Religious and Philosophical Analysis of the Worldview Problems of the Modern Psychology Development

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleРелигиозно-философский анализ мировоззренческих проблем развития современной психологии
3. Language term Russian
4. lemma author Asliturk, Miriam
5. lemma category Natural and the supernatural > Pseudoscience - Scientific theories and disciplines > Psychology-Psychoanalysis
6. Publication date 06-03-2018
7. lemma work Ермаков, Вячеслав Алексеевич [Author]. Религиозно-философский анализ мировоззренческих проблем развития современной психологии
8. lemma manifestations ТЕОРИЯ И ПРАКТИКА ОБЩЕСТВЕННОГО РАЗВИТИЯ.
9. Keywords christian psychology - psychoanalysis - transpersonal psychology - paganism - occultism
10. Url Click Here
11. Citations
    1. <p>Ермаков, Вячеслав Алексеевич, Бажданова, Юлия Викторовна. Религиозно-философский анализ мировоззренческих проблем развития современной психологии. <em>Теория и практика общественного развития, </em>2014,№3. Retrieved from: <a href="https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/religiozno-filosofskiy-analiz-mirovozzrencheskih-problem-razvitiya-sovremennoy-psihologii">https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/religiozno-filosofskiy-analiz-mirovozzrencheskih-problem-razvitiya-sovremennoy-psihologii</a> </p>
12. Lemma body

    1. The article represents Christian psychology as opposed to materialistic and occult approaches to the comprehension of psychic reality. Modern psychology, the authors argue, is represented by five major systems: psychoanalysis, behaviourism, Gestalt psychology, humanistic psychology, and transpersonal psychology. There is also a sixth system – cognitive psychology – which, according to the authors, is gradually beginning to dominate. All these traditions, as argued, are rooted in the Protestant worldview and in their essence are opposite to both Catholic and Orthodox Christianity and Christian psychology.

       The authors posit that modern Western psychology has been developing through “revolutionary” spiritual crises. The first crisis of the XX century was the “psychoanalytic revolution,” which was mainly aimed at fundamentally distorting and undermining the Christian pastoral psychology and cultural tradition. The second revolution was the behavioural one, the essence of which was to finally eliminate the Continental European Christian spiritual tradition and replace it with the dominance of purely positive, pragmatic knowledge. This was followed by transpersonal psychology, which, according to the authors, provoked an occult turn in modern psychology and preached the creation of an occult type of civilization. At the same time, a cognitive revolution took place in psychology. The authors underline that cognitive psychology serves capitalism and is aimed at establishing the total domination of the cognitive economy, which leads to the psychological dictatorship of market relations.

       The authors believe that not a single modern psychological theory deduces types of personality on the basis of virtues (patience, humility, etc.): all theories of psychology are built on the basis of the idea of innate and insurmountable sins of men. Moreover, all these traditions, the authors argue, face a number of problems. Firstly, they completely depend on atheistic models of world perception. Secondly, they lack a common anthropology, allowing to define the nature and essence of man through generally accepted concepts. Third, modern psychology finds itself in a moral deadlock, given the huge gap between modern psychology and historical types of morality.

       All these problems lead to the use of psychotherapeutic methods that are built on the syncretic mixture of traditions, occultism, and esoteric knowledge - all of them advocated in particular by transpersonal psychology. In transpersonal psychology, the authors maintain, traditional ideas about morality are destroyed, mankind is seen as existing outside the linearity of time, beyond the continuity of tradition, but in the unity of the mystical stream of reality. Russian transpersonal psychologists study the so-called “transpersonal worldview” of the Russian people. The latter is represented as a unity of the Russian mystical experience which includes shamanism, paganism, hesychasm, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Russian religious philosophy, theosophy, anthroposophy, the fourth path of Gurdjieff, and Russian cosmism. According to the authors, this approach is wrong as these different traditions have always been opposed to each other. They argue that transpersonal psychotherapy methods in the long run provoke deep mental distortions.

       Russian psychology, the authors argue in conclusion, should instead turn to an Orthodox direction of psychology and psychotherapy, which is based on the eternal spiritual values of Orthodox Christianity.