Analysis of the Relations of the Stuff of the Psychological Institute (1913-1937)

Abstract

The subject of the study was the subjects' connections reflecting the degree of similarity of the research topics of the founder (G.I. Chelpanov), subsequent leaders (K.N. Kornilov, A.B. Zalkind, V.N. Kolbanovsky), and leading employees of the Psychological Institute in 1913-1937. In the context of solving the problem of collective forms of development of domestic psychology, a slang analysis of the titles of their published psychological works was carried out. In order to take into account the semantic meanings, the quantitative analysis of the titles is supplemented by the results of a qualitative analysis of the subject and type of publications, the availability of reprints and biographical data of their authors, as well as the results of an event analysis of the social history of the development of Russian psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. The results obtained testify to the strength of the subject connections of the institute leaders and specific leading employees who supported them in the implementation of research programs and in the development of topical problems of psychological theory and practice; which determined the effectiveness of their joint scientific activities in the 1920s-1930s. The main topic that united scientists was general psychology, to a lesser extent pedagogical psychology. Due to the presence of subject connections, the Institute's staff made a significant collective contribution to the definition of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study of the psychology of behavior, consciousness and such mental processes as sensations, perception, memory, thinking, and speech; into the development of methods of psychological research: experimental, biographical, observation methods, testing, etc. The solution of the problems of pedagogical psychology, as well as other practice-oriented areas of psychology – developmental, social, special, labor psychology, etc., by the staff of the Institute was based on the tradition of organizing experimental research, laid down when the institute was founded by G.I. Chelpanov and determined the content of the subject relations of its leading scientists in the following decades.