The “Right” and the “Wrong” Personology: The Answer to the Disputants (in Russian)

Abstract

A detailed answer is given in the article to the critical arguments by A.B. Orlov and N.A. Orlova, presented in the article “Science of a man: A person-centered approach to general personology” (see the pages of the present issue of the journal) on a previously published article by V.A. Petrovsky and E.B. Starovoytenko “The science of personality: four projects of general personology” (Petrovsky, Starovoytenko, 2012). The authors of the four projects assume that critique towards them is due to the following reasons. The first one is the obvious perceptual mistakes, substitution of terms, biased interpretations of the texts of the criticized works. The critics willingly tell their ideological and political evaluations, possibly assuming that thus they strengthen the persuasiveness of their reasoning (for example, the idea of “personality” is associated by them with the “racist development of the fascist personology” and so on). In consequence of such erroneous perception these authors come to the erroneous conclusions, which affect the core categories and statements of personology (discrediting of its methodological status, non-differentiation of general personology and local variants of its development – multisubjective personology, personology of life, etc.). Herewith, however paradoxical it is, the critics attribute to themselves the priority in development of “local personologies”. The second reason, which prompts the “person-centered” critics of the idea of personology to enter into controversy with the authors of the four projects and leads to significant distortions of perception, interpretations and evaluations, is the own rather questionable ideas of the disputants; primarily, it applies to the balance of science and practice in the perspective of development of psychology (according to the critics, with the set of the approaching “psychozoic era” the psychology will die, giving place to the person-centered psychopractice). The stylistics of the argument of the critics has little to do with the principles of “empathic hearing”, “understanding and acceptance”, “non-judgemental perception”, which were discovered by the creator of the “person-centered approach” C. Rogers. Instead of the “active listening” the methods of “active eating” (“black rhetoric”) are used. The content and the style of their reasoning have nothing common with the “person-centered approach” – as applied to the ideas of those who think differently.