Социально-психологический подход к исследованию личностного инфантилизма

Abstract

This paper describes the socio-psychological approach to the study of personal infantilism. The author confirms the relevance of applying the methods of social constructionism in the research focused on this issue and offers to interpret personal infantilism as a pole of the binary social construct “personal maturity — personal infantilism”, which helps to evaluate the conformity or discrepancy between the achieved level of personal development and the standards of a “mature personality”. It is shown that the consistent application of the socio-psychological approach to the study of personal infantilism can largely expand the field of research of this phenomenon and, in particular, help to explore its content and determinants at various levels of analysis: social, interpersonal and intrapersonal. The theoretical assumptions are illustrated by the empirical research findings that reveal the contents of the construct “personal maturity — personal infantilism”, the phenomenology of personal infantilism at different stages of life, specific to each stage of life infantilizing practices, the role of self-assessment in the continuum “mature personality — infantile personality” in the human regulation of one’s own social behaviour. The author describes the limitations of the socio-psychological approach to the study of personal infantilism and the ways to overcome them.