Chapter 16

Freud, Jung, Augustinavichute and Others

The Problem of Personality Structure: Differences and Continuity. Who Defines Ego, Superego and Id, and How

For he who looks through a crack sees much while remaining unnoticed. — From the notes of the unborn one

Freud was a great scientist who opened up a new way of thinking in medicine, psychology, sociology and art. In connection with Freud’s discoveries one may speak of a revolution in psychology. According to one classification of scientific revolutions [14], this was a revolution of the first kind. Revolutions of that kind are bound up with the discovery of a common cause standing behind the empirical phenomenology that a particular science has accumulated. This type of revolution in science may also be designated as the uncovering of an essence behind the outward motley of phenomena. Such, for example, were the discoveries of Copernicus and Mendeleev. After Copernicus it became possible to explain the visible motions of the planets from a single point of view, and Mendeleev brought the visible motley of the chemical elements to a common denominator. Behind the motley picture of mental disorders Freud discovered a single mechanism.

When Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious into scientific circulation, he raised his hand against the holy of holies of experimental science, which demands that the object of scientific cognition be unambiguously fixed in an experiment. But no — Freud raised no hand against anything; it merely appeared so to a certain portion of psychologists, undoubtedly very intelligent people, but dogmatic and rigid. Freud was simply generalizing the empirical material available to him by the methodological means he commanded.

There exist several levels of empirical identification in scientific research. Each of them has its own limitations and possibilities. The level Freud worked with — clinical observation — of course differs greatly from the level at which I. P. Pavlov or B. F. Skinner worked: the controlled laboratory experiment. And therefore their degree of demonstrative force is very different. In any case, empirical data represent merely a series of sensorily fixed facts, on the basis of which, with the help of intuitively performed induction, we can discover factors (concepts) of a higher order that are not sensorily perceived. Such concepts belong to the domain of intuition and logic. By that same intuitive-logical method we can also discover concepts of a still higher order.

There is no other way.

Only, alas, the results obtained through intuitive-logical effort are far from unambiguous. The whole history of science testifies to this.

If one takes into account the ambiguity of intuitive-logical results, then in the story of Freud everything falls into place. Everything he discovered is by no means absolute truth, as Freud and his loyal supporters possibly thought. But nonetheless what he discovered is truth, albeit relative truth. One can begin from it, one can work with it, one can develop, deepen and transform it. One can criticize it — and here hunters have been beyond counting.

So what, then, is Freud’s truth? And what exactly is relative in it?

It was not Freud who discovered the unconscious, but he managed, despite the resistance of orthodox science, to defend it, to introduce it into scientific circulation, to fill this concept with a rich and complex content that his predecessors had not had — and, besides that, he found a successful clinical embodiment for it, creating psychoanalysis. The truth of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that it helped people to be cured of certain mental disorders. And it still helps today. True, there is also another truth of psychoanalysis. It consists in the fact that psychoanalysis became a stable instrument of large earnings for psychoanalysts, and this guaranteed it loyal supporters and defenders. And regardless of whether Freud’s theories are true or not, the clinical instrument he created copes effectively with practical tasks. However, the effectiveness of a practice resting on one theory or another is not proof of the truth of that theory.

A theory in such a case can serve only as a generalized description of the technology for achieving a practical result, resting on more or less plausible constructs. Such constructs are partial or deformed projections of an archetype, and therefore carry part of its semantic field and turn out to be effective within particular techniques. Although other constructs can be used to achieve a similar result. The fine details of the process may then differ, but the visible end result — the cure of the patient — will be very similar. And here the primitive construct explaining illness by the entry of an evil spirit was not one bit worse. Therefore one need not be surprised if psychotherapists are found who will treat neuroses using shamanic dances and a tambourine.

Although other psychologists and psychotherapists have found a multitude of other psychotherapeutic techniques, often, in a certain sense, more effective, much of what Freud did will forever remain valuable, though with reservations.

Freud possessed a keen methodological instinct, and this is one of the reasons why he was dissatisfied with the state of the psychology of his day. He raised sharply the question of the need for its theoretical formulation. In this connection, Freud’s statement is telling: “A psychology which is unable to explain dreams is likewise useless for the interpretation of normal mental activity and generally has no right to be called a science.” In order for psychology to be able to turn into a science, it was necessary to move from the descriptive level to the explanatory one, which Freud aptly designated as metapsychology. True, subsequent psychologists did not preserve this term.

The core of Freudian metapsychology became the concept of the structure of personality and the notion of an energetic substrate of mental processes, for which Freud chose libido — a category in which he generalized his ideas about sexual energy, extending the shade of sexuality to the satisfaction of any needs whatsoever.

Now it only remained to track the evolutions of libido within a concrete mental structure and to draw the corresponding conclusions. On this Freud built his typology of personality. Freud’s approach to describing personality is classified in psychology as psychodynamic.

For all his genius, Freud was a man of his time and was limited by the level of scientific knowledge, by the philosophical convictions of the nineteenth century, and by the methodological attitudes of the medicine of his day. The key idea with which all of Freud’s theoretical constructions are connected was that at the basis of all mental phenomena — and above all pathological ones — lies the biological structure of the organism. And all the theoretical concepts he built rested upon this idea and confirmed it. The stages of the formation of the psyche — oral, anal, phallic and genital — are set anatomically, and upon them, as the great psychoanalyst believed, neither environment nor culture has almost any influence, and nothing here can be changed. From this stems Freud’s deep pessimism regarding human nature.

Even the famous Oedipus complex — the struggle of the son with the father for the mother — is, according to Freud, biologically set and predetermined from birth. And the existence of instinctual drives, located at the junction of organic and mental processes, only confirmed Freud’s conviction of the organic origin of mental phenomenology. In particular, Freud without a shadow of doubt extended all the results he obtained on a limited sample of the Austrians of his day to all of humanity, since in his time comparative anthropology, which carries information about deep differences between cultures, was still in its formative stage, and it was accepted by default that the psychological organization of all people is identical. And although this aspect of Freud’s position was subjected, apparently justly, to criticism, such criticism rested only on superficial discrepancies between Freud’s ideas and further developments in the field of culture — which, generally speaking, could have been corrected without any particular difficulty. Let the Oedipus complex be realized differently among different peoples, but it is realized nonetheless. It is interesting to note that a similar motif is encountered in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the part where it speaks of the new, inevitable rebirth of a soul that has failed to overcome the temptations of illusion. Here the one who is to be born a boy experiences attraction toward his future mother and hatred toward his father. In the case of a girl everything is the reverse. In that case the soul being drawn into the womb experiences attraction toward its future father and hatred toward the mother.

The biological component in Freud’s methodology was so strong that in his theories he even derived many elements of culture from biology. Freud’s critics, as an alternative to his biologism, put forward social causes for the formation of human behaviour, and it would seem hard to object to this, but Freud stubbornly held to his position. And even now one cannot categorically say that he was absolutely wrong. A biological component in the development of mental phenomena does exist, although it cannot explain everything.

Considerably later, already after his death, convincing confirmations were found that there exists a powerful biological component which to a significant degree determines the structure, plan and content of individual behaviour. Now it can be said with full confidence that a human being represents a neurohumoral automaton whose states are determined practically one hundred percent by the concentration of one hormone or another in the blood. And mental differences, for instance between man and woman, are determined above all by the fact that the dominant hormone in a man is testosterone, and in a woman estrogen and progesterone [19]. An elevated content of testosterone in a man’s blood determines not only the anatomical and physiological features of his body’s build — for example, more powerful and dense muscle mass — but also mental and psychological parameters: heightened aggressiveness, high persistence in achieving a goal, orientation toward technological values, a higher pain threshold compared with women, and even such an apparently wholly intellectual characteristic as the ability to establish quickly a correspondence between graphic schemes, such as geographical maps and technical drawings, and the objects corresponding to them.

It is precisely testosterone that provides a man’s heightened aggressiveness and ambition and his striving for self-realization, including in offspring — which at a young age, that is, with excessive quantities of testosterone in the blood, may be expressed in such extreme impulses as the desire to perform a significant deed, and this may manifest itself even as a readiness for self-sacrifice. Under the influence of testosterone is formed the component of male behaviour connected with the role of provider and defender, and also — however strange it may seem — such a feature of male perception as a specific narrowing of the visual field together with good spatial orientation.

On the other hand, the elevated concentration of estrogen in women’s blood, compared with men, determines their greater emotional sensitivity and the attitude inherent in them toward the harmonization of relations. It is mainly under the influence of estrogen and progesterone that characteristic female behaviour is formed — care for offspring and for the hearth. And, however strange it may seem, in connection with the same hormonal complex there is also formed such a feature of female perception as an increased angle of view compared with the male, but with somewhat reduced capacity for spatial orientation. The attitude of preventively guarding the “nest” is supported by such anatomical features as the relative elongation of the female neck and the relatively increased openness of the eyes. And these are precisely part of those features of the female body which subconsciously evoke a man’s acute attraction to a woman.

The estrogen cycle in a woman’s organism coincides with the lunar month, and a woman’s mood changes over approximately this period (there is a small percentage of individual variation) depending on the concentration of estrogen in her blood. In the menstrual period the concentration of estrogen falls sharply, and a woman may experience depression, sometimes very severe, with a syndrome of loss of interest in life. However, as soon as the estrogen level is restored, an optimistic disposition and a subjective sense of well-being return [15]. An increased quantity of estrogen in a woman’s blood has a calming effect on a man in her vicinity, neutralizing the searching restlessness provoked by testosterone. Men are subconsciously satisfied by this feeling of justified calm, which provides them with the relaxation that helps them restore their strength and rest. This feeling is an additional factor binding a man to a woman. On the other hand, a woman in the presence of a man with a heightened content of the testosterone that agitates him subconsciously begins to produce new portions of estrogen in order to calm and harmonize him. The direct introduction of estrogen into a man’s organism (intravenously or parenterally) is such an effective sedative that it is used in clinics and in repressive institutions to relieve over-excitation in excessively aggressive men.

Estrogen facilitates the transfer of information from short-term into long-term memory, which, when it is deficient, leads to weakened varieties of short-term retrograde amnesia at the end of menopause, or to a weakening of memory in old age — although this is not the sole cause of that phenomenon.

Another female hormone, progesterone, provides the striving to care, to nurse, to feed. The signal for an increase in the quantity of progesterone in a woman’s blood is the sight of a child. Here the releaser, that is, the unconditional biological signal, is the “infant form” [15]: a short plump little body with a characteristic ratio of the size of the head to the whole body (1:4) and proportionally large eyes. However, one may suppose that besides visual and auditory releasers perceived by a woman’s sensory system, there are also bioenergetic releasers, one of which is the vibrational signal coming from the child’s thymus gland. But it would be good to establish this in a laboratory experiment.

Let us note also that tender emotion is evoked in women by the sight of any warm-blooded young: kittens, puppies, calves, kids, piglets and even baby mice. The last I observed personally when we were harvesting maize on a collective-farm field as part of a labour assignment, and the wheel of the cart into which the maize was being thrown accidentally overturned a mouse’s nest. The young men, of course under the influence of testosterone, immediately saw in the defenceless baby mice an object of pursuit and were already ready quite mercilessly to destroy them, but the girls, at the sight of these tiny creatures, literally shrieked with pity and indignation and stood up in defence of the warm-blooded young. That visual infant releasers work automatically at the subconscious level is revealed in women’s emotional perception of rounded, soft and fluffy objects.

The appearance in a woman’s bloodstream of the neurohormone oxytocin, produced by the pituitary, leads to contraction of the smooth musculature, but predominantly of the uterus [19], and provokes in a woman the desire for physical touch.

Of course, the hormonal mechanisms of interaction between man and woman are of a considerably more complex and subtle character. But here we present these data in significantly simplified form merely as a preliminary argument in favour of the biological component that exerts an exceptional influence on the formation of the enlarged blocks of human behaviour — the point on which Freud so stubbornly insisted and which his most successful opponents so stubbornly tried to refute.

Returning to Freud’s methodological complex, one must also note the tendency toward dichotomous constructs coming down from nineteenth-century philosophy, that is, the attitude of regarding mental factors as pairs of opposites: ego and id, the instincts of life and death — respectively Eros and Thanatos — men and women. These are not simply pairs but rigidly opposed groups standing in opposition to one another. From a positivist point of view, such constructs are assessed as a priori and are considered a manifestation of metaphysical tendencies. However, a rigid methodological attitude of that sort itself smacks of metaphysics, since opposing principles may really be present in a real object, and these may indeed be brought out in the intellectual processing of empirical material. As a rule, an object permits various groupings of the parameters discovered in experiment — this is one of the reasons for the difference between scientific schools. However, in some cases a polar grouping of an object’s parameters may turn out to be pragmatically convenient, and this may serve as its justification. Undoubtedly, polar constructs possess an aesthetic attractiveness, but this is merely a side effect, and it must under no circumstances become self-sufficient. In any case, the Freudian ego and id were supplemented by the superego, and the primary “metaphysical” polarity gave way to a more developed and empirically more justified construction.

In the literature on Freud one may encounter an assessment of his theoretical models as mechanistic and built by analogy with physical systems — for example, by analogy with physical forces he allowed that energies expended in one system are automatically lost to another system, so that by giving love to others you diminish self-love [5]. However, it is not entirely clear why the discovery of a causal connection in psychology, even with the use of physical analogies, should be considered something reprehensible. What is Freud being reproached with here? With an unfounded reduction of the mental and the physiological to the physical (reductionism), or with the absence of an experiment that would give a quantitative assessment of the supposed process? But if his reasonings are regarded as hypotheses, then methodologically they are entirely correct, and it is never too late to carry out the corresponding experiments which will confirm or refute the physical analogy. And if it is ever proved that biological energy exists, is capable of transformations, and that the law of conservation applies to it, then Freud’s corresponding idea will turn out to be right.

Freud needed only the truth, and he did not stop before moral prohibitions on the use of “too frank” terminology. When Freud came to the conclusion that sex is the “chief protagonist” in hysterical neurosis and shared this with his colleague-physician (J. Breuer), the latter not only did not accept his ideas but soon refused joint work solely because those ideas were based on the use of “indecent” concepts.

Even such loyal followers of his as Abraham and Ferenczi, not to mention Jung and Adler, from time to time attempted to introduce corrections into what they considered Freud’s excessive emphasis on the sexual causes of neurosis and his non-recognition of other possible factors.

Many of Freud’s reasonings about the primitive roots of contemporary society captivate by their logical coherence and therefore may seem quite convincing to the non-specialist; but the woman psychologist famous among non-specialists for her books on the social origin of neuroses — the American of German extraction Karen Horney [11] — assessing Freud’s sociological works from a methodological point of view, finds them “mechanistic-evolutionist.” And it turns out that the evolutionist moment, in itself positive, masks the mechanicism, misleading the unprepared reader. However, it can now be said that although Freud was not one hundred percent right, still, first, in his sociological constructions he reflected the evolutionist component, and second, as we now understand, a biological-mechanistic component in the evolution of a social object is after all present. It is another matter that it must be methodologically correctly isolated, and that its wholesale denial likewise leads to defective theories.

Probably the brilliant scientist Sigmund Freud had sufficient grounds to consider that the cause of attachment and love is hatred, and that hatred is more ancient than all other emotions; but his pessimism regarding human nature is entirely understandable if one recalls that he lived in Austria in an atmosphere of rabid antisemitism, and that he had to suffer a great deal from nationalistically motivated human hatred and baseness.

Freud constantly sought more precise expressions of his ideas and did not stop before revising solutions found earlier. An illustration of the dynamics of Freud’s views may be provided by the case of his theory of the origin of neuroses. His first insight was the idea that neuroses are caused by repressed memories of sexual seduction in childhood, as a result of which an energetic clot forms in the child’s psyche, something like a splinter — nowadays one might speak of an informational-energetic complex. It was precisely the constant action of such a complex that became the cause of neurosis. Freud’s clinical experience showed that one can be rid of this complex by discharging it, by abreacting the emotions connected with it. In this connection the question arose why the memory was repressed into the unconscious and what the mechanism of this repression is; but what matters is that such a property of the psyche was discovered. To this one may add that Freud considered the repressed memory to be sufficiently isolated, and its neurotic projections to manifest themselves only in special cases. From a methodological point of view it is important here to take into account that at that time neurosis was not yet considered an integral response of the whole personality but was regarded as a local effect.

However, when numerous cases of neurosis began to appear in which clients’ reports of sexual violence or seduction did not correspond to reality (that is, the patient was either lying or fantasizing during the psychoanalytic session), the theory described above began to be criticized as untenable. Freud then changes the contours of the theory of neurosis (though of course this was not a theory but only a hypothesis), making an elegant intellectual move: he proposes to regard lies, fantasies, slips of the tongue and other signals coming from the subconscious as specifically motivated, since all effects in our world have their causes. As such causes he puts forward infantile sexuality, which fitted entirely within the framework of clinical concepts, and a rather strange and, one might say, metaphysical construction which he called the Oedipus complex. Incidentally, one may suppose that, possessing literary talent, he invented a beautiful mythological metaphor for a construct that could have been framed differently.

For the sake of completeness, let us note that the Greek myth of King Oedipus is part of a mythological trilogy whose main idea was in no way connected with parricide and incest — these were no more than plot circumstances. The meaning of the trilogy lies in the inevitability of the fate described by the prophecy, however absurd it may seem.

Be that as it may, Freud’s theory of neurosis acquires a new form. It is postulated that the initial sexuality, as the child grows, undergoes a series of transformations, passing through the oral, anal and genital stages. Here it must be noted that this part of the theory of neurosis was in fact prepared by Abraham, who before taking up psychology had been an embryologist, and in whose methodological complex the ideas of development and of passing through stages in succession were present.

One can imagine how Freud arrived at the idea of libido. For him personally the choice was small, because his methodological complex contained an attitude toward biologism and biological causality — although, as the further development of psychology showed, quite a number of causes can be proposed as the basis for the development of neurosis. For example, Freud might have chosen the instinct of self-preservation as such a cause. However, the emotional tension in the realization of this instinct is considerably lower than in the realization of the instinct for the preservation of the species; and so Freud generalizes sexual energy, replacing it with the concept of libido, and subsequently extends it to any sensations of pleasure — defecation, urination, eating, listening to music, contemplating works of art, poetic, scientific and technical creativity, the exercise of acts of power, and so on. It should still be noted that the greater part of the theory of libido was developed not by Freud but by his pupil Karl Abraham.

Of course, one cannot immediately think what could be objected here and how everything might have been otherwise, when Freud draws your attention to the fact that for the newborn infant the mouth is the primary organ of pleasure, since it is precisely through the mouth that he makes contact with his first object of desire — the mother’s breast. When the breast for some reason becomes unavailable, the infant uses some substitute, for instance sucking his finger. Later the interest in the region of the mouth is preserved in a person at any age (and how could it be otherwise! for this is a very active organ), and it can be linked with the pleasure of eating, drinking, smoking, and of course with the pleasure a person can derive from a kiss. Hence the oral — that is, the mouth-based — stage of mental development. It is followed by the anal stage, when the child learns to control the emptying of the bowel by holding the anal sphincter closed. On the particularities of the passage of these stages depends whether a person will be generous or miserly, whether he will be a rebel or whether submissiveness will be characteristic of him, what he will be like in love and hatred, how he will manifest interest and indifference toward others, whether he will be an optimist or a pessimist in his adult state. Here Freud showed convincingly how purely biological and physiological features of the individual influence the formation of his character. However, biological determinism is here set too rigidly, as though there were no other sources and causes on which a person’s mental features would depend. It is as if someone thought that the content of television broadcasts depends entirely on the construction of the television set — although, of course, there are broadcasts which some sets can receive and others cannot.

When a quite objective observation is made that an infant is more passive at the very earliest stages of development (and this is then classified as the early oral phase) and more active at the following stage (the late oral phase), it is by no means necessary at that stage to ascribe aggressiveness to the child merely because he can bite his mother’s breast with his growing teeth — does this really mean that he acts with the intention of causing pain? After all, he may do it through carelessness and/or because of discomfort in the growing teeth. But one of Freud’s most orthodox women followers, Melanie Klein, considered that aggression in a child toward the mother arises very early, is projected onto the mother, and is then “reflected back onto the child in the form of images of a malicious, voracious witch with long fangs devouring little children. But originally it was precisely the child who, during the oral phase, desired to devour his mother” [5]. Are these conclusions not too categorical? Is there a quantitative laboratory experiment that could substantiate such a theory? Or does all this bear a purely metaphysical character, that is, rest merely on the force of theoretical imagination? Yet Melanie Klein, relying on this theory, explains in detail the customs connected with cannibalism and the dismemberment of corpses. And this is impressive. Although one might also try to explain the creation of such a theory, for example, by Melanie Klein’s own projections.

Here one may single out two ideas having a direct bearing on what has been said above. One of them was always implicitly present among psychoanalysts of all directions but, as far as I know, was never formulated explicitly. This is what may be called the principle of through-action. A feature which is present, is formed, or is implanted at a lower level of animal organization manifests itself in more complex and developed forms at higher levels. And this feature may be of any nature — anatomical, physiological, mental, psychological and even biochemical: at the molecular level. Though why “even”? All biological, and not only biological, features of a human being are after all encoded in the DNA molecule! Be that as it may, in homeopathy we encounter cases where, for example, features of the substitution of calcium by strontium in the bones manifest themselves in a lowered aggressiveness of the individual and an increased readiness for compromise. Moreover, as a hypothesis, one could reformulate the principle of through-action in terms of information coding: a feature present, formed or implanted at a lower level of animal organization is a generalized informational code of more complex and developed forms, features and parameters of personality at higher levels.

As an example, I will cite here a couplet which I discovered in an abandoned lecture notebook of a first-year woman student: “Let those weep for whom we were not meant. Let those drop dead who did not want us.” I do not undertake to judge the quality of the poetry here, but I see in this couplet a verbal expression of the action of the neurohormone oxytocin, under whose action there occurs a contraction of the smooth musculature and, above all, of the musculature of the uterus.

Adler, for instance, said that “any habit of a person that attracts attention can be traced back to its sources in childhood. In childhood are formed and laid down a person’s future manners of behaviour, bearing the imprint of the environment” [8]. In Otto Rank this principle is applied to the influence of birth trauma on the formation of character. Later this idea was used by S. Grof in describing the four basic perinatal matrices (BPM). Let us note also that this idea was very successfully developed in application to socionics by the talented scientist, the Kyiv socionist A. V. Bukalov. He established a correspondence between the semantic fields of each of the four BPM and what in socionics is called quadra values. Of course, such constructions represent only hypotheses, but they are a theme for the preparation of a laboratory experiment.

The second idea connected with the material discussed above could be formulated as the existence, within the system of the human personality, of a “hardware level” represented by anatomy and physiology. However banal and tautological it may sound, it is a truth that only a human being with his anatomy and physiology, with his biological foundation, is capable of demonstrating human behaviour. Of course, one must not forget that the concrete filling of “hardware-supported” forms of behaviour — meanings, goals, strategies and tactical means — is determined by concrete social circumstances. On the other hand, under one and the same social circumstances different people’s various forms of behaviour will have individual peculiarities, not only in connection with some chance circumstances (which is not excluded) but above all because they have differences at the “hardware level.” Let us specify that by the hardware level we here understand the anatomical, physiological and mental substrates of psychological processes and generally of the whole of psychological phenomenology, which is somehow encoded upon these substrates, in the way that, for example, according to existing scientific hypotheses, mnemic material is encoded at the neurohumoral and molecular level. Of course, even acquired immunity against infectious diseases can be regarded as molecular memory in the form of the corresponding antibodies.

Be that as it may, Freud came to the conclusion that the cause of neurosis is traumatic experiences repressed from consciousness which lie in the depths of the unconscious. Traumatic experiences arise as a result of an incorrect passage through the stages of mental development. These stages have a biological basis represented by the anatomical structure and physiological functioning of the human organism. It now became possible to abandon the treatment of neuroses by means of directive hypnosis, and Freud created a new technique which he called psychoanalysis. It is important to bear in mind that psychoanalysis as a method of treating neuroses may, in comparison with directive hypnosis, be considered more humane, since the psychoanalyst, unlike the hypnotist, presumably does not directly invade the psychosphere and occupies a more neutral position with respect to the client. However, the processes of transference and countertransference in psychoanalysis make this assumption less categorical.

One may also suppose that the rejection of directive hypnosis and Freud’s creation of the psychoanalytic technique is directly connected with the socionic type of the great scientist. I share the opinion of some socionists that Freud was a Don Quixote (Il) [ILE], though I still propose to treat this as a hypothesis. In that case the features of the psychoanalytic technique are explained by the inadmissibility, from the point of view of this TIM, of crude interference in the inner world of another person. This is one of the interpretations of the semantics of introverted ethics, which in the Don Quixote model constitutes the content of the fourth function.

In accordance with the psychoanalytic technique, the client, over numerous sessions, lying on a couch and not seeing the psychoanalyst who sits at the head of it, produces free associations connected with memories of the past. The physician sits at the head and in a neutral manner encourages the client to work independently with his memories. At the moment when an association coincides with a traumatic experience in the past, the blocked emotions are channelled, the source of the neurosis is discharged and turns out to be neutralized. The path was prepared for the triumphal march of psychoanalysis, but ahead lay fascist terror and heavy personal trials.

Freud’s numerous and even very talented critics made him many reproaches and proposed alternative explanations of the development of neurosis and the formation of character, but unfortunately the constructions of some of them, often artistically vivid and convincing for non-professionals, were indebted to a critical stance and theoretical imagination and were not carried through to a quantitative experiment.

For the sake of completeness of exposition and for fairness, we have examined above certain aspects of Freud’s scientific work; but from the point of view of socionics, what interests us more here are Freud’s approaches to the structure and formation of personality. He was the first to speak of a structure of personality and outlined the supporting elements of this structure: ego, id, superego. These concepts were never clear-cut in his work. He introduced them, developed them, refined them. And they were, of course, objects of criticism by his opponents as well.

Why did Freud use Latinized terms rather than the corresponding words of the German language? After all, contemporary psychology in its Russian variant, alongside “ego,” also uses the term “I.” And the translation of the title of one of Freud’s most famous books, Ego et Id, sounds as “I and It.” So are “I” and “ego” one and the same and therefore interchangeable in any text as full synonyms, or is the replacement of the term “ego” in the original by “I” in translation merely an admissible translator’s metaphor? Let us note also that Freud’s contemporary, the psychologist Groddeck, used the German equivalent das Es to designate the unconscious, which means precisely “it.” So it appears that the common-language “it” and the Latinized “it” have the same semantic volume, whereas “I” and “ego” have certain differences.

Apparently, at first Freud understood the ego simply as everything accessible to consciousness and opposed to the unconscious, which he immediately designated as the id; but later more complex notions appeared in his work. The ego acquired subconscious components, and the boundary between ego and id became considerably less definite. Let us note only that Freud from the very beginning did not identify the ego with the personality, since the “it” was also part of the structure of the personality; and it was not for nothing that he chose the Latin term instead of the existing German one. Latin here was a natural equivalent of scientific status. Besides, as a term, “ego” was perceived more unambiguously than “I,” since the concept of the I in different contexts may be identified with the concept of the personality as a whole.

Glover, one of the researchers of Freud’s work, notes [2] that “further research convinced Freud that the unconscious consists not only of primitive drives and their repressed derivatives, and also that a considerable part of the ego itself, including those of its elements responsible for repression, is itself unconscious in both the descriptive and the dynamic sense of the word.”

Let us note that at first, in Freud, the ego simply stood opposed to the id as the conscious to the unconscious. These two categories appeared as an inductive result in connection with the clinical facts known to Freud and with his methodological attitudes. Perhaps someone does not wish to consider these facts an equivalent of experiment — they are not framed in accordance with the presumed standard; but after all, in the end, this can be done retroactively, treating all of Freud’s constructions as hypothesis rather than ascribing to them the status of metaphysical metaphors, that is, of something entirely a priori.

What passions boiled in connection with the development of psychoanalysis may be judged from the following quotation from Glover [2]: “Freud’s excursion into the field of research on phylogenesis did not affect the integral structure of his metapsychology. It likewise entirely fails to correspond to the truth to assert that, having formulated the conception of the id, Freud laid the foundation for a rapprochement with Jung’s systems. On the contrary, the conception of the id to an enormous degree strengthened the Freudian theory of the structure of the mental apparatus and led to the elaboration of ego psychology, within whose framework the complications of mental development in the early period of life could be adequately represented.” Here it is also noticeable how far the thinking of the leading psychoanalysts was tuned to a pathological rather than a normal description of personality.

What matters is that the seemingly simple primary pair of opposing categories began to grow more complex: there appeared the concept of the superego as something which, like the id, is immersed in the unconscious and which in principle limits the freedom of the ego’s manifestations — a kind of equivalent of social control. But is the ego itself, according to Freud, not occupied with limiting the spontaneity of the unconscious in accordance with the reality principle? And it turns out that above the id there are two superstructures: the ego limits the id, and the superego limits the ego. If the ego is conscious and builds the individual’s behaviour in accordance with the reality principle, then why does it need to be limited? According to Freud, because the personality can and does come into contradiction with society, and therefore the superego is built above it as an internal equivalent of traditions, culture and morality. But are these very concepts not precisely what forms the human I? So why then do contradictions with society arise in it? Probably because of the id. But the I was formed by culture in order to limit the id. As a result of such reasoning a suspicion may arise that the superego is after all a part of the ego, but an unconscious part. So is the superego not the ego at all, or is it nonetheless an agency of the ego itself, one of its components? According to Freud, these must be different parts of the structure of personality. And then one more question: are these structures present in the mental substrate from birth, or do they develop as a result of the educative and enculturating influence of society?

Let us try to assess how Freud understood the three levels of the structure of personality he had identified. The id is the primordial, uncontrolled mass of impulses and instincts lying outside consciousness. This primary chaos has an extra-personal nature. It is directly connected with the somatic and with instinctual needs, lending them “mental expression,” but it is unknown, as Freud said, “in what substrate this connection is realized.” In the process of the child’s development some part of this original material is set apart and turns into the ego. The ego is above all that which is accessible to consciousness. Initially Freud understood the ego as the conscious part of the personality. The ego was also understood as the self. True, it is not very clear how Freud understood the self itself. Let us assume that this word in Freud has a general scientific character, that is, that it is the capacity of the personality to be independent, the basis of its subjectivity.

The ego in Freud represents a channel along which libido realizes its energy in accordance with social norms. And where are these norms themselves located — in the ego or in the superego? A formed ego provides for decision-making. It is the agency by means of which the sublimation of primary sexual impulses is carried out. Sublimation also changes the direction of pregenital drives, directing them toward alternative goals, and the goals are chosen so as to correspond to societal standards. For example, pyromania, according to Freud, may be explained either by sadistic-destructive drives or by urethral eroticism. The latter manifests itself in the satisfaction a person may experience when he floods a fire with water — but of course this may also be urine. If a person with an inclination toward pyromania becomes a good firefighter and takes pride in the respect he enjoys in his team, then he successfully sublimates his subconscious impulses. But if he becomes a firefighter merely in order to put out fires, then it must be understood that sublimation has not taken place.

Between the ego and the id is located the mechanism of censorship, blocking the direct passage of images from the id into the ego; therefore one can learn about the content of these images only indirectly, on the basis of supposedly accidental errors, slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams and associations, which can serve as a basis for diagnosing subconscious processes. Here one may suppose that the mechanism of censorship is one of the instruments of the superego.

Let us cite the definition of the superego used by Glover [2], one of the most consistent defenders of Freud’s teaching: “the superego is that part of the unconscious structure which performs the function of reviewing all instinctual drives and, in accordance with its own standards, stimulates the unconscious ego to acts of defence whose aim is to prevent the breakthrough of derivatives of primitive drives into the systems of the preconscious or of consciousness.”

The superego, according to Freud, develops at later stages. Its purpose is to hold the individual’s behaviour within the framework of moral prohibitions. The superego may be regarded as the scientific equivalent of conscience, but to make a complete identification here would be incorrect, since the semantic fields of these concepts coincide only partially. The mature superego at the subconscious level performs the function of submission to external authority. It is held that the imperatives of the superego can reach consciousness only partially. It is precisely for this reason that a person may feel guilt in connection with an act he has committed, even though intellectually he may fully justify himself. Freud considered that in boys the superego is formed out of the Oedipus complex. The feeling of guilt associated with the superego is at first connected with fear of parental punishment, and after the interiorization of parental standards into the individual’s psyche it becomes a subconscious obligation imposed by the personality upon itself. A person’s character is formed as a result of the struggle between the external world, the id and the superego. The efforts of the superego are directed at making the impulses of the id compatible with external reality and with the moral attitudes of society. For this it has several mechanisms. For example, this may be what Freud calls “inhibition before the goal,” expressed in the sublimation of pregenital libidinal drives. As a result, “inhibition before the goal” of sadism is transformed into a striving for power and various kinds of self-realization; “inhibition before the goal” of sex is realized in the form of attachment. The sublimation of anal eroticism (“inhibition before the goal” of anal eroticism) is realized in the adult in the form of occupations with painting, sculpture or music.

Let us note at once that other psychologists criticized these ideas of Freud’s, discovering factual and logical defects in them. Thus, if, according to Freud, the social impulse is generated by the uniting of individuals hostile to one another who have experienced “inhibition before the goal” of sexual impulses, then it is unclear how sexual desire could otherwise be inhibited if not as a result of the emergence of social organization. And if social organization already existed and was the cause of the blocking of sexual impulses, then what has the role of such blocking to do with the emergence of social organization? Thus one can see here a circle in the argumentation, which of course casts a shadow on Freud’s theoretical constructions.

Considerably later in America, already after Freud’s death, Eric Berne successfully adapted Freud’s ideas about the structure of personality in the form of positions from which the personality may enter into communication with other people. Despite the analogy that suggests itself — ego = Adult, Superego = Parent, and Id = Child — perhaps there is nothing strange in the fact that Berne denied such a connection, considering that the structure he proposed was entirely independent and that he invested in his concepts a completely different meaning than Freud did. Possibly, from the point of view of strict copyright and of the criteria of novelty, this is quite correct; but still there is no doubt that the semantic fields of the categories equated above coincide to a significant degree, which is not hard to trace if one compares the authors’ definitions of the corresponding concepts.

When comparing theoretical constructs belonging to different scientific schools and paradigms, it is easy to fall into the childish disease of hasty identification of concepts. Thus many beginning socionists went through the stage in which it was “obvious” to them that the socionic Yesenin corresponds to the astrological Cancer, that Napoleon corresponds to Leo, that all Don Quixotes are cholerics, that this is yang and that is yin. Even now at socionic conferences one may hear that Gabin turns into Zhukov when he becomes excited and thereby extraverts, and so on. Therefore let us not hastily identify the constructs of two remarkable scientists, but let us try to analyse them attentively.

By Berne’s definition [6], the personal position, or ego-state (let us note that in Berne, in contrast to Freud, the ego is identified with the personality), of the Adult is characterized by realism, sober assessment of the situation, independent collection of objective information and its balanced processing. Being in this position, a person carries out work responsibly, discusses arising problems seriously with colleagues, and constructively seeks solutions to the problems that arise. The concept of Parental ego-states is a reproduction and generalization of the feelings, attitudes, behaviour and reactions of parents in their interaction with children. The Parent instructs, reproaches, punishes for misdeeds and rewards for behaviour that is good from his point of view. Being in this position, a person educates, cares, acts in the role of judge and unquestionable authority. The position of the Child is characterized by impulsiveness, spontaneity, capriciousness, curiosity, playfulness, creativity. Being in this position, a person acts spontaneously, inventively, often without thinking about the consequences of his acts. In each position there are positive and negative sides, and only with a flexible use of such positioning of one’s own behaviour does the personality achieve communicative success. In any case, Berne’s structure turned out to be very popular and found wide application in teaching people psychological skills of communication.

Comparing the structures of Freud and Berne, one may discover both common features and differences. Common to them is, for example, their tripartite character, the singling out of personal spheres generating specific attitudes and behaviour, the presence of a sphere of spontaneous impulsiveness (the id in Freud, the Child in Berne), the presence of a sphere carrying out the social normalization of behaviour (the superego in Freud, the Parent in Berne), and the presence of a sphere of the formation of decisions and adaptation to reality (the ego in Freud, the Adult in Berne). However, there are also essential differences which do not permit these two different theoretical constructs to be unambiguously identified. Freud’s construct is connected with the search for deep and, moreover, unconscious causes of the formation of personality. To substantiate his position Freud finds organic peculiarities of people and a quantitative energetic cause which, in various variations and combinations, generates the whole diversity of neurotic symptomatology and of human characters. Whereas Berne’s construct is based on a generalization of the externally observable role behaviour of people and singles out three maximally generalized roles in which the personality may act. Freud builds his construct on internal causes and biological features of the human organism, while Berne builds his on the external phenomenology of behaviour.

One might pose the question of who is closer to the truth, Freud or Berne. Then one would have to solve the philosophical problem of what truth is — a problem hitherto unsolved in philosophy. Therefore let us here take a pragmatic position, resting on the fact that both structures have found useful applications, each in its own field, and let us proceed from the assumption that the structures of Freud and Berne represent somewhat differing projections of one and the same archetype, and that this archetype received full expression in neither author. Possibly Berne could have laid claim to complete originality and theoretical independence had he not read Freud before his discovery, but no reliable information confirming this exists.

Judging by the ruthlessness with which Freud showed society and people their underside, one may suppose, using the method of psychoanalysis, that Freud subconsciously chose his terminology and built his theoretical constructs so as to take revenge on society and on people for the humiliations he had to endure from them. In order to establish this with greater reliability, one would have to lay Freud on the couch and conduct many years of psychoanalysis with him; however, he himself was against this even in his lifetime. In any case, Freud’s paradigm did not leave psychologists indifferent: some joined it with enthusiasm and did much for its development, others with no less enthusiasm criticized it and set themselves against it.

The leading direction opposing Freud’s biologism became sociologism, which gained the widest currency among American researchers and practitioners. But within the “biological” direction of psychoanalysis, too, there were deep differences in the positions of individual researchers and a multitude of fine nuances. It will be useful to dwell on some of them.

One of the first heretic-followers of Freud was Alfred Adler. Freud’s biologism suited him, but he managed to build his own paradigm of mental development. Having joined Freud, Adler from the very beginning considered himself not a pupil but a younger colleague. He was even president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but when his views became entirely incompatible with Freud’s views he left that society and founded his own Society of Free Psychoanalysis.

ADLER’S THEORY

Adler was a physician, and very early in his practice he noticed that people can be distinguished by the illnesses which predominantly afflict them: allergy sufferers, heart patients, stomach patients, kidney patients… Their outward appearance is different too, and their enthusiasms, and their life positions, and their goals of self-realization — everything is different. From the very beginning of his scientific activity he drew attention to the capacity of the human body to compensate for organic damage. In 1907 he published his research on the inferiority of the organs of the human body and its compensation [9]. This became the core of his methodological complex in psychological research. The theme of the feeling of inferiority and of the personality’s efforts directed at compensating for this inferiority became the leading one for him in the field of psychology. To him belongs the term “inferiority complex,” which relates to the mental sphere of a human being. Adler’s basic thesis: “To be a human being means to have a feeling of inferiority which constantly pushes one toward its conquest” [8]. “The striving for perfection is innate in the sense that it is a part of life, a striving or need without which life would be unthinkable” [8]. The inferiority complex is formed in a person in early childhood on the basis of the child’s weakness and dependence on adults. In itself the feeling of inferiority is a healthy basis for development, but in an attempt at overcompensation it turns into a “superiority complex,” when a person begins to exaggerate his real or imagined abilities. This generates such negative qualities as boastfulness, arrogance, conceit and the like.

It is interesting to note that Adler rarely turns to the concept of the unconscious, accepting it more by default. This may testify to the fact that for him it played a purely negative role of a universal psychological background which he used instrumentally in order to set against it the patient’s transition to awareness of his situation with its fictive goals and with its activity — motivated by reality yet illusory — that distorts his original intention.

Another basic methodological assumption of Adler’s was that the human being is a self-consistent organic wholeness. And he framed his teaching as individual psychology, where in the word “individual” the accent was placed on indivisibility, which corresponds to the literal Latin meaning of this word. Psyche and body constitute an indivisible whole. Defects of the body are projected into the parameters of mental well-being. The organism’s efforts directed at compensating for the inferiority of organs are projected into a person’s striving to overcome the psychological inferiority complex. The consistency of all manifestations of the person as a whole Adler called “life style,” but let us note that this concept was not formed in Adler at once: at first there were the concepts of “life plan” and “guiding image.” This “life plan,” as a concretization of the striving for perfection, is realized in movement in the direction of personally significant goals. This movement is the psychodynamic principle underlying the development of the personality. People choose their life goals for themselves, and therefore their fate depends on themselves. The attainment of independently set goals is precisely self-realization, which raises a person’s self-esteem. To realize oneself and to find one’s place in life are variants of one and the same concept. Adler considered that heredity and the influence of the surrounding environment are merely initial circumstances which can be overcome thanks to the creative force possessed by every person.

It is precisely creative force that makes a person a self-determining individual. Human behaviour may be explained in terms of a “struggle for power” with the aim of overcoming a feeling of mental or physical inferiority. It must be noted that the concept of “struggle for power” was borrowed by Adler from Nietzsche, who at the beginning of the twentieth century published his book entitled The Will to Power, where this concept was used in a finer and more general sense than, say, something like a political career. The will to power in the generalized sense, according to Nietzsche, is the capacity of any object to occupy its own place in the cosmos and to exert influence not only on its own surroundings but on the whole course of events in the world. Such an understanding completely changes the assessment of Adler’s position: this is not a notion of petty careerism and of quarrelsome elbowing aside of people from one’s nearest and more distant surroundings; it is a universal law of self-realization which acts as an imperative inner impulse, and which there is neither sense nor possibility in resisting.

The wholeness of a human being is not limited to his individuality alone but makes him an inalienable part of society and of humanity. This wholeness manifests itself in the feeling of community and in social interest as an innate striving to cooperate with other people.

The understanding of the human being as an indivisible whole (note this methodological attitude of the scientist!) did not permit Adler to develop the same kind of hierarchical structure of personality as Freud’s — which of course he knew well. Character, according to Adler, is a once-and-for-all formed system of attitudes which, by virtue of the wholeness of the person, is unambiguously determined by the circumstances of his life. To the circumstances of life belong the physical and physiological features of the person, the composition of the family, the birth order of the children in the family, education, social and economic position, and so on. Individual traits of character are closely interconnected and correspond to the individual life style. They are essential instruments in the process of self-realization. Adler explains the constancy of the personality throughout life by the wholeness of the personality and by the life style, which depends on the whole totality of the personality’s life circumstances. Adler considers that a person’s life problems form a unity, and that the solution of one of them contributes to the solution of the others. He even considered that in his life a person solves only one problem, and that the concrete tasks he has to face on his life path represent separate facets of this single problem. This is a very beautiful image, following from Adler’s basic notion of the unity of all sides of the human personality.

Taking into account the uniqueness of each person, Adler did not particularly strive to single out typical life styles; at the same time he insisted that one can recognize a person’s true life style only if we know what means he uses to solve life’s problems. Typical life styles, according to Adler, are only a first approximation to concrete individual styles. Adler singles out generalized life styles using two parameters: “social interest” and “degree of activity.” Social interest manifests itself in cooperation for the sake of achieving common success, while the degree of activity is the quantity of energy a person invests in his activity. Four generalized types of life style differ in their degree of social interest, activity and typical attitude.

The ruling type. Social interest minimal, energy abundant; they try only for themselves; typical attitude — superiority over others.

The getting type. Social interest absent, activity minimal; the attitude is parasitic and directed at getting as much as possible from life — the so-called “everything.”

The avoiding type. Social interest minimal, activity low; typical attitude — the avoidance of failures rather than the achievement of success.

The socially useful type. Social interest and activity high; typical attitude — work for the benefit of others.

While rating highly the humanistic foundations of Adler’s theory of personal growth, one can understand the basic sense of the typology he proposed. By showing the unattractiveness of the first three types, it orients a person toward socially useful activity. However, the list of types proposed by Adler, despite the noble intention contained in it, does not seem convincing. And the term “ruling type” is altogether misleading, since it includes, among others, criminals, hooligans and drug addicts. At the same time a false impression is created that socially useful rulers cannot exist at all.

Incidentally, it must be noted that Adler’s followers, using the concepts of activity/passivity and constructiveness/destructiveness, managed to present his typology as complete with respect to these concepts. Using this conceptual base, we likewise obtain four life styles, but with a somewhat different semantics.

Actively constructive: the personality is energetic and productive, its activity is socially useful, and the personality expects social recognition.

Passively constructive: the personality tries to be agreeable to society, but attracts attention to itself not by deeds but by its inner qualities.

Actively destructive: the personality actively sets itself against society; it is intrusive, malicious, inclined to revenge for its real and imagined misfortune, which manifests itself in conscious sabotage and the infliction of damage both on individual people and on society as a whole.

Passively destructive: the personality sets itself against society but, possibly out of laziness or lack of energy, does so passively, confining itself to malice, hatred and despair.

A comparison of the two typological series generated by Adler’s methodological position leads to the thought of their incomplete identity. The descriptive categories used in the first case give a somewhat different result than the polar constructs underlying the second series. The concept of the socially useful type only partially intersects with the concept of the actively constructive style, since, for example, a passively constructive type may also be socially useful. In the first series the first three types are presented as socially unattractive, and in the second only the last two. The comparison presented shows that the absence of logical analysis of a typology masks its hidden defects — but of course this does not diminish Adler’s real achievements.

JUNG’S THEORY

Perhaps Freud’s most powerful opponent was Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s methodological attitudes were substantially influenced by his deep acquaintance with various spiritual teachings of the East. Advocates of the experimental validation of theories of personality reproached Jung with metaphysicality, which apparently should be understood as an inclination toward advancing empirically weakly argued and hard-to-reproduce constructs.

Between Freud and Jung there existed a fundamental disagreement concerning libido. Jung understood libido as free life energy which may rush along any channel of personal activity, and he did not, like Freud, identify this energy with sexuality.

To the structure of personality proposed by Freud, Jung opposes a structure developed by himself: ego, the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious constitute the three agencies of the structure of personality according to Jung.

Unlike Freud, Jung considered that the human unconscious is not chaos represented by a “seething mass of impulses and instinctual drives” absolutely devoid of any directedness, but a fully structured sphere of the psyche. Above all, the whole unconscious part of the psyche, according to Jung, is divided into the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. Moreover, each person’s individual unconscious passes over into the collective unconscious and is a part of it. The individual unconscious is structured by complexes. The collective unconscious, however, is structured by archetypes, which represent entities not amenable to direct verbalization but exerting a substantial, if not total, influence on human behaviour. An archetype is a generalized informational complex distinguished by a high level of programme-generating activity. Projections of one and the same archetype onto the mental, psychic, psychological or social plane may have not simply different but directly opposite realizations. One of the conceptual projections of the concept of the archetype is the notion of the symbol, which in the opinion of certain thinkers (Luis Ortega) belongs not to the epistemological but to the ontological plane. This may be understood in the sense that the symbol, and after it the archetype, are present in this world as real entities and are not generated by human consciousness in situational attempts to make sense of the world.

The individual unconscious is a storehouse of repressed, suppressed or forgotten experiences. But besides this, there are located there special structural elements which Jung called complexes. These are emotionally charged units which at the subconscious and unconscious levels form a person’s behaviour. Jung considered that the material represented by complexes can be brought to awareness. It is not hard to come to the conclusion that Jung’s individual unconscious is the closest equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, but with the difference that it is more structured. Here one may speak of Jung’s further development of the Freudian concept of the unconscious — if only they had also been in agreement with each other about it.

The collective unconscious, according to Jung, contains material common to all humanity. This was the main point in the divergences between Freud and Jung. However, it is useful to note that the semantic field of Jung’s collective unconscious partially intersects with the semantic field of the Freudian superego. Like the superego, it is an agency transmitting ethnic and social norms and forms of behaviour.

The material of the collective unconscious is represented by archetypes — certain predisposing factors setting the generalized forms in which human thinking, feeling, perception and action are carried out. Thus, for example, in dealing with his own father a child perceives him not only as a concrete person but also as a bearer of power and authority who is a standard of male behaviour.

Is there a difference between the ego according to Freud and the ego according to Jung? Jung considered that the ego is fully conscious, although he himself does not always consistently maintain this line. For Jung the ego is the centre of the region of consciousness. That is, the following picture emerges. In the psyche there is a region of consciousness, and its centre, something maximally conscious, is precisely the ego. The ego, according to Jung, includes everything thanks to which we are able to identify ourselves — personal experience, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories. This is the basis of self-consciousness.

As an image this is not bad, but is it possible to single out this centre in practical work with a client? Is it possible to mark out clearly the boundaries of a concrete person’s ego? Is it possible to say precisely what exactly enters into the ego, belongs to the ego, and what does not? Besides, if in Jung one may speak of the centre of the region of consciousness, then one may also pose the question of the periphery of that region. Does the periphery of the region of consciousness differ from its centre? Is peripheral consciousness, for example, less distinct, as is the case with peripheral vision? Is there some gradient of transition from “distinct” consciousness to a less definite, blurred one, and further to its complete absence? Such questions remain unanswered, and once again we are dealing with a sufficiently amorphous entity with which one can work only on the edge of intuition. It would be useful for psychology if experimental psychologists could develop and carry out laboratory techniques capable of delimiting with maximum precision all the structural elements of the psyche, beginning with the ego. Socionics supplies for this all the necessary and adequate theoretical constructs.

Since in Jung the ego is more definitely connected with consciousness than in Freud, let us look at what Jung says about consciousness. Let us cite a number of Jung’s statements about consciousness from the Tavistock Lectures [12], where in the living flow of speech one can see how a concept difficult to develop is formed and refined. Sometimes his suppositions and conclusions bear a contradictory character. Of course, when Jung says that “consciousness is something exceedingly peculiar” [12], this is by no means a definition but rather an opening phrase for tuning the intuition and beginning a discussion. And when Jung says that consciousness “is a discontinuous phenomenon,” it is at first hard to understand what he means, since he gives no explicit definition of discontinuity. One can partly guess at Jung’s understanding of the discontinuity of consciousness from the subsequent phrase to the effect that “one fifth, one third, or even half of human life passes in an unconscious state” [12]. That is, it appears that in speaking of the discontinuity of consciousness Jung has in mind breaks in self-identification. Further he writes: “Our early childhood is unconscious. Every night we plunge into the unconscious, and only in the interval between waking and falling asleep do we have a more or less clear consciousness — for in a certain sense it is still a question how clear this consciousness is. For example, we assume that boys or girls of ten years of age must be conscious; yet this is a very unusual kind of consciousness — a consciousness which may be devoid of any awareness of one’s own ego.” From this quotation it is evident that Jung here has as yet no clear notion of what consciousness is. He is merely trying intuitively to feel out approaches to its discussion; but one cannot after all agree that boys or girls of ten years of age have no consciousness — they are not, in the end, in a faint. Thus, in speaking of consciousness, Jung apparently has in mind awareness, which represents one of the forms of reflection, that is, of intellectual control over the performance of intellectual actions. Of course, consciousness is present in awareness too, but they are not one and the same.

Confirmation of this can be seen in the following phrase from the same source [12]: “I know many cases where children suddenly come to an awareness of the fact ‘I am’ only at the age of eleven, twelve, fourteen, and even later.” Here one glimpses the idea that consciousness is awareness of one’s own existence. The concepts of consciousness and awareness are very close, since in awareness there is present the semantic moment of the directedness of consciousness upon itself, and therefore we can define awareness if we know what consciousness is, but not the other way round.

Further: “Up to that time they merely experience events, and afterwards, casting a glance into the past, they remember these events but cannot remember themselves in them. If we say ‘I,’ this does not yet mean that we have access to the experience of an integral ego. On this score we have no absolute criterion. It is quite possible that our awareness of the ego bears a fragmentary character, and that some day in the future people will know considerably more about it than we do today.” Here one may single out at once several supporting points relating to Jung’s understanding of consciousness and the ego. First, it possibly turns out that experiencing and consciousness are not one and the same, that is, to experience, according to Jung, does not mean to be aware. Second, self-identification by means of the word “I” is not identical with the functioning of the ego, and hence the semantic volumes of the concepts I and ego do not coincide. Third, Jung admits that he does not know an absolute criterion determining the difference between the use of the personal pronoun I and reference to the experience of an integral ego. Fourth — and this is very important in this context — Jung allows that our awareness of the ego bears a fragmentary character. This should indeed have followed from the discontinuity of consciousness. As for Jung’s further statement that “consciousness is like a film on the surface of the unconscious, with its unknown depths,” this is no more than a beautiful metaphor, but it could become a theme for planning an experiment.

However, in another place Jung writes: “…consciousness is characterized by a certain narrowness. At any given moment of time it is capable of working with only a limited volume of material. Everything else at that moment turns out to be unconscious. We obtain a general notion of the conscious world only from a succession of momentary states of consciousness. In consequence of this narrowness of consciousness we are not able to imagine an image of totality. It is given to us to catch only isolated signals of existence. It turns out as though we were observing everything through a crack and therefore all the time seeing only part of what is happening; all the rest is covered in darkness, and at the given moment we know nothing about it. If the field of activity of consciousness is limited to the present moment, then the expanses of the unconscious are boundless and continuous.” Here Jung indicates two further features of consciousness: its narrowness and the limited volume of material with which it is able to work. Thus consciousness, according to Jung, is discontinuous, is distinguished by narrowness and by limitation of volume; but here the impression is created that Jung is identifying consciousness with attention.

Further: “We do not know how far the power of the unconscious extends, since we generally know nothing definite about it. We say ‘the unconscious’ in order thereby to communicate something, but in fact we communicate only that we know nothing about this unconscious. We have only indirect confirmations of the fact that behind consciousness there is concealed some other sphere of mentality… Thus any conclusion or even judgement about the unconscious which I may intend to make in these lectures should be treated critically.” We are in the “creative laboratory” of the great analyst. We see the difficulties with which he has to deal in his attempt to grasp the subject of discussion. However, let us note that Jung admits the existence of various kinds of mentality — that which is connected with the conscious processing of information, with conscious thinking, and that which lies beyond its limits. But then one may admit the existence not of two but of at least several varieties of mentality. Of course, it would be appropriate here to specify how this term is to be understood. Did Jung not use it in some approximate sense? And is there at least one category of the same level which in some sense stands opposed to mentality?

The first thing that comes to mind here is the concept of vitality as pure, impulsive, spontaneous aliveness, unburdened by the problem of choice and realizing itself reflexively. And if to vitality we here set in correspondence reflexivity in the sense of reflex, then to mentality it is natural to set in correspondence reflexiveness as the capacity to reflect, to duplicate reality informationally in order to use this reflection in constructing behaviour.

However, another approach is also possible, resting on a quantitative criterion for distinguishing varieties of mentality. One may allow that there are spheres or levels of mentality differing from one another in the power of information processing. For if mentality is inherent in all people, even in imbeciles and clinical idiots, then the power with which each individual person processes information may vary greatly. And the matter here may lie not only in heightened trainedness but also in primary capacity. Types of mentality may also differ in the classes of tasks in principle accessible to a particular individual for solution. And the point here may be that quantitative differences are provided by qualitative features of the corresponding mental organs or substrates. However, to work through such a topic a corresponding laboratory experiment is necessary.

At least a third approach to the theoretical development of the problem under consideration is also possible. Since in the quotation cited above Jung might have used the term “mentality” in a metaphorical, approximate form, as an equivalent of consciousness, one might suppose that what is at issue is some qualitative features of a subject’s awareness of himself and of his situation; and then one might speak of the concept of the state of consciousness, which was not in use in the time of Jung and Freud, and of which Jung might have had an intuitive notion from sources on the spiritual teachings of Eastern schools. At the present time the concept of the state of consciousness is a subject of experimental and theoretical development in psychology.

In the concept of consciousness there are present at least two semantic moments. First, that which can be noticed and marked at once is its filling, that is, what precisely is being conscious of. Second, that elusive envelope into which this filling is immersed, but which can nevertheless be felt, noticed and made aware of in an introspective experiment if, as is done in meditation, one halts the flow of thoughts and images — which does not come easily to everyone and for which purposeful preparation may be required. Such a halt corresponds in part to the separation of consciousness from its contents.

“Consciousness is predominantly a product of perception, and also of orientation in the external world” [12]. This is a phrase difficult to make sense of. It is not very clear whether the idea contained in it is the result of an intuitive insight or is some logical reminiscence of Leibniz’s assertion that “there is nothing in consciousness that was not previously in the sensations.” If it is ever established that consciousness is, for example, one of the basic properties of the primary energy-informational field, then the phrase cited will become almost meaningless, since it may turn out that everything is precisely the reverse — that the forms of perception themselves, from the most primitive to the ever more complex, are generated by various states of consciousness. Let us also note that perception without awareness is possible, although of course awareness and consciousness are not one and the same. And besides, it is not clear why consciousness should be separated from orientation in the internal world.

Jung points out that Freud proceeds from consciousness as already given and derives the unconscious from it. This is not hard to understand in the sense that when Freud became aware of the important role of the unconscious in mental processes, he became aware of it as something opposed to consciousness, which is familiar and habitual to us; while the subconscious and the unconscious are everything that is forgotten, not accepted, suppressed, repressed from consciousness or never was in it at all. Thus for Freud consciousness is primary and the unconscious secondary. Jung himself considers that everything is precisely the reverse, and that “first, most probably, the unconscious appears, and out of it, on its basis, consciousness grows” [12]. Jung argues this conclusion by the fact that “in early childhood we are unconscious; unconscious too are our most important instinctual functions. Therefore consciousness is most likely a product of the unconscious.” Of course, all this consists of suppositions not supported by a strict laboratory experiment. However, if it turns out that consciousness is universal and at different levels of the organization of matter differs only in some quantitative criterion such as clarity, and within the limits of one level in various states, then the very opposition of consciousness and the unconscious will acquire an entirely different meaning. It is not excluded that then the unconscious may be understood as some dim, dark, closed, encoded — but still consciousness. For if the unconscious plays such an important role in a person’s life and is opposed to his ego, this by no means signifies that the personality or individuality has no relation to it at all, that it is a wholly alien, extraneous force exerting its influence without any connection with the intentions of the individuality. In the end, there exist forms of intuitive behaviour, when a person suddenly performs an unpredictable act, takes an unexpected decision, or, as if not knowing why, finds himself in the right place at the right time, and the result not merely suits the personality but gladdens and inspires it and is experienced as a victory. Moreover, it often turns out that at the decisive moment the person did not give himself a full account of his actions or acted under the influence of an immediate impulse, urge or inspiration; but in any case there is no question here of clear consciousness.

One of the best definitions of everyday consciousness possible in verbal form was given by Locke: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Here consciousness is reduced to perception. However, external perception is carried out by means of the sense organs; but by what organ — an indication of which is absent from Locke’s definition — is internal perception carried out? And if there is no such indication, then it is not clear how this perception is carried out and how such perception differs from consciousness; and thus there is contained here the logical error of substituting one unknown for another.

But still, perhaps the best definition of consciousness was given by the French mystic Paul Sédir: “Consciousness is the capacity to distinguish oneself from other objects.” Here the genus concept is capacity and the specific difference is to distinguish. But the concepts of distinguishing, differentiating, recognizing, identifying and being conscious are close to one another on the verge of synonymy. Therefore the replacement of consciousness by distinguishing is not fundamental. Nevertheless, this is a successful attempt, if not to define, then to elucidate the concept of consciousness.

In Soviet psychology an officially accepted concept of consciousness was elaborated, but it bore a social-behaviourist character and was under rigid ideological control. The Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary of 1983 and the psychological dictionary of 1992 give slightly differing but essentially identical definitions of consciousness as the highest level of mental activity of the human being as a social being (1983) and as the highest level of mental reflection and regulation, inherent only in the human being as a socio-historical being (1992). In both definitions consciousness is defined from the quantitative side as the highest form of something, and a qualitative definition is absent here. Besides, since it is accepted that consciousness is the highest level of manifestation of the mental, and consequently that there is nothing higher, this limits scientific inquiry from above. Second, both these definitions have a common defect, since the psyche in Soviet psychology was defined mechanistically as a systemic property of highly organized matter consisting in the active reflection by the subject of the objective world [1] — which does not at all exclude the presence of a psyche in, for example, computers. Well, of course, their complexity would still have to be increased somewhat, but that is not far off. Third, the definition of the psyche through reflection, and of consciousness through mental reflection, makes these concepts essentially indistinguishable, singling out consciousness only by degree as belonging to the highest level. Fourth, the inclusion of the concept of the subject in the definition of the psyche deprives the definitions of both psyche and consciousness of still more sense, since the definition of the subject as the source of cognition (a variety of reflection) or the bearer of activity introduces a hidden circle into the definition of both of the preceding concepts.

I hold the point of view that the concept of consciousness belongs to the basic meta-concepts and cannot be, and should not be, defined through concepts of a lower level, since this will yield formal, scholastic, or — in the working sense — ineffective definitions. But this concept may be discussed at an informal level in order to reach a preliminary agreement between opponents. As the history of psychology and philosophy shows, it is very difficult for different schools to come to an agreement about the meaning of this concept, if it is possible at all — despite the fact that the experience of consciousness is apparently possessed by all people. Consciousness was and remains a phenomenon of subjective experience accessible to all people, yet to this day no means have been found for the objective observation of consciousness, and what can be directly observed is merely signs of its possible existence.

Of course, one could have refrained from turning to the definitions of ideologized concepts in Soviet psychology, but what interests us here are the possible variations in the understanding of basic psychological terms in various schools.

About the behaviour of representatives of primitive peoples Jung says, in connection with the concept of consciousness, that “they escape from any, even the most insignificant, provocation of consciousness, and at the slightest thing they immediately sink into drowsiness… they hold that only a madman can think… if they think at all, they most likely do it with the stomach or the heart… in some Negro tribes you will be assured that thoughts are located in the stomach… this is explained by the fact that primitive man gives himself an account only of what troubles his liver or his belly… in other words, he is aware only of emotional thoughts” [12]. Interesting here is Jung’s use of the concept of emotional thoughts. In this concept he seems to be trying to set something in opposition to consciousness, but it appears that no opposition results, since he thereby speaks of the awareness of emotional thoughts, that is, consciousness is present in them. This concept of emotional thoughts is by no means generally accepted, and therefore it is difficult to identify unambiguously. These may be emotionally coloured phrases of internal dialogue — for example, the verbal expression of joy, gratitude, surprise, fear, curses and the like. Perhaps such production is not the highest achievement of human genius, but it is by no means necessary to deprive it of the presence of consciousness, although the level of consciousness in this case may be different from that in the case of grasping high philosophical or spiritual truths. These may also be pure emotions without verbal or mental accompaniment; but is consciousness really absent in them? These people are not, after all, in an unconscious state!

In any case, at the everyday level one can distinguish at least several states of the human psyche with which one may connect different states of consciousness. These are the state of coma, the state of deep faint, the state of dreamless sleep, the state of sleep with dreams, states of drowsiness of various degrees, states of relaxed wakefulness, states of vigilance, states of emotional and intellectual creativity, ecstatic states, various states provoked by psychedelics but which may also arise without their participation. And of course let us not forget states of various degrees of alcoholic intoxication. Can experimental confirmations be found that to all these states, or to some of them, there correspond different states of consciousness or forms of it?

The Pueblo Indians consider that they think with the heart. As Jung says, they “derive consciousness from the intensity of feelings… abstract thinking does not exist for them at all”; “…we consider that dreams and fantasies are ‘below’ consciousness, and therefore some of us speak of the sub-conscious, of things that exist beneath consciousness.” From a juxtaposition of these two quotations one may conclude that Jung allows that dreams and fantasies need not necessarily be considered as not belonging to the sphere of consciousness, although they may perhaps differ from what it is customary to call everyday consciousness.

“For us it is important that consciousness cannot be conceived outside its connection with the ego. If something has no relation to the ego, then it is not conscious. Consequently, consciousness may be defined as the relation of mental facts to the ego” [12]. Here Jung once again identifies consciousness with the experience of the ego and immediately defines consciousness through the ego as the relation of its mental facts. Here again and again one may speak of a circle in the definition — the ego is defined through consciousness, and consciousness through the ego. Besides, it is difficult to understand the expression “consciousness may be defined as the relation of mental facts to the ego.” If the logical stress here is placed on the term “relation,” then the concept of consciousness acquires some kind of mechanistic character.

Continuing the reasoning quoted above, Jung says: “And what is the ego? It is a complex formation constituted, first, by a general awareness of one’s own body, one’s own existence, and second, by the data of memory — you have a certain notion of what happened in the past, a long succession of recollections. Such are the two basic constituents of the phenomenon called the ego. Thus the ego may be called a complex of mental facts.” Here the ego is defined through awareness, which likewise, like consciousness, remains without a logical definition. But here Jung gives one more definition of the ego, as a complex of mental facts. However, from a logical point of view this is too broad a definition, since other mental formations also fall under a complex of mental facts, be it the individual or collective unconscious, the superego or the id.

“It seems to me that the ego is a kind of complex, undoubtedly the closest and dearest to us. It is always at the centre of our attention and of all our thoughts; it is the centre of consciousness, which cannot be dispensed with: when the ego is destroyed (for example, in the case of schizophrenia) the individual loses his system of coordinates; the centre has disintegrated, and some mental constituents now belong to one fragment of the ego, others to another. Therefore in a schizophrenic one observes a rapid transition, as it were, from one personality to another.” Commenting on this fragment, I should like to note the following. First, Jung is not categorical in his reasoning — he says: “It seems to me…” Second, he designates the ego as a complex, that is, from a logical point of view he indicates the nearest genus of the corresponding concept, and then singles out the most important characteristic of the ego as the complex closest and dearest to us. Although this characterization is made in an emotional rather than a logical style, nevertheless there is in it a quantitative moment as well. It is expressed by the words “closest” (minimal distance) and “dearest” (maximal valuation), that is, the ego may be understood as the function of ultimate self-identification. Here, by the criterion of self-identification, there is a functional extremum. Besides, this may be an indirect indication of the maximal energetic provision of the ego function. And finally, Jung quite definitely designates the ego as the centre of consciousness and speaks briefly of what happens if the centre of the personality disintegrates. Such an identification of ego and consciousness is, of course, logically untenable. One might say, as in socionics, that the ego is the most conscious part of the personality, but that is not the same as the centre of consciousness. However, it is not excluded that we are dealing here with an imprecise translation from the German, where to be at the centre of attention and to be made aware of might mean one and the same; but I have no possibility of checking this against the primary source.

Comparing the constructs of Freud and Jung, one might once again pose the question of scientific truth. Are their approaches so different that they cannot be brought to a common denominator? Is there any necessity to seek this common denominator? Can everything here be reduced merely to the experimental verification of the theories of Freud and Jung? Is it not simpler to hold to an eclectic position, using both theories as the case requires? Or can the existing state of affairs be justified by a pluralism of opinions, adding that this is currently very fashionable?

In the theory of science a useful concept of complementarity has been worked out, describing one of the variants of the connection between two theories of one and the same object. This concept is used to characterize the relation of two theories when the preceding theory turns out to be a particular case of the new, more developed theory. Is not the connection between certain fragments of the theories of Freud and Jung of this kind? What interests us here in the first place is what concerns the structure of personality. The topology and the semantic foundations of both structures either coincide or are very close. In Jung the unconscious sphere is structured in more detail as compared with Freud. However, Freud did not agree with the very concept of the collective unconscious, opposing to it the concept of the superego. If the concept of the collective unconscious could be identified in an experiment, then part of the problems in the opposition of Freud’s and Jung’s positions would be solved, since the superego would turn out to be a partial function of the collective unconscious. Of course, this is not enough to remove all the contradictions between the views of the two great psychologists, but it could become the first step in constructing a generalizing theory.

Besides, it is by no means necessary to represent the collective unconscious as an enormous mental space including within itself all individual unconsciouses as its fragments, although such an image could well be developed into a full-fledged theoretical construct. Here again it will be appropriate to note that contemporary psychology is knocking at the doors of the field paradigm, but the laboratory base is as yet not ready for this.

However, let us see how Jung develops the theme of the structure of personality. Let us leave aside for the time being his concepts of the persona, the anima, the shadow and others, and concentrate on what he designated as the mental functions.

“In consciousness we can distinguish several functions” [12]. After the analysis of the concept of consciousness carried out above, it is not hard to see that here this term is used with a homonymic shift toward the concepts of the psyche and the ego. Besides, in introducing the concept of function he does not specify it but uses it as a general scientific and self-evident one.

Further Jung says that “…consciousness may be oriented either toward ectopsychic or toward endopsychic facts. By the ectopsyche I understand the relation between the contents of consciousness and data arriving from without. This is the system of orientation connecting a person with external facts given to him by means of sensations. On the other hand, the endopsyche is the system of relations between the contents of consciousness and the unconscious processes postulated above.” Thus he introduces one more structural opposition — the ectopsyche and the endopsyche. These two mental zones or agencies may be regarded as certain equivalents of conscious and unconscious processes. From the point of view of contemporary psychophysiological notions [Pribram, Languages of the Brain], these two zones may use different informational codes corresponding to conscious and unconscious mental processes; and besides that, presumably, there exist informational processes in physiological substrates whose codes may differ in principle from those present in verbal and pictorial acts. In that case there is nothing surprising in the fact that extensive zones of the psyche turn out to be inaccessible to consciousness. This is one of the themes requiring experimental development.

Further Jung consistently introduces the mental functions, undoubtedly considering that this sequence is ordered. First in this series stand sensations, or, as it is now customary to call them more generally, sensorics. These are the data of the sense organs, this is the empirical material for the remaining functions. And it is understandable that this function must be the first, since without it the remaining functions have nothing to do. “Sensation tells me that something is: it does not tell me what this something is, it tells me nothing at all about this something except that it is” [12]. This is a clear and substantive elucidation of what, in essence, sensation is in its maximally generalized form.

The second function in this series Jung calls thinking. “Thinking in its simplest form informs us of what a given thing is. It gives the thing a name, applies a concept, since thinking means perception and judgement.”

As the third function Jung names the capacity to experience feelings with respect to various objects and situations, and substantively discloses its meaning: “Thanks to the tonality of feeling we learn about the value of a thing… Without a definite feeling reaction it is impossible to perceive a single phenomenon.” Further Jung makes a statement paradoxical for his time, saying that “feeling, like thinking, is a rational function,” and this is one of the manifestations of his penetrating mind. He has to overcome the widespread conviction that “feeling is by no means a rational function but, on the contrary, the most irrational of all.” Jung says that from “the point of view of feeling, objects differ not only factually but also in value.” In contemporary logic this corresponds to the opposition of denotation and sense. Thus, thanks to feeling, judgements have not only denotation but also sense, which, incidentally, is not always fully perceived in written speech. “In order to obtain an integral picture of the world it is absolutely necessary to take the value aspect into account.” “To many people feelings seem irrational because they identify them with foolishness.” Jung considers feelings rational because they are an instrument for processing information received by the subject.

As the last, fourth function Jung names intuition. I should like the reader to read the corresponding passage in the Tavistock Lectures for himself [12, p. 10], since this is a remarkable example of how a thought is born. At the beginning of the corresponding passage there are no final answers, everything is only being felt out, everything is in process; and although there is no reason to doubt that Jung knows what intuition is, nevertheless his treatment of this concept does not fully coincide with the presumed general-psychological one. Summing up his reasoning about intuition in his own peculiar way, he even says: “Although I have tried to describe this function as thoroughly as possible, it seems to me that I have not succeeded.” Here is one of Jung’s perhaps somewhat clumsy but very vivid statements about the fourth function: “Intuition is the function by means of which one can see what is going on ‘around the corner,’ which is simply impossible; but someone as it were does it for you, and you trust him” [12]. And one more statement: “So, I assert that intuition is a special type of perception proceeding not directly from sensations but from the unconscious — and I go no further than that, giving myself an account of the fact that ‘I do not know how it works.’ I do not know what happens when a person knows what he cannot in principle know. I do not know how he manages it, but the fact remains — he knows and can use this knowledge.”

Thus, according to Jung, the ego of the personality is structured by four functions: sensations discover the object, thinking classifies and structures it, feeling evaluates it, and intuition discovers its meaning [13], which in this case is deciphered as possibilities and possible changes in time. Here it is appropriate to note that in socionics the concept of intuition as a generalized mental function was refined by Aushra Augustinavichute and is now understood, first, as the catching of changes in time (introverted intuition), and second, as penetration into the potential possibilities of an object (extraverted intuition).

If the structuring of the ego by mental functions generally accepted in psychology is distinguished by high reliability, then Jung’s suppositions about such substructures of personality as the persona, the anima and the shadow would be considerably more difficult to verify.

With respect to the mental functions Jung advanced the entirely obvious hypothesis that they can be controlled by the will. True, he is not very confident in this when he says: “Usually the psychological functions are controlled by the will — at least we should like this to be so, since we are frightened by everything that is done arbitrarily. If the functions are under control, they can be suppressed, subjected to selection, strengthened, proceeding from one’s intentions. However, at times they nevertheless escape control — they think for us, feel for us — and in such a way that most often we can do nothing about it. Or else they act altogether at the unconscious level, and you do not even suspect what they have got up to there…” [12]. However, if this hypothesis looks more or less plausible with respect to thinking and feeling, it is highly implausible that it is applicable to sensation and intuition. Possibly there do exist people capable of controlling their sensations and directing their intuition, but this is not of a mass character. Yet a little further Jung says: “No one is in a position to say, ‘I will not think’ — for one will have to think all the same. In exactly the same way no one has the right to say, ‘I will not experience feelings’ — one will have to feel one way or another for the reason that the specific energy inherent in this case in feeling cannot be transferred to another function of the soul.” It appears that the key to the activity of the functions is bound up precisely with this very specific energy. However, all this is no more than hypotheses, since as yet no instruments exist capable of detecting and measuring the specific energy of the mental functions. However, if this specific energy or its equivalent is reliably established, it may turn out that the question of volitional control over the functions will have an entirely different meaning.

Freud’s pioneering works gave rise to a large number of works on the study of personality, so different in their initial positions and results that, within the framework of the contemporary psychological paradigm, they can hardly be brought to any common denominator. We shall here present only a few key figures in this field in order to demonstrate the range of the researchers’ positions and the theoretical possibilities of the results they obtained.

HORNEY’S THEORY

Horney is interesting above all in that, being a woman psychoanalyst, she managed to find arguments against the Freudian — possibly subconscious — discrimination against women as defective beings on account of their lack of a penis. She wrote: “One must not take on faith the female striving in one way or another to substantiate her inferiority proceeding from the fact that she is a woman. Attention must be paid to the fact that every person belonging to a minority or to a less privileged group strives to use this status for various kinds of suggestions of inferiority…” [10].

For the theme of the present chapter it is important that Horney, as a counterweight to classical psychoanalysis, names as the generalized cause of neuroses basic anxiety, developing because of a disturbance of interpersonal relations in childhood. As a result, according to Horney, four generalized types of behaviour are possible: movement toward people (in search of help); movement against people (aggressive orientation); movement away from people (avoidance of others); and a position in which the individual flatters himself, overstating his standards and thereby withdrawing from reality.

Working with the neurotic personality, K. Horney developed a way of describing the neurotic’s behaviour in terms of claims, shoulds and defence mechanisms. As the basic neurotic symptoms Horney considered: 1) inconsistency and indecisiveness of behaviour; 2) emphasized hopelessness; 3) fear of change; 4) constant insistence on one’s own rightness (as a defence against internal conflicts); 5) shyness and timidity; 6) vindictiveness or sadism in behaviour; 7) considerable fatigue (as a result of the expenditure of energy on internal conflicts) [cited from 18].

From the point of view of socionics, what is interesting in Horney’s work is the presence of elements with the semantics of the socionic SUPERID, that is, of functional relations in which demands upon the external world, and among other things upon society, are expressed. If this is confirmed, then it will be possible to consider that the socionic model can be effectively used to describe not only the healthy person but the neurotic personality as well. If one singles out and specifies more precisely the structural element of the psyche with which Horney worked without naming it, explicitly setting herself in opposition to Freud, then it will be possible to supplement the tripartite structure of personality developed by Freud with a fourth structural element, which is not hard to correlate with the SUPERID¹ of socionics.

MURRAY’S THEORY

Here Freud’s views are taken as the basis, but with a limitation of the theme of conflict avoidance, and with the addition of two further stages of development:

Claustral (the intrauterine period of development): clearly defined erogenous zones are absent, there is a passive dependence on the mother.

Urethral (between the oral and anal stages): when the erogenous zone is the urethra, and urination itself represents the basic type of activity.

Typology. Here Murray follows Freud and adds to his character types two further types corresponding to the stages he has singled out.

Claustral complex. The basic defence is denial; the traits are passivity and alienation.

Urethral complex. The basic defences are analogous to those characteristic of the anal character; the traits are a striving for rivalry and stubbornness.

Around 1927 Murray met Jung, whose personality and intellect made a strong impression on him; however, in his personology he relied on Freud’s works. In America Murray developed extensive work in the field of psychology and made a notable contribution to it. To him belongs the famous “Thematic Apperception Test” (TAT).

ERIKSON’S THEORY

Although E. Erikson accepted Freud’s basic propositions, the difference in their methodological complexes led to a change of accents. Erikson emphasized features of personality development motivated not only by conflict avoidance. He rejects the excessive and obsessive emphasis on biological sexuality and devotes more attention to the psychosocial aspects of the conflict between child and parents. As a result, the development of personality is presented as a process lasting the whole of a person’s life and is subdivided into 8 stages corresponding to eight types of possible fixation. These “eight ages of man,” when various facets of the ego are disclosed, are, in Erikson’s view, invariant for all people and represent his most original and important contribution to the theory of personality.

1. Trust versus mistrust. The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict. Let us note that although the semantics of this stage is analogous to the oral character in Freud’s conception, it is expressed in psychological rather than physiological terms.

2. Autonomy versus shame and doubt (analogous to the anal character in Freud’s conception). The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

3. Initiative and responsibility versus guilt (analogous to the phallic character in Freud’s conception). The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

4. Industry versus a feeling of inferiority (analogous to the latency stage in Freud’s conception). The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

5. Identity versus role diffusion (from the beginning of puberty to the end of adolescence). The conflict is conditioned by the task, imposed by society, of transforming the adolescent into an actively acting and independent adult, and by the difficulties in accomplishing this task. The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

6. Intimacy versus isolation (the period of early adulthood). The conflict is conditioned by the task, imposed by society, of establishing close and satisfying relations, and by the difficulties in its accomplishment. The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

7. Generativity versus stagnation (the period of middle adulthood). The conflict is conditioned by the task, imposed by society, of renouncing one’s own immediate concerns with the raising of children and of transmitting one’s experience to other people. The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

8. Ego-integration versus despair (from the period of middle adulthood to the end of life). The conflict is caused by the decrease with age in the number of social and biological roles and by the difficulties arising from this. The prominence of one pole or the other is determined by the degree of intensity of the conflict.

Erikson considered that psychological facts must be examined comprehensively from biological, behavioural, empirical and social positions, whereas Freud unambiguously held to the universality of biological causality. Erikson was one of the first among “clinical” psychologists to shift the accent from pathological symptomatology to functioning within the norm, to the characteristics of the healthy person. He extended the idea of the formation of personality to the whole of a person’s life. He considered the achievement of a sense of identity to be the most important motive in this process. Besides, unlike Freud, Erikson is an optimist, and therefore he regards every crisis in a person’s life as a challenge whose acceptance leads to personal growth. From the point of view of the principle of complementarity, what is important here is that Erikson develops Freud’s constructs, presenting them as part of a more developed structure.

Character types are not singled out.

Let us note that the second, weak poles in Erikson’s constructs may quite well be correlated with a weakened SUPERID. Then it may be asserted that a personality successfully passes through the next stage of its formation if its SUPERID received the necessary support in good time.

SULLIVAN’S THEORY

Within the framework of ego-theory, Sullivan’s key idea turned out to be the personality’s attitude toward the maximization of satisfaction with the simultaneous minimization of the experience of insecurity.

In Sullivan’s opinion, these two strivings are rooted in the biological nature of the human being, but it is not excluded that this is merely a partial projection of a more general archetype. Over the course of life the satisfaction of these strivings may vary greatly. The features of a person’s interrelations with those around him are determined by the dynamism of various components of the personality. Dynamism is a term introduced by Sullivan to characterize the energetic filling of various elements of the human personality. The most important is the self-dynamism, which represents a complex of self-determinations, predominantly unconscious. Possibly the best translation of the term “dynamism” into Russian would be the word “activity.” Then to “self-dynamism” there would correspond activity directed at oneself. But nevertheless Sullivan used the term “dynamism.” Possibly this is an unsuccessful translation from English into Russian.

Infancy — the period when a person is practically helpless; absence of a distinction between the “I” and the external world; defence of the dissociation type.

Childhood — the period when the child learns the essential characteristics of his culture; the basic source of developmental stimuli remains the parents.

Adolescence — a person becomes social, begins to enter into relations of cooperation and competition, to grasp the essence of social rejection and neglect, and also identification with a group.

Preadolescence — a period characterized by the need to establish close relations with a peer of the same sex.

Youth is subdivided into an early phase, lasting until the establishment of stable patterns of satisfying genital drives, and a late phase, lasting until full interpersonal maturity.

Sullivan’s elaboration of age periods, when compared with Erikson’s results, looks like the initial stage of a possible investigation. Besides, the accent on biological sexuality is still too strong here. In analysing Sullivan’s research the impression is created that these are in the main variations on Freudian themes with an attempt to refine and elaborate particular points, but there is no question here of any fundamental novelty.

Sullivan singles out several varieties of personality, the set of which does not meet the requirements of completeness, unambiguousness and independence. A typological criterion is likewise absent. No direct connection between these varieties and the stages of development is established. The terms designating these varieties are weakly motivated semantically. In this one may see the influence of one of the key moments in Sullivan’s methodology: he emphasized that personality is an illusion which cannot be observed outside relations. In Sullivan’s methodological complex an eclectic component is clearly noticeable.

Types of personality:

The self-absorbed personality — autistic and naively preserving infantile attitudes; labile, vulnerable, clinging.

The hopeless personality is disposed with hostility toward everyone except those whom it considers beneath itself.

The negativistic personality is preoccupied with its own inferiority and insignificance, and readily resorts to meanness toward a partner.

The unintegrated personality is characterized by the absence of self-dynamism and internal consistency.

The stammerer — development is disturbed because of a speech defect.

The ambitious personality — rivalry above all.

The asocial personality — feels alienated and lonely, although it tries to be friendly and attentive.

The inadequate personality — is not independent and strives toward submission and dependence.

The homosexual personality — experiences attraction only toward representatives of its own sex.

The eternal adolescent — vainly strives to attain an ideal.

A more haphazard list of personality types is hard to imagine.

RANK’S THEORY

Minimization of the fear of life with the simultaneous minimization of the fear of death. Both fears are polar and are considered innate.

Rank considers that the mechanism of development is determined by will and counter-will, which at the early stages of development manifests itself as the capacity to withstand the pressure of the parents and of one’s own impulses. Counter-will may become the cause of the arising of a feeling of guilt as a variety of the fear of life. In the favourable case counter-will grows into will. Stages of development are not singled out by Rank.

Rank singles out three types of personality on the basis of a weakly differentiated totality of traits and of the correlation of will and counter-will.

The artistic type — the result of ideal development, when the fears of life and death are effectively minimized. Will is stronger than counter-will. Such a personality is characterized by a high degree of differentiation and integration of thoughts, feelings and actions, by closeness without slavish devotion or a striving to possess the object of love; the products of its activity are unusual but useful.

The neurotic type — hostile, distinguished by a strong attitude of negativism, self-assured, often isolates itself from those around, is critical of them, is inclined to experience feelings of guilt, and so on; simultaneously strives for separateness and refuses unity. Counter-will is stronger than will.

The average person expresses a tendency toward unity but rejects the tendency toward separateness. Because of the fear of life he never experiences positive feelings regarding his own individuality. He is conformist, dependent, superficial, suggestible, and cannot obtain satisfaction. Such a type of personality is the result of the suppression of the child’s counter-will by the parents.

The concept of counter-will did not receive support and further development in psychology, and it is not very clear why the capacity to withstand something is called not will but counter-will, which makes this concept too situational. Rank’s typology relates to the juxtaposition of the successful, the unsuccessful and the pathological personality.

As we see, Rank concentrates on a separate aspect of personality which, it seems, is a projection of his own complexes, but which at the same time also reflects real processes of a person’s possible formation.

ANGYAL’S THEORY

An attempt to maximize simultaneously both the expression of autonomy and the expression of surrender. Autonomy and surrender are innate and counteracting tendencies, and therefore conflict is inevitable and a search for compromise is necessary.

Autonomy manifests itself as independence and alienation. Surrender is equated with merging, or union, with other people, ideas or the inanimate environment, with an emphasis on dependence. The biosphere is understood as the interaction between the personality and its environment, which is an element of novelty in theories of personality. The concept of the symbolic “I” is introduced as the whole totality of a person’s notions about himself; however, the content of these notions is not specified.

A typology is not proposed, but it could be built on the combinatorics of three dimensions: the vertical (poles: external activity — deep concentration), the progressive (approach to a goal — withdrawal from a goal), and the transverse (integration of actions into large blocks — absence of integration).

In Angyal’s position a striving is noticeable to find an ultimately generalized cause determining personal dynamics.

BAKAN’S THEORY

An attempt to maximize both the manifestation of power and the sense of belonging. The striving toward the manifestation of power and toward belonging are internal tendencies opposing each other, and therefore conflict is inevitable and a search for compromise is necessary. Here the dependence of Bakan’s categories on Angyal’s categories is almost obvious.

A typology is not proposed.

ROGERS’S THEORY

The tendency to actualize one’s internal potentials. Potential is that which ensures the maintenance and enrichment of the life not only of the individual but of the species as a whole. Since in the internal potentials there is nothing that would be unacceptable to society, conflict is not inevitable. The tendency toward actualization is universal for all living beings. In the human being this tendency takes one more form, namely the striving to actualize one’s “I.” This tendency is directed at the maintenance and enrichment of the life not only of the individual but of the species as a whole. Since in the internal potentials there is nothing that would be unacceptable to society, conflict is not inevitable. The need for positive regard (on the part of other people) makes a person receptive to social approval and disapproval. The central place in Rogers’s theory belongs to human individuality, and this is an element of novelty in his approach; therefore only two types of personality are opposed.

The fully functioning personality — there is no tendency toward defensive behaviour; such a personality is characterized by congruence between the “I” and its potential possibilities.

The maladjusted personality — there is a tendency toward defensive behaviour; such a personality is characterized by incongruence between the “I” and its potential possibilities.

Thus Rogers discards all the subtleties of biological predetermination and offers people a programme which all could follow.

MASLOW’S THEORY

(may in part be regarded as a development and supplement of Rogers’s theory)

An attempt to actualize the internal potentials and an attempt to satisfy the needs responsible for the physical and psychological survival of the organism.

The element of novelty here is the hierarchy of needs, on condition that each of these needs comes to the fore when all those lying below it are satisfied. When all the needs connected with survival are satisfied, the need for self-actualization comes to the fore.

This tendency is directed, for instance, at the maintenance and enrichment of the life not only of the individual but of the species as a whole. Since in the internal potentials there is nothing that would be unacceptable to society, conflict is not inevitable. The tendency toward actualization is universal for all living beings. In the human being this tendency takes one more form, namely the striving to actualize one’s “I,” to realize one’s personal potential, as far as possible without conflict.

A typology is not given, but as an ideal the self-actualizing personality is proposed — its needs connected with survival are satisfied, and it is distinguished by realism of perception, acceptance of itself, of others and of the surrounding world, spontaneity, orientation toward the solution of the task, a need for solitude, independence, spirituality (which is not necessarily religious in character), a sense of community with humanity, deep interpersonal relations, adherence to democratic values, a distinction between means and ends, a sense of humour, creativity and non-conformism.

In this theory the subtleties connected with the structure of personality are entirely discarded, and only one of its components remains — the self-sufficient ego. The theories of Rogers and Maslow are a good example of the fact that theories of personality can be built on any substructures of personality and on separate elements of it.

WHITE’S THEORY

The striving to achieve an effect by means of one’s own actions (effectance motivation) and the striving to achieve competence in activity (competence motivation). Possibly effectance motivation appears first, whereas as personal maturity is attained competence motivation is added to it. With effectance motivation is connected the nervous system’s need for information, or stimulation. With competence motivation are connected actual competence and the sense of competence, but what role these characteristics play in the structure of personality is not clear.

White adheres to Erikson’s ideas about the eight stages of psychosocial development, and he has expanded Erikson’s proposition about the importance of the phase at which trust or mistrust is formed in the child.

In White’s work one senses an attempt to develop and supplement Erikson’s ideas, and he does this by adding effectance and competence motivation, which looks like a particular case of broader possibilities, but at the same time reflects the process of the mutual influence of theories of personality.

ALLPORT’S THEORY (published from 1937 onward)

The striving toward the expression of the “I,” designated by the term “propriate functioning,” and toward the satisfaction of the biological needs connected with survival, designated by the term “opportunistic functioning.” The “I” is defined phenomenologically. The author considers that functioning in accordance with the “I” is more relevant to human nature than functioning in accordance with the needs of survival, but the latter must be satisfied by the former.

Stages of development are not singled out, but the content of age periods is indicated.

It is assumed that at the moment of birth the organism is opportunistic, that is, as Allport understands it, oriented only toward survival.

If nothing hinders the satisfaction of the biological needs, then propriate functioning is formed, which is opposed to the opportunistic.

By the end of the first year of life a sense of one’s own body begins to form; in the second and third years self-identity is formed and then the “I”-image; in the period between 6 and 12 years, the capacity for the rational solution of problems. In adolescence propriate striving increases.

Although the various propriate functions begin to form at different periods of life, by the moment adulthood is attained they are already expressed as a complex. A precondition of such functioning is sufficient care and support in childhood. If these are insufficient, propriate development is disturbed and in adulthood opportunistic functioning continues to play the dominant role.

A typology is not developed.

The basic characteristic of a concrete person is the personal disposition, which is responsible for producing and governing consistent forms of adaptive and stylistic behaviour. Personal dispositions may be both dynamic (motivational) and expressive (stylistic). Allport sought laws applicable to the description and explanation of the separate person. He considered that the concept of a common trait is averaged and characterizes a concrete personality only to a small degree. Such a position explains the absence of a typology. As an element of novelty in Allport one may consider the elaboration of criteria of maturity. To these belong: extension of the “I,” the capacity to establish warm relations with those around, tolerance toward people, self-acceptance identified with emotional stability, realistic perception, orientation toward the solution of problems, the capacity for self-knowledge and a sense of humour, an integral life philosophy with clearly defined value orientations, a differentiated religious feeling and conscience.

Allport’s leading methodological concept is the concept of the “trait,” which he defines as a “neuropsychic structure capable of transforming a multitude of equivalent stimuli, and also of stimulating and directing equivalent (to a significant degree stable) forms of adaptive and expressive behaviour” [cited from 16]. L. Hjelle and D. Ziegler render this author’s definition in more accessible language as a “predisposition to behave in a similar way in a wide range of situations” [16], which is considerably clearer.

FROMM’S THEORY

The striving to express one’s human nature. The human nature and the animal nature of the personality differ radically. However, in reality they do not enter into conflict with each other, first because the animal nature plays only a secondary role, and second because the animal nature usually does not experience any particular deprivation. The content of human nature is expressed through the need to establish connections with people and with the physical environment, the need for separation from other people and from the world, the need for a sense of belonging, the need for personal identity and the need for a system of views.

According to Fromm, there exist three types of interrelation between parents and child: the symbiotic bond (interdependence, the impossibility of attaining independence), the alienated-destructive (great distance, indifference toward each other) and love (mutual respect, support and acceptance). Development depends more on the type of relations between parents and child than on the passage through any stages. Thus, in Fromm’s constructions a disregard for the biological foundation and a displacement of the accent, in comparison with Freud, toward the social programming of personality is noticeable.

Types as orientations, represented by a totality of traits.

The receptive orientation is formed on the basis of masochistic patterns of behaviour which a child learns while playing a passive role in symbiotic relations with the parents. With such an orientation a person supposes that the source of everything good is located outside himself, and remains in a state of passive expectation. The typical personality traits with such an orientation are passivity, weakness of character, an inclination to submit, and faint-heartedness.

The exploitative orientation proceeds from sadistic patterns of behaviour which a child learns while being the dominant side in symbiotic relations with the parents. With this orientation a person is confident that the source of everything good is located outside himself, yet he does not so much wait to receive it as try to take it by force. The traits typical of a personality with such an orientation are aggressiveness, egocentrism, an inclination to flattery and arrogance.

The hoarding orientation is based on the behavioural patterns of destructiveness which a child learned in reacting to the parent’s alienation in the alienated-destructive type of interrelation. A personality with such an orientation has little faith that anything new can be drawn from the external world; it feels safe by accumulating and preserving what it already possesses. Typical personality traits with such an orientation include stubbornness, suspiciousness, causticity, absence of imagination, and a proprietary instinct.

The marketing orientation is formed on the basis of the behavioural patterns of alienation which a child learned in reacting to the parent’s destructiveness in the alienated-destructive type of interrelation. With such an orientation a person perceives himself as a commodity which can be profitably sold or exchanged, which possesses a definite value on the market. Such a personality is characterized by opportunism, inconsistency, unscrupulousness, absence of goals, wastefulness.

The productive orientation proceeds from the behavioural patterns learned by a child whose relations with the parents were built on love. With this orientation a person respects himself and others, feels protected and is at peace with himself. The typical traits of such a personality also reflect the potentially favourable aspects of the other orientations (for example, modesty, adaptiveness, trust, activity, pride, self-confidence, practicality, patience, devotion, flexibility, openness to the world and to new experience, a spirit of experimentation). Obviously, Fromm considers this type ideal.

Here a strong influence of Adler is noticeable, but biological causality is discarded and replaced by social categories; however, the explanation of personal dynamics seems no less plausible than in Adler.

FAIRBAIRN’S THEORY

The British psychoanalyst W. Fairbairn relied in his theoretical constructions on Freud’s ideas, but handled them freely and critically. Thus, for example, he recognized Freud’s phases of the formation of personality only in part. He considered that the oral phases correspond to reality, but that the anal and phallic phases are artefacts, that is, contrived constructs having no real foundations beneath them. Besides, he did not accept one of Freud’s key ideas, according to which all neuroses can be reduced to one or another psychobiological phase of the formation of personality. Thus, according to Freud, obsessional states develop out of the features of the passage through the anal phase, and hysterical neuroses are connected with the phallic phase. In clinical work with his clients he discovered that “…the paranoid, obsessional and hysterical states — to which the phobic state may be added — in essence represent not products of fixations at particular libidinal phases, but simply a series of techniques designed to defend the ego from the impact of conflicts of oral origin” [cited from 5]. Libido, according to Fairbairn, is the function of seeking objects, which is carried out with the help of the erogenous zones. Fairbairn connected the development of the ego not with biological phases but with object relations. Moreover, this process may be far from simple and unambiguous, since significant objects may be hidden from direct contact as a result of the assimilation of their influence at early stages of life.

For us it is important here that Fairbairn related creatively to Freud’s theories — he accepted some things, rejected others, and did this relying on his own empirical observations. This does not necessarily mean that he was right in everything, but it does mean that he was not a dogmatist. He regarded development as a gradual process of transition from early infantile dependence, when the child unconsciously identifies himself with the mother or with other objects, to a mature state distinguished by the fact that the individual learns ever more finely and deeply to distinguish himself from his surroundings. This process is far from trivial, since even in adults various degrees of both useful and harmful identification with particular elements of their habitat are preserved.

An original moment in Fairbairn’s conception is his notion of the mental structure as a “multiplicity of egos.” As he writes: “…I was compelled to set aside the traditional classification of mental structure in terms of ego, id and superego in favour of a classification expressed in terms of an ego-structure split into three separate egos — (1) the central ego (‘I’), (2) the libidinal ego, and (3) the aggressive ego of persecution, which I define as the internal saboteur” [cited from 5]. This theoretical manoeuvre may be explained by the originality of Fairbairn’s thinking, his high level of non-conformism and his priority of empirical observation.

KELLY’S THEORY

The striving to predict and control the events of one’s life. A generalized figurative model of the human being is proposed, as an abstract scientist who formulates constructs and then subjects them to testing: constructs that pass the test are accepted, those that do not are rejected or modified. Constructs are abstractions or generalizations on the basis of concrete experience. They are dichotomous, that is, they are represented by two poles with contrary semantics, such as clever–stupid. Constructs are organized into hierarchical systems on the basis of subordination or inclusion.

In predicting events, a person selects those constructs which seem to him to correspond to the task set, and orients their poles accordingly. This process represents the taking of a rational decision presupposing the further expansion of one’s system of constructs.

The existence of markers indicating a change in the system of constructs is assumed. To such markers may belong emotions, impressions, practical results. For example, anxiety as a marker indicates an incapacity to explain something on the basis of the system of constructs existing in the person.

No attention is devoted to the nature of significant relations in childhood and adulthood. A typology of personality and a typology of constructs are not proposed, but the differentiation of constructs may turn out to be useful in explaining individual differences. There are several parameters by which constructs may differ from one another and on the basis of which they can be classified.

In analysing Kelly’s approach it is almost obvious that he confines himself exclusively to one side of the human personality, namely its capacity for self-programming, and this is the element of novelty in his work.

McCLELLAND’S THEORY

The striving to minimize significant discrepancies between expectations and reality while at the same time maximizing small differences. McClelland holds that people strive for a certain degree of unpredictability in life in order to avoid boredom, and yet are wary of great unpredictability in order to avoid fear. This process is regulated by positive and negative emotions corresponding to the magnitude of the discrepancy between reality and expectation. It is assumed that there exist mental mechanisms linking positive and negative emotions with achievement and avoidance.

If a child grows up in conditions characterized by small discrepancies between the expected and the actual, then an attitude of achievement will be formed in him. If large differences predominate, then an attitude of avoidance will be formed in the child. If the discrepancies do not exceed a critical minimum, then the child will not become interested in the situation or object.

McClelland uses such constructs as motives, traits and schemas. A motive is a strong emotional anticipation of a reaction to the attainment of a goal, based on past experience. A distinction is made between motives of achievement, when a person tries to act in such a way that his expectations are realized, and motives of avoidance, when a person tries not to allow the realization of expectations. Motives of achievement are formed in conditions where small differences between the expected and the real predominate. Motives of avoidance, on the contrary, are formed in conditions where large discrepancies between expectations and reality predominate. In his theoretical constructions McClelland uses the concept of need, taken by him from Murray, but supplements the idea of need with the poles of achievement and avoidance.

A trait is defined by McClelland as a learned attitude of the personality to react in accordance with previous experience. Thus, according to McClelland, a trait is similar to a habit, which makes this construct not very definite. Since a trait in such a case is capable of generating only repetitive behaviour, it is not an expression of a tendency of the personality. McClelland proposes no mechanisms for the formation of traits and no list of them.

A schema, according to McClelland, is something like a cognitive model generalizing past experience. McClelland proposes three classes of schemas — ideas, values and social roles. McClelland considers that the most important schemas in the form of ideas and values are connected with such areas of human experience as economics, aesthetics, social relations, politics, religion and science. Social roles as schemas are correlated with age, sex, position in the family, profession and group membership. Mechanisms for the formation of schemas are not developed, although it is emphasized that they represent socially transmitted experience. Schemas likewise are not an expression of a tendency of the personality, and therefore they can be regarded only as static models for the reproduction of cultural forms created by society.

A typology is not proposed.

THE THEORY OF FISKE AND MADDI

The striving to maintain the customary (characteristic for the personality) level of activation. At any moment activation may be below or above the customary level, which leads to the seeking or to the avoidance of additional activation. The mental aspect of activation is excitation or tension; the physiological aspect of activation is the excitation of definite brain centres. The level of activation at any moment is determined by the impact of stimulation, namely by the degree of intensity, significance and variety of the stimuli arriving from internal and external sources.

When the level of activation falls below the usual, behaviour becomes impact-increasing. When the level of activation exceeds the usual, a person demonstrates behaviour that reduces impact.

It is assumed, however, that early experience affects the determination of the usual level of activation. People will differ in the degree of activation they require depending on the level of activation customary for them. If this level is high, a need for intensity, significance or variety of stimuli will be formed in the person. If the level is low, a fear of intensity, significance or variety of stimuli will be formed. Some people possess an innate or acquired capacity to anticipate the demands of a developing situation and to maintain a high level of activity, whereas others merely passively correct the discrepancy between the actual and the customary level. People of the first type simultaneously demonstrate increasing differentiation and integration of thinking, feeling and action (forthcoming impact is raised by means of differentiation and lowered by means of integration). Besides, it is assumed that some people learn to rely on external sources of stimulation and some on internal ones.

The variations and combinatorics of two polar parameters — activity/passivity and externality/internality — determine four types of personality.

The active-external type — the personality is active and insatiable.

The active-internal type — the personality will be a thinker, a dreamer, distinguished by subtlety and complexity.

The passive-external type — the personality will demonstrate conformism and simplicity in tastes and enthusiasms.

The passive-internal type — the personality will be a conservative with a particular accent on its own organism.

It is obvious that this typology strongly recalls Adler’s, but the explanatory basis has been sufficiently altered. Of course, one may see in this an element of novelty, but unfortunately there is no synthesis here, for one cannot simply discard Adler’s findings and replace them with constructs that, although quite plausible, have not been experimentally verified.

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For a better survey and comparison of the basic propositions of the various theories of personality, let us present their conclusions about the basic tendency of the personality in the form of a conventional symbolic notation. This is a synopsis of the preceding survey of theories of personality. Its structure has the following form:

Author Symbolic notation of the tendency of the personality and explanations of the notation Leading methodological concept.

Freud

A(Lib), M = max(U(I)) + min(Z + V), P(Eg + Se + Id), L(Фn), Фn <Or, An, Ge>

A — the activity of the subject; Lib — sexual energy; M — human behaviour; max — the striving to maximize; min — the striving to minimize; U — the unconscious; I — instincts; Z — punishment; V — the feeling of guilt; P — the phenomenology of personality; Eg — ego; Se — superego; Id — id; L — mental development; Фn — the phases of biological development; Or — the oral phase; An — the anal phase; Ge — the genital phase. The source of the subject’s activity is sexual energy — libido. Human behaviour is formed by the maximization of the satisfaction of instincts with the simultaneous minimization of punishment and guilt. The phenomenology of personality is determined by its structure, represented by the ego — the sphere depending on consciousness; the id — the “seething cauldron” of unconscious impulses; and the superego — the socially conditioned sphere controlling the manifestations of the ego.

Mental phenomenology is determined by the biological foundation. Mental development is determined by the phases of biological development.

Adler

R/N + K — R: the striving toward self-realization; / : despite; N: the inferiority complex; K: life conflicts — to realize oneself, overcoming inferiority and entering into conflicts.

R/N + nK — the same, but conflict is not obligatory.

Physical and mental inferiority push the personality to strive for superiority.

Jung

F_Lead > F_Aux1 + F_Aux2 > F_Sub — F: mental function; >: the sign of hierarchy; F_Lead: the leading function; F_Aux1 + F_Aux2: the two auxiliary functions; F_Sub: the subordinate function. The mental functions are rigidly positioned within the psyche. The leading function is more active than the auxiliary and the subordinate ones.

Lib – CU – PU – Eg – Ind — Lib: libido, the general energy of the person; CU: the collective unconscious; PU: the personal unconscious; Eg: ego; Ind: the process of individuation.

The energy of libido as the total energy of the person is the source of activity and passes through transformation in the collective and personal unconscious and in the ego, and is realized in individuation. The self is the cause of individuation. There exists a hierarchy of mental functions.

Horney

T(BA) — T: behavioural tendency; BA: basic anxiety. The cause of the diversity of people’s behaviour is variations of basic anxiety.

An inversional transformation of certain of Freud’s concepts.

Berne

L(Pt + At + Cd) — L: the manifestations of personality; Pt: the position of the Parent; At: the position of the Adult; Cd: the position of the Child. The manifestations of personality fit within the framework of three personal positions: Parent, Adult, Child.

Personal role positions.

Murray

M = Fr //> A(K) + (Cl, Ur) — M: Murray; =: agrees; Fr: Freud; /: partially; /: on condition that; >: limitation; A(K): the role of conflict in the manifestation of activity; Cl: the claustral complex; Ur: the urethral complex. Murray is in the main in agreement with Freud, but limits the inevitability of conflict and adds two further stages to Freud’s stages of development.

To make psychology a practical instrument for understanding concrete people.

Erikson

E = Fr //> –A(K) + 8Ф — E: Erikson; =: agrees; Fr: Freud; /: partially; /: on condition that; >: limitation; A(K): the role of conflict in the manifestation of activity; 8Ф: there are 8 phases of the formation of personality. Erikson is in the main in agreement with Freud, but limits the inevitability of conflict and reworks Freud’s stages of early development into eight stages of the formation of personality over the course of life.

The development of personality is a process lasting the whole of a person’s life.

Sullivan

Initial version: B + P = T(U(I) + Z). Revised version: max(U) + min(nZ) — B: the satisfaction of the demands of the biological foundation of the human being; P: the striving toward security, psychological in nature; T: tendency; U: satisfaction; I: instincts; Z: security; nZ: insecurity. Thus Sullivan accepts as the basic attitude of the personality the striving toward the satisfaction of biological needs and the striving toward security. In the later version of his views he refines the formulation of the basic attitude of the personality as the striving toward the maximization of satisfaction with the simultaneous minimization of the experience of insecurity.

Freud is in the main right, but something can still be added.

Rank

min(F(W) + F(X)) — F: fear; W: life; X: death. Thus the basic tendency of the personality, according to Rank, represents the striving toward the minimization of the fear of life with the simultaneous minimization of the fear of death. Since these two fears are innate in character and stand in opposition to each other, conflict is inevitable and a search for compromise is necessary.

All the events of human life are situated between the poles of the fear of life and the fear of death.

Fairbairn

P = e(C) + e(L) + e(A), L = I ⇒⇒⇒ A — P: personality; e(C): the central ego; e(L): the libidinal ego; e(A): the aggressive ego; L: the development of personality; I: the infantile stage; ⇒⇒⇒: gradual transition; A: the mature state.

Development is regarded as a gradual process of transition from early infantile dependence, when the child unconsciously identifies himself with the mother or with other objects, to a mature state distinguished by the fact that the individual learns ever more finely and deeply to distinguish himself from his surroundings.

Angyal

max(At + Kp) — At: autonomy; Kp: surrender.

An attempt to maximize simultaneously both the expression of autonomy and the expression of surrender. Autonomy and surrender are innate and counteracting tendencies, and therefore conflict is inevitable and a search for compromise is necessary.

All the events of human life are situated between the poles of the striving toward autonomy and the striving to capitulate before society.

Bakan

max(F + S) — F: the power of the personality, the sense of one’s own might; S: the striving to be together with others. Thus in a person there are simultaneously present the striving to maximize his power and the striving to belong to a group, to society. These are two internal tendencies opposing each other, and therefore conflict is inevitable and a search for compromise is necessary.

All the events of human life are situated between the poles of the striving toward domination and the striving to belong to a group and to society.

Rogers

R(P) + nK — R: realization, tendency, drive or striving to realize, to actualize; P: personal potential; nK: conflict is not inevitable, as it is, for example, in Freud. Thus there is a tendency to realize one’s personal potential, and conflict here is not inevitable. This is the quintessence of the humanistic approach to the understanding of personality.

The main thing in a person is his individuality.

Maslow

R(L) + nK — R: realization, tendency, drive or striving to realize, to actualize; L: personal potential; nK: conflict is not inevitable. Thus, according to Maslow, the maximally generalized expression of any human personality looks like the tendency to actualize one’s internal potentials.

The main thing in a person is his individuality.

White

R((E + C)/L) — R: to realize oneself, to attain; E: effectiveness; C: competence; /L: by means of personal effort. Thus White’s views come down to the fact that a person strives to achieve an effect by means of his own actions and strives to achieve competence in activity.

The main thing in life is to be effective and competent.

Allport

G + B — G: the striving toward the expression of the “I” or the proprium; B: the striving toward the satisfaction of biological needs.

The main thing in life is to express one’s “I,” but the biological must also be taken into account.

Fromm

R(HN), HN >> AN — R: the striving toward self-expression; HN: human nature; AN: animal nature. Thus Fromm insists that a person’s basic tendency consists in the striving to express his human nature, which for him is more important than his animal nature.

The main thing in life is to express one’s human nature.

Kelly

(PG + CN)W/C(F + P) — PG: the striving to predict; CN: the striving to control; W: the events of life; / (right slash): by means of; C: constructs; F: formation; P: testing. Thus Kelly singles out as the most important feature of the personality the striving to predict and control the events of one’s life by means of constructs which are, first, formed and formulated, and second, subjected to testing.

The main thing in life is to programme and control what happens to you.

McClelland

min max |D – L| + max min |D – L| / opt(R) — D: reality; L: personal expectations; opt: to optimize; R: risk. Thus, according to this theory, the personality strives to minimize significant discrepancies between expectations and reality while at the same time maximizing small differences, but on condition of preserving a certain degree of unpredictability in life in order to avoid boredom, while at the same time being wary of great unpredictability in order to avoid fear. The attempt to hold the situation within these limits may be described as the striving to optimize risk.

The main thing in life is to live on the edge of risk, so that it is interesting and not boring.

Fiske–Maddi

Y(A = AL) — Y: striving; A: the level of activation; AL: the level of activation typical for the personality. Thus in this theory the generalized characteristic of the personality is the striving to maintain the level of activation customary for the personality. Depending on fluctuations in the level of activation, an impulse arises to increase or to weaken activation.

The events of human life are determined by homeostatic mechanisms of maintaining activity at the level of the personal norm.

Lewin

L(P) — behaviour and the set of events L relating to the personality are a function of the social field P.

Everything in a person is so interconnected that the multitude of capacities, influences and events happening to him must be regarded as a single field which can be described mathematically.

Sheldon

L(B) — L: personality; B: biological factors. Personality is a function of biological endowments.

A human being is above all a biological organism.

Cattell

L = — L: personality; F: mental factor; : the set of mental factors; personality as a set of factors of different orders.

Knowing the factors determining the manifestations of personality, one can give a person a multitude of recommendations.

Skinner

P = f(Dr1; S→R; Dr2) — P: personality; Dr1: primary drives; Dr2: secondary drives; S→R: stimuli and reactions; personality as a set of primary and secondary drives in an environment of stimuli generating unambiguous reactions — convenient for social manipulation.

A strictly controlled laboratory experiment. The concepts of theories of personality developed as a result of clinical observation are too approximate, blurred and subjective, represent no more than explanatory fictions not amenable to verification in an unambiguously controlled experiment, and therefore no effective technology of working with people in real situations can be built on their basis. In many respects S–R theories serve as a model of an objective approach to human behaviour.

Miller and Dollard

P = f(Dr1; S→R; Dr2) — Dr1, Dr2: drives of the first and second order; S→R: mechanisms of reactions under the influence of various stimuli; personality as a set of primary and secondary drives in an environment of stimuli generating unambiguous reactions — convenient for social manipulation.

A strictly controlled laboratory experiment.

Bandura

L(T_s) — L: human behaviour; T_s: social learning; human behaviour depends on social learning.

A strictly controlled laboratory experiment. Besides the mechanisms of individual learning, there exist mechanisms of social learning.

John Lilly, from 1960

P = BC(MPRG; PRG) — BC: biocomputer; MPRG: metaprogrammes; PRG: programmes; the human being as a biocomputer with programmes and metaprogrammes.

The computer metaphor.

Aushra Augustinavichute

L(S(IM))′ — L: personality; S: structure; IM: information metabolism; ′: a marker indicating the limited character of the functional dependence. Thus the whole formula may be read as: “Personality is partially a function of the mental structure of information metabolism.” How correct is such an assertion? For one may also say that personality is a function of social relations. However, social relations themselves represent one of the mechanisms of IM, in which the personality is immersed and of which it is a product. Therefore one ought to distinguish at least two components in the personality: the social and the individual. The individual structure of the psyche, adapting to the objective and subjective environment of the individual’s habitat, forms an integrated dynamic response, which is precisely the personality.

A synthesis of the most advanced theories of personality on the basis of the concept of information metabolism, of the strict ordering and positioning of the mental functions.

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Taking into account what has been set out above, it may be said that contemporary psychology has done a great deal for the understanding of the human personality and its structural units, and nevertheless, as we see, psychologists have no unified point of view on these questions. Comparing the results of individual authors, one may see many gradations, from near-identity, comparability, continuity and parallelism to complete opposition, the absence of any points of contact whatsoever, and even hostility. In part this is explained by differences in the scientists’ methodological complexes, and this ought to become a special theme of psychological research. Many components of such complexes are located in the domain of the subconscious and the unconscious, which of course is reflected in the final result of the research; and this may mean that psychologists do not always give themselves an account of what they are producing, and do not take their own subconscious into account. This is one of the manifestations of the uncertainty principle in psychology, when the investigation of an object and the final result depend — sometimes very substantially — on the subject of the research, the scientist who conducts this research. Taking account of this phenomenon could become the basis for separating the objective and subjective components of research. And who, if not psychologists, who know the price of the influence of the unconscious, might take up research in this field?

However, besides subjective factors, the results of research in the field of the psychology of personality are also influenced by such an objective factor — one that often remains outside methodological reflection — as the existence within the psychological problem field of levels characterized by different invariant structures.

The singling out of such levels requires a special investigation. However, without going deeply into this problem and without claiming completeness, let us indicate only a few of the most obvious ones.

The phenomenological level deals with the infinite diversity of forms in which personality manifests itself. It is well represented by imaginative literature, which attempts with varying degrees of detail to convey the sensory flow connected with the everyday life of people. Close to this level is the individual-biographical, taking maximally into account the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each concrete personality; but there are also differences here, connected with the degree of documentary character.

The professional-orientational level singles out above all the invariants connected with the suitability of a personality for the performance of one kind of work or another (the basic consumer being personnel departments). Close to it is the manipulative level, taking into account in the first place those features of personality which may be used in politics, criminology, intelligence work and the like — that is, everywhere where dossiers are compiled or compromising material is collected. The level of the social invariants of personality deals with how the personality is socialized. The pedagogical level singles out in the first place the invariants relating to instruction. The biological level investigates the biological mechanisms of the formation of definite types of behaviour, taking into account gender and age features of behaviour.

But there also exists a level which may be called statistical, since it regards the human being as a certain generalized unit capable of consuming energy, industrial products, living space and foodstuffs, while his unrepeatable individuality may be left out of account. Thus, for example, military strategists, assessing the “effectiveness” of weapons of mass destruction, operate with the percentage of destruction of human resources, where a human being is merely an impersonal point — but one on which the warring side’s capacity for resistance depends.

All such levels of invariance are not opposed to and do not contradict one another, and only all together can they give the maximally possible description of the personality. At the same time, the confusion and non-differentiation of different levels of invariance in the study of personality leads to the appearance of semantically distorted constructs. Thus, for example, Freud, insisting on the absoluteness of biological causality and not singling out social causality, creates constructs such as the Oedipus complex, in which the biological is strangely mixed with the social, which subsequently leads to their complete or partial rejection by the psychological community.

What, then, is the “I”? Is it identical with the ego? Normally a person (and this is one of the signs of the norm!) does not doubt what he connects with his “I.” This process in contemporary psychology is connected with the concept of self-identification. Thereby it is implicitly presupposed that the “I” is a symbol, a form and/or a function of self-identification.

Relying on socionic concepts, we can now give a grounded answer to all these questions posed above. We shall proceed here from the principle of complementarity established in the methodology of science. This principle postulates continuity in the development of scientific theories. From the point of view of this principle, the whole development of the psychology of personality from Sigmund Freud to Aushra Augustinavichute represents a single — albeit uneven, at times contradictory, sometimes paradoxical — process of the cognition of a far from simple phenomenon of nature, which is the human personality. Individual participants in this process were set against one another, struggled, refuted and even hated one another; but often they also supported, developed and refined one another’s theoretical constructions, as a result of which an ever clearer picture of personality and its structure gradually took shape. At the present time this picture, in the person of socionics, has reached its maximum. No, not everything has yet been decided, not everything has been reconciled, not everything has been brought to a common denominator; but at the very least the contours of the future theoretical whole are visible. Of course, it must be understood that socionics deals not with all levels of invariance but above all with the level of information metabolism. But at this level it offers constructs distinguished by a high degree of unambiguousness and effectiveness.

Taking account of the principle of complementarity, socionics does not renounce the concepts of ego, superego and id “felt out” by Freud and his followers. It develops, supplements and refines them, as ought to be the case in a normal science. And, undoubtedly, its own concepts may also be, and continue to be, refined.

Therefore for the term “I” we retain maximal universality, correlating it with the concept of personality as one of its identifiers. As an illustration of how the understanding of the periphery of the concept “I” varies, let us give an incomplete list of derivative and adjacent combined concepts encountered in the literature and theoretically possible:

1. I — the result of a person’s singling out of himself from the surrounding environment, allowing him to feel himself the subject of his physical and mental states, actions and processes, and to experience his wholeness and identity with himself — with regard to his past, his present and his future alike. The I is formed in activity and communication. Changing the surrounding world in objective activity and interacting with other people, the subject separates his I from the not-I, directly experiencing his non-identity with other objects. The I is evaluated by the subject in the I-conception, forming the core of the human personality [1];

2. “I”-conception — a relatively stable, to a greater or lesser degree conscious, system of an individual’s notions about himself, experienced as unrepeatable, on the basis of which he builds his interaction with other people and relates to himself. The I-conception is an integral, though not devoid of internal contradictions, image of one’s own I, functioning as an attitude toward oneself and including the components: cognitive — the image of one’s qualities, capacities, appearance, social significance and so on; emotional — self-respect, self-love, self-abasement and so on; evaluative-volitional — the striving to raise one’s self-esteem, to win respect and so on [1]; the designing, varying, theorizing and forecasting connected with the evolutions of one’s own personality. The I-integral — the result of a person’s singling out of himself from the surrounding environment, allowing him to feel himself the subject of his physical and mental states, actions and processes, and to experience his wholeness and identity with himself — with regard to his past, his present and his future alike. The I is formed in activity and communication;

3. symbolic “I” — a symbolic projection of the archetype of the self;

4. communicative “I” — the one to whom external communicants address themselves and with whom they deal as the operator of decision-making and activity;

5. situational “I” — who “I” turn out to be in a concrete situation: the state of the symbolic “I” at the current moment of time;

6. dynamic “I” (current positions in time) — the totality of structural tensions which are a function of the problem field in the space of the personality;

7. formal “I” — that agency with which statistics and the organs of authority deal;

8. formalized “I” — the notion of the subject’s personality which arises in the experimenter when formalized test techniques are used, and which may thus be considered to have been measured;

9. ideal “I” — what “I” should like to be; a self-description of the personality in terms of the attainment of personal ideals and standards;

10. historical “I” — the personal potential accumulated over the course of life;

11. “I”-biographical — biographical reflection on one’s own life experience;

12. social “I” — the social position of the personality accepted and recognized by society; a function of social ties;

13. role “I” — the totality of roles, the role repertoire, and each concrete role position which a concrete personality may occupy;

14. “I”-system — the integral structure of personal space which has become the object and the instrument of the governing of one’s own behaviour;

15. “I”-projection — everything I scold, criticize, do not accept in others;

16. “I”-reflected — the personal synthesis of the signals received from others about one’s own personality;

17. “I”-encyclopedic — the description of a personality in fundamental publications reflecting the current notion of a concrete personality in a concrete society;

18. I-IDEAL — a term used in psychoanalysis as a synonym of the Super-I. At the same time a number of commentators on Freud’s theory consider that one should distinguish the Super-I as the result of the original early-childhood identifications with the parents from the I-ideal as the result of later identifications with a considerably wider circle of persons. The I-ideal represents moral societal norms. Over the course of life it may change repeatedly [1].

This list may be continued, since its completeness and consistency are not stipulated in advance, and it is not clear how this could be done.

Of course, in the construction of a theory much depends on the chosen axiomatic basis and on the definitions. If we accept as one of the basic concepts the idea of a multiplicity of I’s, then the simple concept of the I as the psychological domain of greatest competence will already be insufficient. The concept of a multiplicity of I’s presupposes a somewhat different qualification of the concept of the I. In this case a more acceptable notion is that of the I as the integral effect of situational identification. The concept of an integral effect is here close to the conscious synthesis of numerous aspects of the psyche. Identification is the determination of one’s own assemblage point (Castaneda) in the coordinates of personal space. And since life situations change, sometimes very rapidly, the coordinates of the assemblage point may also change. Besides, one may speak of several levels of self-identification.

In accordance with the complete generalized model of personality, one may speak of sixteen personal positions whose substrate is systems of activated meridians. But on this see the chapter on the substrate of the psyche.

The terms “EGO,” “SUPEREGO” and “ID” we assign to the corresponding structural elements of personality, giving them definitions refined within the framework of socionic theory. Besides, in the development of the existing notions about the structure of personality, one further structural element is added — “SUPERID” (here and below the socionic names of the blocks of the structure of personality are set off by typographic register). At a first acquaintance with socionics it may seem that these terms are “dragged in by the ears,” taken from an entirely different theoretical environment and, moreover, deformed by a simplified understanding. However, the internal coherence of socionic theory guarantees the correct adaptation of these terms with the necessary correction of the concepts connected with them. And now, within the framework of socionics, these concepts, while relating to the corresponding structures of personality, themselves acquire their own structure.

Aushra Augustinavichute, having built the socionic model of personality, precisely designated the boundaries of the EGO and gave its formula. The EGO is the domain of greatest confidence, of greatest competence with respect to the informational aspects of the programme and communicative functions. I would add to this that it is also the domain of greatest self-identification. Besides, it is also the domain of the potential possibilities of the personality and of its optimal self-realization. What in contemporary psychology has come to be called the core of the personality is quite definitely interpreted by the EGO block of Model A. This question is examined in more detail in the chapter on the description of the socionic type.

When Aushra Augustinavichute built her famous Model A, then, in intuitively juxtaposing the structure of the model with the structure developed by Freud, it was natural to try to fit the already ready-made terms to the model. The upper block of the model, as expressing the most essential thing in the personality, fitted easily into the term “ego.” The very lowest — not only by position but also because it is opposed to the most conscious and developed — suggested itself for juxtaposition with the id. Besides, it is located in the vital ring, where information circulates in first-signal form — either not yet verbalized or already de-verbalized. Here it suggests itself of its own accord: it is not made conscious precisely because it is not in the language of consciousness. Here it is, the sphere of the unconscious! Not some mental space with untranslatable-into-the-language-of-consciousness ideas hovering in it, but neuro-humoral informational circuits where information is preserved and circulates in codes quite different from those in which it reaches consciousness. But of course this by no means denies the possibility of the existence of a mental space.

The second block from the top of the model, which contained the PLR — the place of least resistance, that which is most vulnerable in the personality, vulnerable because it functions as an imperative weakly or almost not at all controlled by the personality — is relatively easy to juxtapose with the Freudian superego as a set of programmes in significant measure external with respect to the personality. These are programmes with a general orientation that may be designated as “what must not be done.” But in the same second block, in the third function, are gathered programmes responsible for what must be done in extreme situations, when the personality maximally identifies itself with one or another social structure. Although such a description of this block does not fully coincide with Freud’s description of the superego, it is well motivated by the semantics of the functions constituting it, and this internal consistency gives the right to consider the resulting concept a development and refinement of the concept of the superego introduced by Freud. Thus, there is no question here of a formal transfer of these concepts from an “alien” theory into “one’s own” on the basis of an uncritical identification of constructs.

A particular triumph of Model A was the identification of the fourth element of the structure of personality absent in Freud — SUPERID. Just as Mendeleev’s system of elements required a strictly definite filling of its cells by chemical elements not yet discovered, so Model A “predicted” the existence of a structural element of the psyche not known before then. This became SUPERID. In Freud it merged with the id, since it possessed its characteristic features. Yes, this is in significant measure an infantile and impulsive substructure of personality, but one having the right to independent existence. The demands which society makes on the personality are balanced by the demands which the personality makes on society. It is interesting to note that the semantics of this structure, unidentified in psychoanalysis, appeared quite distinctly in the theoretical constructions of Karen Horney which were oppositional to Freud, although it was not reflected upon by her. Without such a refinement it remains unclear what, in the structural-theoretical sense, Horney’s basic idea was.

The empirical and theoretical material accumulated in socionics allows us to suppose that the psychological functions as elements of the mental structure of personality are innate. The psychological functions are already engaged, before the child’s birth, in processing the information accessible to them, just as the digestive system of a newborn is ready to take in food, but such food as corresponds to the child’s limited possibilities. Analogously, just as the visual system is capable of perceiving brightness, colour and lines but is not yet capable of classifying and identifying them, so the mental organs — EGO, SUPEREGO, SUPERID, ID and others — possessing a primary formedness, are ready to perform the functions corresponding to them within the volume accessible to them. This manifests itself in the child’s behaviour and can be recognized by an external observer.

Thus the SUPERID of the human infant manifests itself in that expectation and signalling cry which are perceived by adults as an imperative demand. The EGO at this stage manifests itself in exploratory activity, however insignificant it may seem — the child looks and listens, and does so with maximal attention. And since many psychological schools connect the EGO with consciousness, and consciousness in a child, however minimal it may be, undoubtedly exists, this is an additional indication of the innate existence of the EGO. Here one must especially note the child’s speech readiness, thanks to which he shows heightened attention to the phonetic side of speech. The ID, of course in the socionic sense, manifests itself in instinctual activity, in particular in the chaotic movements of a newborn’s little arms and legs. It is harder to identify the SUPEREGO, but it is quite plausible that it manifests itself in that background trust in adults which is characteristic of children.

And now let us pose the most important question: are the blocks of Model A the same structural units as in the structure of personality proposed by Freud, or are we dealing here with a formal — and possibly also artificial — terminological homonymy? It appears that the correct answer here is: both yes and no. Aushra Augustinavichute’s categories are a development and refinement of Freud’s categories. Freud’s categories are an approximate sketch of Aushra Augustinavichute’s categories. Aushra Augustinavichute’s categories are Freud’s categories brought to their truth. In any case Aushra Augustinavichute’s categories gravitate toward the corresponding categories of Freud, but nevertheless, in the hope of experimental verification, let us not insist on their unambiguous conceptual identity. However, let us hope that the further development of the theory of personality will introduce its own corrections both into the concepts proposed by Freud and into the concepts developed by Aushra Augustinavichute, which will contribute to the appearance of more general notions in which the concepts of Freud and of Aushra Augustinavichute will be regarded as particular cases.

With the appearance of socionics, the principle of complementarity — that is, the principle of taking into account what has been achieved in science earlier — received, in its application to theories of personality, its adequate realization. Everything fell into place. Three scientific schools — the Freudian structure of personality, the Jungian typology, and I. P. Pavlov’s teaching about the first and second signal systems — came together. This was not eclecticism gathering together whatever techniques took its fancy. This was a genuine, sound theoretical synthesis of what seemed incomparable.

Aushra Augustinavichute made a discovery which in its essence is a revolutionary upheaval in science — this is a revolution of the fourth kind, a kind which has not yet found its place in the classifications of the philosophy of science. This is the discovery of the informational basis of phenomena. Strictly speaking, this revolution began with the works of Wiener, but there it looked simply like the elaboration of a new scientific field, which became cybernetics. The revolution accomplished by Aushra Augustinavichute has remained unnoticed by big science, and some time will yet pass before its significance is appreciated at its true worth. For this a great deal of experimental and theoretical work is needed. But one can say with confidence that the twenty-first century will be the century of socionics.

Conclusions to the Sixteenth Chapter

1. The whole history of the study of the human personality in psychology may be regarded as a single process of the gradual cognition of this complex entity, so important for people.

2. The differences in approaches to the problem of personality and in the results obtained by different authors may be explained by differences in the scientists’ methodological complexes and by each author’s conscious or unconscious orientation toward a specific level of invariance.

3. Several levels of invariance may be singled out in the phenomenology of the human personality. Among them: the phenomenological, well represented by imaginative literature; the individual-biographical, taking maximally into account the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each concrete personality; the professional-orientational, investigating the professional suitability of a personality; the social, dealing with the invariants of the personality’s social behaviour; the biological, investigating the biological mechanisms of the formation of definite types of behaviour; the statistical, regarding the human being as a source of generalized resource and as a unit of consumption.

4. The non-differentiation of levels of invariance leads to the appearance of constructs with semantic deformations, in which different projections of different archetypes are whimsically interwoven.

5. Socionics proceeds from the plausible hypothesis that all the structural elements of the psyche — EGO, SUPEREGO, SUPERID, ID and others — are innate, and that in the process of social programming and adaptation their primary content is modified and made concrete. The generalized content of the structural elements of the psyche is determined by the semantics of the psychological functions and by the semantics of their informational aspects. So these structural units do not appear for the first time in the adult state but merely manifest themselves, being filled with developed individual and social content.

6. Socionics, within the framework of the principle of complementarity, is a natural stage in the formation of the psychology of personality. It has refined and found the ultimate expression for a number of constructs whose preliminary contours were found by other researchers.

Literature

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Notes

¹ The Freudian structural blocks of the psyche we write in lower-case letters, and the socionic terms in capitals. This is above all because these are different, though closely interconnected, concepts.

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Scientific edition. Approved at the XXIII International Socionics Conference.

Churyumov, Semyon Ivanovich. The Smile of the Cheshire Cat, or the Possible and the Impossible in Socionics: Problems, Hypotheses, Solutions. Vol. III — Moscow, “Chernaya Belka,” 2010.

© S. I. Churyumov © “Chernaya Belka”

The book is printed in the author’s own editorial version. Illustrations by S. I. Churyumov and A. S. Churyumov.

ISBN 978-966-8260-83-4. Second edition — corrected and enlarged.

Publishing house “Chernaya Belka,” Moscow.

Figures

• Fig. 16.01. S. Freud.
• Fig. 16.02. A. Adler.
• Fig. 16.03. C. Jung.
• Fig. 16.04. K. Horney.
• Fig. 16.05. H. Murray.
• Fig. 16.06. E. Erikson.
• Fig. 16.07. H. Sullivan.
• Fig. 16.08. O. Rank.
• Fig. 16.09. C. Rogers.
• Fig. 16.10. A. Maslow.
• Fig. 16.11. G. Allport.
• Fig. 16.12. E. Fromm.
• Fig. 16.12. J. Kelly. (numbering as in the original)
• Fig. 16.13. Aushra Augustinavichute.