Psychology of physicality Introduction

The importance of studying human physicality is so obvious that it has become the central problem of the whole cycle of biological and medical sciences. A person constantly faces the reality of bodily existence. Although in everyday life he often does not notice his body, physicality has many ways to discover himself. One of the most common and most unpleasant is the disease, when the body manifests itself in a combination of painful intraceptive sensations. In addition, there is a very extensive area of ​​“normal” corporeality: the existence of the body is found at almost every moment of our life activity in the form of “weakness”, “fatigue”, or, on the contrary, “strength”, “excitement”, etc. The body is completely “ manifests itself explicitly in the field of sexuality, erotica, religious experience, even if sometimes in a transformed form of "bodily restraint." If in modern philosophy the body is understood as “the decisive moment in the genesis of the objective world” (Merlot-Ponty, 1999), and in modern psychoanalysis it represents the primary, “nuclear” form of the subject’s existence ( Bergeret , 2000), then for his psychology does not exist. It does not exist not only in the sense that modern psychology remains largely asexual, but also in the fact that if we try to create a certain schematic image of a person on the basis of psychological publications, taking into account the attention paid to certain areas of the physical body, we will get “homunculus ", Consisting of a huge brain, not very large genital organs and

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still maybe faces. There is no psychological concept of corporeality either; the body is understood as an area absolutely adjacent to the organism, as a certain material substrate or, rather, as the “habitat” of the psychic, and despite its self-evident importance, the corporeality turned out to be “theoretically invisible” for psychology. Discussing body perception, authors of textbooks on psychology present data that can rather be attributed to the anatomy or physiology of intraceptive analyzers, rather than to psychology {Ananyev, 1960, 1961; Luria, 1964, 1977; Rubinstein S.L., 1999).

Declaring the psychosomatic unity of a person, psychology deals primarily with phenomena of consciousness or higher mental activity, while corporeality remains alien to it, naturally organized and naturally ready-to-live for quality. The “disembodied” approach established in psychology reduces the entire essence of a person to his consciousness, not noticing that in the course of development, corporeality itself loses its natural, natural character, becoming humanized and acquiring qualitative changes. “... Much earlier than a person will begin to manipulate external objects, practically from the first days of his life, he gradually, in stages, instill the skills of cultural realization of such important human functions as the ability to eat, drink, excrete excrement, walk, etc. . ” (Tishchenko, 19875, p. 189). Human body is the first in ontogeny to master and transform into a universal instrument and sign. This transformation is not indifferent for the function itself, and for its understanding.

The main idea introduced into modern psychology by L.S. You are a Gothic, his students and followers, is that the natural mental functions, turning into proper human, "higher", lively formed, social in origin, - radically change (Luria, 1974; Leontyev A.N., 1961; El'konin , 1963; Zaporozhets, 1967; and others.). A person masters his mental functions, mediating them with “psychological tools” - sign systems. Natural and "mediated" functions are similar only externally, they are implemented in different ways, differently controlled. Indirect functions are created over natural “paths over the construction of new formations over the old ones, while preserving the old formations as subordinate layers within the new whole” (You are gothic, 1956, p. 488).

However, paradoxically, from the study of the process of human development - socialization and mediating its functions

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- one of the fundamental aspects fell out - the natural vital activity of man himself, his bodily being. This applies both to the development of socialized forms of the implementation of bodily functions (eating, drinking, excretions, sexual departures), and to the vast field of cultural ways of experiencing and manifesting bodily painful disorders.

Intraception remained an undeveloped area of ​​psychology and was treated as a “lower”, archaic, physiological form of perception that was not subject to the general psychological patterns of human perception. With this approach, clinical psychology is faced with serious theoretical difficulties in understanding a number of facts. The physiological understanding of intraceptive perception, which relates the quality and intensity of subjective experience to the qualities and intensity of the stimulus, is not supported either by clinical experience, or by special scientific research, or by ordinary human experience. There is a whole range of extreme cases of such discrepancies: from the absence of any sensations of any kind, despite significant bodily injuries, to hypochondriac sensations that possess all the hallmarks of psychological reality, but have no valid basis ( Dupre , 1925; Rothstein, 1961; Mel -zak, 1981; Karvasarsky, 1980; Buytendijk , 1966; Smulevich, 1987). Such dissociations are very common in clinical practice: the hypochondria syndrome, for example, is the most common, but at the same time, the least studied psychopathological phenomenon.

Intraceptive perception cannot be unambiguously determined by the properties of irritation, but depends on the assessment of the situation, the meaning of bodily sensation, its meaning, human motivation, belonging to a particular culture, individual experience and other psychological factors whose influence on bodily perception cannot be denied, but it is very difficult understand, staying within the “natural” scheme. Studying the mechanisms of such influence has a very long history “and, however, despite this long history of psychosomatic ideas, it is difficult to name any other area of ​​medical thought that would give rise to as many fierce disputes that would be just as poorly agreed upon ideas about nature .e. about laws, principles, mechanisms) of fundamental facts, in reality of which ... there is no doubt ” (Prangishvili , Sherozia, Bassin, 1978, p. 196)

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The solution to this problem is very relevant in a practical sense. Ignoring any phenomenon by science still does not mean its cancellation, and it forces one to reckon with oneself, often manifesting itself in a pathological form. "Incorporeal" psychology and pedagogy overlook entire layers of the most important reality of human existence, encountering it only in the form of "inferiority", distorted development or pathology, and "organized" medicine demonstrates its increasing dehumanization, crisis of confidence, helplessness of theoretical understanding and treatment of disorders, pathogenesis of which goes beyond physiological changes.

The urgency of this problem is increasing with an increase in the number of psychosomatic diseases, neuroses, difficulties of effective rehabilitation, with the expansion of paramedical alternative practice. According to experts of the World Health Organization, one of the most important medical problems of the next decades will be the impossibility of effective treatment of a large number of patients who come to institutions of health care with constant complaints that are difficult to correlate with one or another organic lesion (Sartorius, 1983 ).