush as a doctor made this idea as the starting point of psychotherapy. But despite this, she had political meaning for him. The will of the subject in the liberal mode of manifestation was regarded by him as a factor that favors (with the help of the soul) the material well-being of the organism. Philosophic difficulties, concluded in the question of interaction, B. Ra-sha cared little. It was important for him to reduce the universal interpretation of mental phenomena with the actual social and political tasks. Psychophysical interaction in the interpretation of B. Rush signified binary dependence: physical causes affect the moral ability of the soul, and the well-being of the body depends on it. Religious ideas were considered to be the central factor in the beneficial effects of the soul on physical health.