1. PSYCHOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AS AN INDUSTRY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Developmental psychology is a section of psychology that studies the age dynamics of the development of the human psyche, the ontogenesis of mental processes and psychological personality traits. Developmental psychology can be called "age psychology", although this term will not be entirely accurate. In developmental psychology, development is studied only in connection with a certain chronological age. Developmental psychology studies not only the age stages of human ontogenesis, it also considers various processes of mental development in general. Therefore, it would be more correct to assume that age psychology is one of the sections of developmental psychology. Almost all researchers believe that development is a change over time. Developmental psychology answers the questions what and how exactly changes; As a subject, developmental psychology studies the natural changes of a person in time and the phenomena and characteristics of human life associated with it.

Currently in the world there are many textbooks on child psychology. The science of the mental development of a child — child psychology — was born as a branch of comparative psychology at the end of the nineteenth century. The objective conditions for the development of child psychology, which were formed by the end of the 19th century, were associated with the intensive development of industry, with the new level of social life, which created the need for the emergence of a modern school. Teachers were interested in the question: how to teach and raise children? Parents and teachers stopped to consider physical punishment as an effective method of education - more democratic families appeared.

The task of understanding the little man has become one of the main. The child’s desire to understand himself as an adult has prompted researchers to treat childhood more closely. They came to the conclusion that only through the study of the psychology of the child lies the path to understanding what the psychology of an adult person is. The starting point for a systematic study of child psychology is the book “ The Soul of a Child” by the German Darwinist scholar Wilhelm Preyer . In it, he describes the results of daily observations of the development of his own son, paying attention to the development of the sense organs, motility, will, mind and language. Despite the fact that the child’s development was monitored long before the appearance of the book by V. Preyer, his undisputed priority is determined by referring to the study of the earliest years of a child’s life and the introduction of a method of objective observation developed by analogy to the methods of natural sciences in child psychology. From the modern point of view, the views of V. Preyer are perceived as naive, limited by the level of development of science of the XIX century. He, for example, considered the mental development of a child as a particular variant of the biological one. However, V. Preyer first made the transition from the introspective to the objective study of the psyche of the child. Therefore, by the unanimous admission of psychologists, he is considered the founder of child psychology. As a rule, age psychology studies the patterns of mental development of a healthy person and is a branch of psychological knowledge. On this basis, allocate child, adolescent, youthful psychology, the psychology of an adult and gerontopsychology .

Ontogenesis (from the Greek. On, ontos– “being, birth, origin”) is a process of development of an individual organism. In psychology, ontogenesis is the formation of the basic structures of the psyche of an individual during his childhood; the study of ontogenesis is the main task of child psychology. From the standpoint of domestic psychology, the main content of ontogenesis is constituted by the subject activity and communication of the child (first of all, joint activity — communication with an adult). In the course of interiorization, the child “rotates”, “appropriates” social, sign-symbolic structures and means of this activity and communication, on the basis of which his consciousness and personality are formed. Common to domestic psychologists is also an understanding of the formation of the psyche, consciousness, and personality in ontogenesis as social processes that take place under conditions of active, purposeful development.

Thus, in the center of study and research is the man - a creature embodying the highest stage of the development of life, the subject of social and historical activities. Man is a system in which the physical and mental, genetically determined and in life-formed, natural, social and spiritual form an indissoluble unity.

Man acts as an organism endowed with the psyche; the individual (which means his belonging to the genus homosapiens); individuality (characterizing the difference between one individual and another); a subject (making changes in the surrounding world, in other people and in himself); carrier of roles (sexual, professional, conventional, etc.); "I-image" (the system of representations, self-esteem, the level of claims, etc.); personality (as a systemic social quality of an individual, his personalization, reflected subjectivity in other people and in oneself as in another).

Man is the subject of study of a number of sciences: anthropology, sociology, ethnography, pedagogy, anatomy, physiology, etc. Practically all psychology addresses the problem of man as an individual involved in social relations, his development in the processes of training and education, its formation in activity and communication . Objectively existing diversity of human manifestations in the evolution of nature, the history of society and in his own life created his images, clearly or hidden existing in culture at certain stages of its development.

In sociological, psychological, and pedagogical ideas, there are the following “ human images” that have a direct impact on research and practical work with people:

1) “a person who feels” - a person as the sum of knowledge and skills; man as a “device for processing information”;

2) “person-consumer” , i.e., a person in need, as a system of instincts and needs;

3) “programmed person” , i.e., in behavioral sciences, a person appears as a system of reactions, in social - as a repertoire of social roles;

4) an “activity person” is a person who makes a choice;

5) a person as an expression of meanings and values .

In pedagogy, they proceed from the image of a “feeling person”, and the concept of a person is reduced to the sum of knowledge, its actions are regarded as a product of past experience, and the process of education is replaced by convictions, persuasion, that is, purely verbal influences.

As a result of the predominance of such an approach in training and education, the process of “impoverishment of the soul while enriching with information” occurs.

The image of a person as a container of needs, instincts and desires has established itself in a number of areas of psychology, primarily under the influence of psychoanalysis. Many of the founders of directions ( individual psychology - A. Adler , non - psychoanalysis - E. Fromm , etc.) proceeded in their concepts from the image of a “person in need”, deriving psychological regularities from a study of the dynamics of implementation and satisfaction of various needs.

The image of a “programmed person” defines ideas about him in sociobiology , which studies human development as the deployment of genetic programs in behaviorism, reflexology and non-behaviorism, sociological and socio-psychological role-based concepts of a person (behavior is viewed as playing out learned programs and life scenarios learned during socialization) .

If the interpretation of a person in psychology is based on the image of a “programmed person”, then the impact somehow comes down to a successful selection of stimuli and reinforcements, to which live social automata must dutifully respond.

The image of a “human activist” is the basis for building cultural-historical psychology, a system-activity approach to understanding a person, humanistic psychoanalysis and existential logotherapy. Here he is understood as the subject of responsible choices generated by life in society,

this or that social way of life.

Both concrete actions in relation to him and theoretical schemes for analyzing his development depend on human images in culture and science. The predominance of the images of the “sensing person”, “the needy person” and the “programmed person” largely determined the real fact of the discrepancy between the individual, personality and individuality and the separate formation of bioenergetic, sociogenetic and personogenetic orientations of human cognition.

In their isolation, the metaphysical scheme of determination of human development is manifested under the influence of two factors - the environment and heredity . Within the framework of the historical-evolutionary approach, a fundamentally different scheme for the determination of development is being developed. In this scheme, the properties of a person as an individual are considered as “impersonal” prerequisites for development, which in the process of life’s path can become the product of this development. The social environment is also a source, not a factor directly determining a person’s behavior. Being a condition for carrying out activities, the social environment carries those norms, values, roles, ceremonies, tools, sign systems that an individual faces. The bases and driving force of human development are joint activities and communication, through which people move in the world, familiarizing them with culture.