Psychology in the Zinchenko Space-Time (an Essay in Personological Interpretation)

Abstract

The psychology beginning in V.P. Zinchenko’s personality can be defined as a fundamentally understanding and base-laying science of the foundations of individual lives, social life, and existence of civilisation and culture, a science revealing a range of possibilities, temptations, and perspectives to its followers. The necessary conditions for a synthesis between the exploratory and base-laying functions of psychology are analysed, turning it into a science of self-acting consciousness, inseparable from personality of its creator; a science of acts, instruments and results of individual and universal self-consciousness, demonstrating how consciousness can exist overcoming facticity and revealing new degrees of its freedom before itself and outside itself. The history of psychology for V.P. Zinchenko is a way of objectivation and subjectivation of consciousness using the means of consciousness itself.