The “Opposition Principle” in Personological Cognition

Abstract

This article is part of a series of the author’s publications devoted to the modeling of the opposition category in modern personality psychology. The subjects of the study are binary structures of the psychic life of the individual, the opposition and contradictions of individual life, dialectical cognition and self-identity, and the attitude of personality to their oppositions and contradictions. This article is dedicated to the principle of opposition as a personological method for studying personality, immanent to European thinking and conceptually grounded in philosophical dialectics, in-depth psychology and the theory of vital relationships of the personality by EB Starovoytenko. The aim of the work is to comprehend the principle of opposition in the context of general personology (VA Petrovsky, EB Starovoytenko) – to describe new ways of problematization in the study of personality, and justify the theoretical, hermeneutic and practical potential of the principle of opposition in personological study of the intuitive attitude of personality to life oppositions. The main research methods include theoretical and methodological modeling, cultural and psychological modeling, and psychological hermeneutics of texts.The results of our work are: 1) We identified identify the potential of the principle of opposition in the formulation and development of new problems in personality research through various forms of theory, hermeneutics and practice of personology. 2) We reconstructed the ontological, epistemological and reflexive phenomenological "modes" of the existence of oppositions in individual life based on SL Rubinstein’s work. 3) We present the results of the hermeneutic study of the individual’s attitudes to life oppositions. Cultural and psychological models, reconstructed from European and Russian fairy tales, describe the intuitive methods of coping with oppositions. 4) We identify the issues of "I" as the subject of the attitudes to life oppositions.The results obtained are important for the further theoretical development of the opposition category in psychology, for the development of the theory of vital relationships of the personality, and for the use of the principle of opposition in personality research. Cultural and psychological models of intuitive attitude to life oppositions can be used in the analysis and interpretation of individual attitudes to life oppositions and self-understanding in the context of self-positing of a personologist.