Lev A. Zaks

The article discloses the main potential aspects of cooperation between psychology and culturology, which are connected through their mutual determination of the psyche (psychic reality) and culture. The paper acknowledges the key importance of the cultural-historical traditions initiated by Lev Vygotsky and his successors as well as the idea that their potential has yet to be realized by contemporary psychology. A new vision of culture is given to culturology (in comparison with traditional cultural studies) and its significance in conducting modern psychological research: a novel problematization of psychology’s subject matter and its methodological support. Different aspects of the psyche’s cultural determination, the experience with cultural psychology (historical psychology) in researching historical mental types (“Annals school”) are reviewed alongside with the role of culture knowledge in analyzing the psychological results of this determination. The consistency of culture and its components represented and internalized by mental structures is announced as a fundamental cultural basis of psychological research. The return influence of psychological phenomena on culture’s various aspects, as well as related cultural and psychological problems, are determined by the fundamental place and role of the psyche in any given cultural system as well as the contradictions that exist between a culture and the psyche. All this requires further examination. One of the most vital contemporary challenges facing psychology is the problem of the mental peculiarities of the consciousness, which can be principally explained in terms of a consistent culturological approach. Interrelationships between the psyche’s properties and conscious cultural functions are shown through example of aesthetic attitude.