Two Theoretical Schools In The Development Of USSR Psychology

The school of materialistic reflectivism and that of social-historical culture are the two most famous ones in the development of USSR psychology. Through reviewing, comparing and analyzing the main viewpoints and inclinations of the two theoretical schools in the USSR psychology development, this thesis presents one aspect of the regularity in the psychology development and thereby gains a lot of beneficial inspirations in the respect of psychological epistemology and methodology.The major structure of the theses falls into four chapters.First chapter introduces the theoretical background of the evolution and developing sequence of the two theories in the USSR psychology development. There were two major schools in Russian psychology before the October Revolution. One was introspective psychological school, represented by idealism and featured by metaphysical subjective deductive methodology, whereas the other was traditional psychology school, represented by materialism and featured by positivistic methodology of natural science. Through competing each other, the two schools jointly formed the theoretical background of the evolution of the two theoretical inclinations in USSR psychology development. After October Revolution, USSR founded and developed theoretical system for Marxism psychology, taking dialectic materialism and historical materialism as its philosophical foundation and natural science as its research foundation. There were two theoretical inclinations engendered in the constructing process—school of materialistic reflectivism and social-historical cultural school. The developing sequence of the former was firstly Bekhterev's reflexology...