Association psychology history, ideas, facts
Associationism, which emerged in the 19th century, was developed by outstanding scientists: Herbert Spencer, Thomas Brown, John Stuart Mill, James Mill, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer. Its important feature was its connection with the philosophy of positivism, which argued that “every science is its own philosophy.”
Associative psychology is a branch of psychology that explains spirituality, emotionality, and human movement through the associations that arise through the process. This science has formed a number of schools, theories, teachings and concepts. Experts in this field consider associations to be the main element that participates in the work of the human psyche and consciousness.
Emergence and development
The emergence and development of associative psychology took place in several stages. From the 4th to the mid-18th centuries, initial teachings arose. Aristotle and Plato described in detail the principle of its operation back in ancient times. To better understand the emergence of the emotions of each individual, the rules of associationism were used by Descartes. Hobbes stuck to them to gain new experience and skills. And Spinoza wanted to use them to understand the peculiarity of human thoughts. At the same time, Locke introduces the term “association”.
In the mid-18th and early 19th centuries, the human psyche was completely determined by association.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a crisis occurred in the development of this doctrine. This happens because it is impossible to find a connection between the laws of consciousness and mechanics.
From 1900 to 1920, associative psychology disappears, and its ideas take place in other areas of this science.
Scientists from this field have come to the conclusion that associations are a special phenomenon of the psyche that needs further, detailed study.
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The doctrine of associations was rooted in the fertile soil of new mechanics. Affirming the natural scientific view, it, contrary to the attempts of Berkeley and Hume to turn association into an immanent property of consciousness, explained the order and connection of mental phenomena by the action of material, bodily causes.
The conviction that the natural transition from one fact of consciousness to another is determined by neurodynamics (understood either as the movement of “animal spirits” or as the vibration of nerve fibers) remained dominant. This was favored by an ideological climate that reflected the rise of social forces interested in maintaining materialistic ideas about the psyche.
At the turn of the 19th century. the situation has changed significantly. The specter of the French Revolution haunted the ruling classes. Attacks on materialism as a trend leading to the destruction of religion, morality and public order intensified. But it was not only under the influence of socio-political circumstances that the general appearance and paths of development of the associative direction changed. Under the influence of the successes of new experimental physiology, the principles that developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. speculative ideas about the bodily substrate of associations gradually dissipated. Claims about the neural mechanism of associations had no real physiological support. When at the turn of the 19th century. physiology began to “disassemble” this mechanism and clarify the nature of the interaction of its parts, the instability of the physiological schemes (derived in the physics first of Descartes and then of Newton) on which the associative theory was based became obvious.
Hartlian ideas that the activity of nerve fibers are similar to the vibrations of strings, which, merging according to the laws of association, create a “symphony” of mental life, could not be accepted in an era of rapid increase in real knowledge about these fibers. Having played an enduring heuristic role, the imaginary physiology of Hartley and other materialist associationists disappeared from the scene. In this atmosphere, doctrines are put forward that interpret association as an immanent-psychic, and not a physical-psychic principle of organization and the natural course of mental and volitional processes.
So, socio-ideological circumstances, on the one hand, and specific scientific events, on the other, led to the fact that in the first half of the last century, the interpretation of association as an immanent property of the mind, and not the body, became dominant.
Let us turn to the works where this interpretation is most clearly captured. First of all, it follows about (1820) Thomas Browne (1778-1820). Brown, a doctor by training, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a poet, is usually attributed to the Scottish school, which, as we remember, energetically defended the doctrine of the “faculties of the soul” in opposition to associationism. Brown's lectures truly reflected the transformation of the Scottish school, its rapprochement with the associative movement, the polemics against which it had once been absorbed. The prerequisite for the rapprochement was the above-mentioned common ideological basis of Reed’s “psychology of abilities” and the idealistic associationism of Berkeley and Hume. Supporters of both directions claimed that they stood on the basis of strict empiricism in the study and explanation of the facts of consciousness. But what they understood by the experimental study of the soul was based on the confidence that self-observation represents the only infallible source of information about mental life.
Representatives of both the Scottish school and idealistic associationism taught that the psychic can be understood only from itself, without reference to anything external. This attitude allowed Brown to synthesize the tendencies of two directions: to combine the principle of spontaneous activity of the soul, defended by the Scottish school, with the view put forward by Hume on internal experience as a combination of elements of consciousness - sensations.
Brown's transition to the position of associative psychology forced him to look for a sensory equivalent in the phenomena of consciousness for those features of mental activity that prompted representatives of the Scottish school to use the concept of the original abilities, or forces, of the mind (soul, consciousness) as the main explanatory principle.
Let us recall that Brown's predecessors in the Scottish school appealed to these forces or abilities in order to avoid, while remaining faithful to idealism, the solipsistic impasse of Berkeleyanism and Hume's skepticism. The philosophy of Hume, which questioned the reality of both the external world and the soul as an independent substance, seemed especially dangerous for religion to supporters of the Scottish school. Reed and his followers sought to restore the rights of the immaterial soul with its original abilities.
Having distinguished sensation (as feeling) from perception (as an image of an external object), Reed attributed the objectivity of the second due to the innate ability - belief (belief) in the reality of external objects ( In this regard, for the first time in the history of psychology, the concepts of “sensation” (sensation) were terminologically distinguished ) and “perception”
). Brown argued that to distinguish between internal and external there is no need to introduce special powers of the mind and go beyond the flow of subjectively perceived phenomena. He distinguishes among these phenomena a special kind of sensation—muscular. It is they, according to Brown, that generate a sense of the reality of the world around us.
Since the term “association” was firmly connected with the materialist view of the dynamics of ideas, Brown chose to abandon this term altogether and replace it (following Berkeley) with the word “suggestion.” Thus, in the description of the order and laws according to which psychological phenomena replace each other, the idea of their subordination to factors independent of consciousness was introduced. Brown specifically explained in one of his lectures why he considers it appropriate to talk about “suggestion” instead of the unsuccessful, in his opinion, expression “association of ideas.” An important role in Brown's argumentation was given to criticism of the doctrine that ideas are combined and reproduced only due to their contiguity in space and time.
The subsequent history of associationism is full of discussions about whether the concept of association is based on the principle of contiguity (as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hartley believed), or whether it should also include other principles that are irreducible to it, especially similarity.
For the materialist direction, contiguity did not act as a combination of mental phenomena sequentially (one after another) experienced by the subject, but as the effect of a transition independent of the subject from one bodily process to another. In other words, association by contiguity meant that the mental process unfolds in space (of the nervous system). Behind this was the assumption that the dynamics of mental processes are identical in type to neurodynamics (in turn, conceived in the image of the interaction of physical objects, in particular, as in Hartley, the movement of acoustic waves). Adhering to these positions (the only deterministic ones in that era), the association could be interpreted only on the basis of the principle of contiguity.
Meanwhile, real mental activity is characterized by such signs that cannot be explained based solely on the interaction of processes within the bodily device that produces this activity. The principle of contiguity as spatial proximity caused by the transition of one bodily process to another is completely insufficient to understand the semantic connections in consciousness, not to mention the creative work of the human mind. It was precisely these signs of mental dynamics that Brown pointed out in his criticism of the doctrine of the association of ideas, which had a mechanical-deterministic basis. Association by contiguity, he emphasized, is not sufficient to unambiguously predict which idea will replace a given one.
Classical associationism of the 18th century, inspired by the predictive power of Newtonian mechanics, counted on just such an explanation. Brown argued that poetic metaphors, scientific comparisons, and creative discoveries require a different explanatory principle. The laws of Newtonian physics (which served as a model for associative psychology) cannot explain the intellectual work of Newton, who discovered them. The transition of Newton's thought from the perception of a falling apple to the system of the universe should, according to Brown, be explained not by association, but by “suggestion” - one idea “suggested” (suggested) another.
Brown divided the laws of associations - “suggestions” into primary (“suggestions” by contiguity, similarity and contrast) and secondary. Primary laws are initially inherent in consciousness, the elements of which, regardless of experience and learning, are connected with each other, either when they follow each other, or when they are similar to each other in some respect, or when they are opposite.
The primary laws of associations are necessary, but not sufficient to explain the circumstances due to which, behind a given mental phenomenon (image, thought, desire) in consciousness, out of many possible ones, exactly one appears, and not another. To solve this problem (central for the entire associative direction), it is necessary, according to Brown, to add secondary laws to the primary laws. There are nine of them (the laws of frequency, novelty, duration of the initial sensation, constitutional differences between individuals, etc.). The more often mental phenomena are recognized, the stronger the emotions they evoke, the fresher the impression of them, the more unusual they are, etc., the greater the chances of establishing a connection between them, as a result of which the subsequent appearance of one of them entails a naturally related a string of others.
The methodological flaw of Brown's concept was not in posing the question of these laws (primary and secondary laws of associations), but in their interpretation as inherent in the individual mind and thereby not rooted in anything external, objective, material. The same drawback is characteristic of other attempts made during the period under review to transform the associative scheme for the purpose of its “purely” psychological interpretation.
In the same 20s of the last century, when Brown’s “Lectures...” was published, James Mill’s book “An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind” (1829) was published, usually assessed as the most straightforward and uncompromising implementation of the mechanistic approach to the psyche from the “hard” position. associationism. Note that Brown questioned the position associated with the names of Hobbes and Locke about the atomic nature of experience (complex mental formations arise according to the laws of association from the simplest, further indecomposable elements) ( Brown spoke of the “spontaneous chemistry of consciousness,” meaning by this “the emergence as a result of associations (“suggestions”) of new products in which their original components are indistinguishable. Brown also argued that in some cases consciousness is initially relational and not atomic, that is, it initially grasps not individual sensory elements, but the relationships between them. “Feeling” relationships" is experienced directly
). Mill again defends this position as the only possible way to explain how human consciousness works, which, according to Mill, is a kind of machine that does not have any innate structures and contents. Denying the innateness of experience does not mean accepting its materialist interpretation, characteristic, say, of Hobbes, Spinoza, for whom the order and connection of ideas are identical to the order and connection of things, as well as for Hartley, who believed that the order and connection of ideas are determined by nervous processes. For J. Mill, association has no other basis than the properties of consciousness itself, the only tool of analysis of which he considered introspection.
In Germany, the ideas of associative psychology were uniquely refracted in the concept of Herbart (1774-1841). This country was dominated by a different ideological climate than in Great Britain, which was due to the peculiarities of its historical path. Philosophical traditions were also important. From Leibniz to Kant and Hegel, German philosophy was distinguished by the desire to affirm the original activity of the subject, to emphasize the dynamism, inconsistency, and integral nature of his inner life.
This general attitude affected new concepts that arose in an era when transcendentalism showed deep cracks and the need to descend from its heights to the ground of empirical study of specific phenomena became obvious. The younger generation saw in the philosophical systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel something antithetical to positive science, natural science experience, and the practice of real communication with reality. The majority of representatives of this generation, taking into account social demands, felt a craving for new views on nature and man. At the level of theory, German classical idealism was decisively rejected. But his critics and subverters did not go through his school in vain.
The noted tendency to interpret the soul as an active, dynamic principle affected concepts in which the general logic of the development of psychological thought manifested itself differently than in Great Britain. This logic required the rejection of apriorism, the doctrine of the soul as a special entity and its original abilities. In place of the purposefully acting soul, individual phenomena were put, in place of abilities as voluntarily acting forces - the laws of the dynamics of elements of consciousness (associations).
The idea that the psyche develops through the gradual unification of initial elements acted not only as a philosophical and psychological thesis directed against apriorism and belief in the priority of intuitive knowledge, but also as an ideological stimulus for pedagogy, designed to rationally, based on experience, influence development of the mind.
In close proximity to these demands of pedagogical practice, the concepts of Herbart and another philosopher, Beneke, developed in Germany. The focus on practical problems weakened the metaphysical element and encouraged a search for real connections between facts. Herbart opposed the popular psychology of abilities of Christian Wolff, who “covered up enormous difficulties by explaining names,” and against Kant, in whose philosophy, according to Herbart, disguised abilities appear under the name of transcendental apperception, acts of reason, etc.
Herbart sharply criticizes his predecessors for the fact that their theories make the management of training and education meaningless. To recognize the innateness of the basic forces, or abilities of the soul, means to exclude the possibility of directed influence on them. The concept of “mental abilities,” according to Herbart, is a product of hasty, superficial introspection. The latter snatches mental facts from the necessary connection and randomly generalizes them, not stopping until this generalization reaches the highest generic concepts - ideas, feelings, desires. If we add to these everyday concepts the assumption of abilities as their real basis, then “psychology turns into mythology” (6, 3). The differences between types and kinds of mental acts, noticed by everyday practice, are interpreted as the result of the action of hidden forces, that is, in exactly the same way as ancient man explained phenomena of external nature that were incomprehensible to him. Therefore, Herbart believed that abilities should be banished from psychology, as phlogiston from chemistry.
In contrast to the psychology of abilities, Herbart and Beneke put forward provisions close to the associative doctrine. They take as initial not abilities, but mental elements, the interaction of which is natural and accessible to empirical study. The laws of psychology, in their opinion, should be understood from the internal dynamics of mental life in itself, without resorting to hidden, randomly acting forces (abilities) of the soul as the imaginary cause of phenomena given in experience. At the same time, neither Herbart nor Beneke considered the soul to be a passive reflective apparatus. Activity was retained as an integral feature, and Beneke also recognized the originality of some primary properties that play the role of the makings of subsequent development. Herbart's influence was incomparably more significant, but Beneke in his time, in the 30s of the last century, when transcendentalism still reigned in the philosophical life of Germany, was perceived as a troubadour in the experimental study of mental activity.
Beneke demanded to overcome the inconsistency of Kantianism and to derive from experience not only the content of knowledge, but also its categorical structure. To solve such a problem, according to Beneke, a reform of psychology is necessary. Only by abandoning speculation and being guided by internal experience can psychology join the natural sciences and even get ahead of them. Beneke saw the guarantee of this in the fact that psychology has one fundamental advantage over other sciences: thanks to introspection, it knows its subject directly, while natural science must be content with indirect knowledge of the results of the actions of things on the subject ( Similar views were later developed by one of the main theorists of the new experimental psychology — Wundt
). By following an empirical, inductive path, psychology, Beneke hoped, would discover the primary psychic elements and forces and then, becoming a genetic science, would be able to explain how developed consciousness gradually arises with all its properties that seem a priori.
Herbart's main work was called “Psychology, Newly Based on Metaphysics, Experience and Mathematics” (1816). Metaphysics was understood as the philosophical, non-empirical premises of a new psychological system. There is nothing original in the soul - in this Herbart unites with the associationists. In contrast to them, he retains the concept of the soul, believing that it is otherwise impossible to explain the unity of mental life and the original source of its activity. At the same time, the soul, according to Herbart, is an unknowable entity. Therefore, it cannot be a subject of science. They are phenomena.
In “classical” associationism, the primary phenomenon was sensation. It was interpreted differently by materialists, who saw in sensation the effect of an external influence independent of the subject, and by idealists, who considered sensation to be a finite element that has no basis behind it except the properties of consciousness itself. For Herbart, the original “atom” of the soul is not a sensation, but an idea. The concept of sensation correlated the simplest component of mental life with the activity of the senses. It encouraged us to differentiate between sensation and idea as its copy. With Herbart this distinction loses its force. There is only one initial element, which is generated by the soul due to its inherent desire for self-preservation (as opposed to external disturbances). Representations are acts of the soul that arise even before the subject’s self-consciousness awakens. They accumulate in ever-increasing richness, forming an individual experience. A representation not only has some content (in this case it would coincide with Locke’s “idea” or Condillac’s “sensation”), but it is also an “energy” (force) quantity.
Based on this premise, Herbart develops the doctrine of “statics and dynamics of ideas.” The ideas must be either completely or partially opposite to each other. As a result, they are mutually delayed. A relationship of conflict and confrontation develops between them. They crowd each other, strive to stay in the “living space” of consciousness and not be pushed beyond its boundaries into the area of the unconscious. The psychodynamics of ideas is expressed in their opposition (when one displaces the other), similarity (leading to fusion) and complication (unification, in which their separateness is preserved).
Herbart returns to Leibniz’s category of the “unconscious” and, accordingly, to the idea of gradation of ideas, their dynamics. But Leibniz understood the monad as the essence in which the Universe is reflected, while Herbart’s idea is the phenomenon of the individual soul, that is, a phenomenon that is exhausted by what is given to the subject as such. Although Herbart assumed that for these phenomena the attribute of awareness is not indispensable, he was united with other associationists of a phenomenological orientation by an understanding of the nature of the psyche. After all, his unconscious idea is no different from the conscious one, except that it is not perceived by the subject at the moment. It does not possess any other meaningful features compared to what is given introspectively.
In idealistic associationism, the phenomena of consciousness were considered to interact according to laws that do not depend on anything external, that is, neither on the real connection of objects, nor on physiological connections. This is also Herbart’s view. His “statics and dynamics of ideas” determines itself, as if we are talking about the interaction of real physical bodies.
The volume of consciousness, according to Herbart, does not coincide with the volume of attention. The latter is apperception. The stock of ideas, by the force of which a given content is predominantly retained, was called by him the “apperceptive mass.” In Kant, along with the empirical, transcendental apperception appears, which structures sensory content through forms and categories that are independent of experience, but make experience possible. Herbart speaks of "apperceptive mass." Kant's transcendental apperception is primordial. On the contrary, the “apperceptive mass”, consisting of representations, each of which is acquired in individual experience, can be formed, “programmed” by the educator. In the concept of “apperceptive mass” the achievements of advanced pedagogy (Herbart directly studied the experience of Pestalotia) were reflected one-sidedly. Pedagogy was based on the primacy of the child’s sensory-effective contacts with the world.
Inspired by the desire to bring into psychology “something similar to the research of the natural sciences,” Herbart puts forward the hypothesis that representations as force quantities can be subjected to quantitative analysis. At one time, Kant argued that psychology is deprived of the opportunity to become an exact science due to the inapplicability of mathematical methods to it, since these methods require at least two variables, while the phenomena of consciousness change only in time. Herbart lifted Kant's veto. He proceeded from the fact that every idea has intensity (subjectively perceived as clarity) and each has a tendency towards self-preservation. By interacting, they have an inhibitory effect on each other, which can be calculated.
Despite all the fantastic nature of Herbart's mathematical research, his thesis about the fundamental possibility of mathematical analysis of the relationships between mental facts was taken up by Fechner in his works on psychophysics and by Ebbinhaus in the study of mnemonic processes. As Boring notes, Herbart supplied Fechner with the concept of threshold, which he himself received from Leibniz (3, 35). There were, however, not only similarities, but also significant differences between Herbart's and Fechner's ideas about the threshold, as well as between the meaning of the calculations that the two researchers made. Herbart set the task: to calculate how strong an idea must be in order to stay on the threshold of consciousness with two or more even stronger ideas. Fechner did not calculate the relationship between ideas as forces, but the relationship between physical stimuli and the simplest facts of consciousness - sensations. This determined the real value of Fechner's contribution to experimental psychology. A number of other concepts developed by Herbart, in particular the concepts of apperception and complication, were also used (in a transformed form) by psychologists of the subsequent era, especially the school of Wundt.
Herbart's influence does not stop there. The question of whether Freud did not follow Herbart’s ideas expressed 70 years before him has long been discussed in the literature. The concepts of the unconscious psyche, of repression, of conflicts, of combinations of ideas (complexes), although unconscious, are nevertheless capable of influencing processes for which the individual is able to give himself an account - all this can indeed be considered as evidence of Herbart’s influence to Freud, who was undoubtedly familiar with the Herbartian system.
The associative direction, including the adjacent concepts of Herbart and Beneke, emerged in the first half of the last century as aphysiological. In this way, it differed significantly from the associationism of the 17th-18th centuries, the pathos of which was to explain the connection and replacement of mental phenomena with the objective dynamics of bodily processes, understood first according to the type of mechanics, then acoustics.
Speculativeness, incompatibility with empiricism of ideas about the physiological mechanism of associations, combined with the desire to understand the uniqueness of the processes characteristic of mental life in its difference from purely bodily life, led to the doctrine of association as an immanent principle of consciousness. The idea of psychic causation took hold. Consciousness turned out to be the cause of itself. This is how it appears both in T. Brown, James Mill, and Beneke.
At the same time, in the concepts of aphysiological associationism (and Herbartianism, which is close to it), with all their limitations and weaknesses, the problem of special patterns of mental activity that are not identical to physiological ones emerged. If such a problem had not arisen, the idea of constructing psychology as an independent science would not have appeared, because a body of such knowledge, the objects of which do not have their own laws of existence and development, cannot lay claim to the role of a separate science. Aphysiological associationism raised the question of these laws, after which only their search became possible. But contrary to the ideas of those. who believed that the originality of the mental is revealed only in its opposition to the acts of bodily life, real progress in understanding the uniqueness of mental phenomena in comparison with physiological ones occurred where psychological problems were solved on a natural scientific basis using physiological methods and relying on biological models.
