Psychology and culturology: A means of cooperating and problems associated with cooperation

Zaks, L.A. Liberal Arts University–University for Humanities, Ekaterinburg, Russia

For ages, psychology has been fruitfully cooperating with various cultural studies (the name given to the humanities after a well-known book by G. Rikkert), ranged from philosophy to linguistics and ethnology, and from history and anthropology to aesthetics. Modern “cultural-historical psychology” started with L. S. Vygotsky and his school, and the notion and the idea of culture are considered to be the school’s basic concepts. The ideas of Vygotsky and his disciples A.N. Leontiev and A.R. Luria were further developed not only in Russian psychology but also worldwide, by American cultural-historical psychologist D. Brunner, M. Cole, S. Scribner, and M. Tomacello. The flectedinfluence of psychology on culture studies was first documented in the late 19th century. V. Dilthey’s psychology-inspired philosophy and literature studies, g. Zimmel’s sociology, A. Potebnya and D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s psychological aesthetics and literature studies in Russia, and overwhelming Freudian as well as neo-Freudian impacts on all the humanities also testify to these ideas.

In the twentieth century, culturology appeared as a science of culture, where culture means an organized wholeness (system), its general (systemic) properties, as well as its laws and variations. The birth of culturology was historically and genetically related to a whole system of cultural studies, and marked a new level of understanding culture and its components. Further work on this sophisticated phenomenon integrated the characteristic features of both social and individual human existence. Despite the controversial present-day status of culturology, its presence has far-reaching consequences for the entire system of social and anthropological studies, psychology among them. But psychology with its corpus of knowledge and approaches is equally essential for culturological thought.

This article is aimed at analyzing the synergetic relationship between psychology and culturology alongside prospects for using this knowledge to relate Man and society.

Let us start with a fundamental point for our consideration. What objectively binds psychology with culturology? What constitutes the basis for their cooperation ?

Culturology and psychology are objective multilateral relationships, the complex mutual determination of main system objects (culture and the psychic reality of human beings) builds a foundations for this cooperation. Every macro object is indeed [1] universal in terms of the human world, albeit in different ways. Culture comprises a wide range of modalities and substrates; it is closely “interlocked” and “fused” with all forms and manifestations of social life and the experience of particular individuals without exception, whereas “the psyche” is a specific, “mono- substrate”, it has its own qualitative limitations, which means it is “localized”. “The psyche” itself acts as one of culture’s substrates and specifies particular ways in which it exists: the ideal and the mental. But these differences in ontological perspective, diversity and quality cannot eliminate the psyche’s integrity and “unalienatedness” regarding the universe-continuum of social and cultural existence, and this allows both the psyche and culture to be treated as attributes of human society. Thus, the relationship between culture and psyche present the relationship between two attributes which are fundamentally important for Man and his world’s realities. Hence, the resulting point is the attribute/fundamental character of “culture-psyche/the psychological relationship, which in itself is the basis for our consideration.

The interrelationship between culture and psyche can be expressed in T. Dobzhanskiy’s words, though he spoke of man’s biology (you may use “psyche” instead): “...trying to understand man’s biology while neglecting cultural influences is as useless as attempting to interpret culture’s genesis and rise without knowing the biological nature of Man”(Cole, 1997, 191). These words truthfully reflect two sides of culture-psyche interdependence: 1. Culture→Psyche; 2. Psyche→Culture. Both cases imply a promising cooperation between psychology and culturology.

1. Culture →Psyche. In this relationship, culture represents both a system and a force that determines the psyche as a human functional system as well as particular aspects of personal or group mental life. Here, in psychological reality, the essence of culture is ultimately realized as a starting point for forming specific human existential peculiarities, world adaptation specifics, as well as reproduction and characteristic evolutionary features which are species-typical for Homo Sapiens. L.S. Vygotsky expressed precisely this correlation: “Culture creates special forms of behavior, changes the functioning of mental structures, and writes new scenarios in the progressing system of people’s conduct”. On this conceptual basis, Vygotsky explained the genesis and specific ontology of mental abilities and processes associated exclusively with people or, according to Vygotsky, “higher mental functions”. It should be mentioned that even for this absolutely “culture-oriented” school of psychology, in its continuing historical and genetic research, the culturological approach to culture seems to be very fruitful. It is most vividly seen as something that bridges the gap/contradiction between humans and the higher animals that following J.-M. Shaffer can be called “the end of man’s uniqueness”. A vision /understanding of culture as a natural historic system that in the unity of its most significant features, is able to predict the specific qualities of man: his distinction from “the wild” is of great importance. Undoubtedly, certain “artificial” (super-biological) aspects of human existence such as artifacts, language and symbolic communications, the transfer of knowledge and experience, etc., are extremely important but each of them taken separately does not ensure a specifically human existence. They do not underscore the notion that man is substantially different from animals as, to some extent, they are typical of non-human primates, too. The qualitative leap of mankind; man’s transition from the animal kingdom while keeping up the whole kinship with nature and at that, capability of being reversed are ensured only by the unity of all mutually-attributed and conditioned “artificialities”. They are culture in its onto-functional wholeness, a source, a foundation, an acting part, a system generating and maintaining everything that we call “the human”. And this wisdom is exclusively received, understood, theoretically and methodologically accumulated by culturology. Neither cultural anthropology nor meta-psychology (at the level of Freud, Skinner and Vygotsky’s theories) or sociology are able to produce this knowledge, and sometimes they are not able to borrow it “ready-made” from culturology.

However, this phylogenetic aspect of culture’s impact on the psyche is not the only one. Another view, which has been actively elaborated for a long time, is a historical approach. Here a time factor is introduced into the “culture-psyche” relationship, and we obtain a history of culture with its influence on the psyche, as well as an understanding of what psychological types are formed by which different historical types of cultures, and what they are. The range of problems is so wide and so important (just think of forty thousand years of human history!), that it is not enough to simply speak of the influence of culturology on psychology. “On the border” where culturology (particularly historical culturology) and history meet, a new, culture-logical sub-discipline has appeared (which is a part of psychology at the same time). It is called the psychology of culture, historical psychology (Lotman, Uspensky, 1977, another interpretation of historical psychology is suggested by Shkuratov, 1997). This science was initiated by French historians at the School of Annals (M. Bloch, L. Febvre, J. Le goff, G. Duby, etc.). In Russia, A.Y. gurevich is studying medieval culture and the psychology of the culture French scholars followed. Due to Annals School’s historians, the object of a new scientific area was understood and formulated mainly as a psychological one. Mentality became such an object, representing the wholeness of a subject’s psychic organization for a certain culture type emerging in the course of natural history. It is a generating matrix/programming structure which determines the specific features of the subjects’ world-perception, world-view, world-experience (world-feeling), and world-conception; that is, in general, a way of seeing the world and one’s world outlook. The research led to astonishing results which were highly appreciated around the world. However, when introducing the mentality concept as a central point in fact, Annals School historians did not build the whole psychological “construction”. Their “theoretical constructions” actually explore the collective consciousness and its individual carriers: medieval people and their descendants. The dominant focus of this approach is the mind content (the same as the super-individual (cultural) content of the epoch, the historical type of culture); consequently, such concepts as a system of values, collective consciousness, and worldview came to the fore. genuine psychological notions were used much more rarely. For example, J. Legoff analyzed “imagination” mainly as a specific component of the cultural content, the consequence-realization of the medieval people’s world outlook, a synonym for their worldview. Finally, we have very rich, well-justified data concerning medieval people’s knowledge and values: their views on nature, society, sacral reality and themselves. However, we cannot acquire proper psychological information, for instance, about what and how these people felt and desired, in what way, not logical but psychological, they thought; what constituted the intrinsic structure of their intimate psychological world, the correlation of their main psychological forces, psychological energy tension, the psyche’s emotional scale, tempo-rhythm, and what “temperature”, etc., used to be. Concurrently research issues were extended and involved material parts of culture alongside mental ones: the pattern of civilization, the structure of collective being, as well as systems of production activities and economic relations (in F. Braudel’s works). However, the scholars did not see any contradictions in their discourse, they studied the things that excited them, namely, those that were vivid and full of events; a multipronged history connecting culture and the life course of a living man programmed by it, his mentality and conduct, which proved to be more interesting to this research as a socio-cultural rather than a psychological phenomenon. That is why their willful shift from “history of mentalities” to “historical anthropology” (after the ‘Conclusions’ of the above-mentioned P.Y. gurevich book) became logical. This research focus is similar in subject to historical psychology and the psychology of culture but totally different in essence. Nowadays historical anthropology is following the course of researching the history of particular psychological powers and mental phenomena in the context of socio-cultural history.

But the one-sided character of this development is clearly seen from a culturological point of view. First, the cognitivists’ specialization still dominates (contemporary variants of socio-cultural psychology in its phylo- and ontogenetic research alike). First of all, intellectual history is studied with its focus on historical semantics (“intellectual language of the epoch, history of ideas, history of words”, “history of concepts, history of discourse, history of mentality” — these are quotations from latest publications (Buedecker, 2010; Zenkin, 2011).

Generally speaking, even 18th century psychology and anthropology showed a tendency towards rationalism; the mind is great but where are senses and will?

Quite the same can be said about the psychology of culture, which is devoted to explaining the logic and specific results of psychological forms and spirituals forces as the phenomena produced by culture and history. The situation is similar to the will component in the psychology of culture: the psychology of wish and act, the essence of the phenomena is well studied by philosophical anthropologists and ethics specialists, but it requires historical and psychological apprehension.

Second, spiritual senses and will (together with reason) only starches the surface of the psyche. In this case, we “stumble” over the unconscious psychic as a problem of cultural and historical psychology and the psychology of culture. S. Freud’s naturalistic theory can explain many things, but not everything; it has its own limits and restrictions, as epitomized by Eros’ and Tanat’s dark irrepressible forces, their sublimations and metamorphoses. According to Freud, culture is known to deal with the unconscious, but it is not pertinent to its nature and content. There is a problem of explaining, for example, why mainly the same psychological forces people have (sexual drives, for instance) that have passed through creative sublimation mechanism lead to idea-meaning and image-language results that are different in every respect (say, in art), which at that have undisputable historical and typological similarities/differences. The answer is clear: the unconscious is not alien to culture and mind’s cultural forms and mental experience. It is an area of culture; its influence and controls ensure the integration of natural psychological forces (unconscious and actually animal-like) and living practices and consciousness, practical and conscious experience: the “Lacanian” semiotic structures of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Psychology and culturology should be united in order to give the socio-cultural explanation of the unconscious and the conscious world’s relationships. This process follows the pattern that M.M. Bakhtin (V.N. Voloshinov) suggested early on in “Freudism” (Bakhtin, 1998). It also embodies the spirit of Vygotsky, whose ideas Bakhtin highly valued: the unconscious is treated as a “deferred”, “gone-underground-for-a while” consciousness; this occurs due to the impossibility of the unconscious being realized in practice. There must be a “pan-cultural” understanding of the unconscious in polemics, with Freud disregarding culture-nature dialectics. Culture probably acts differently, and it requires further research. But anyway it can find ‘links’ between consciousness and the unconscious,  ‘mediate’ deep natural powers that primarily seem purely natural, and sometimes “cope with them” ...by meeting them - not only repressing and transforming them but also legitimizing them and translating them into a culture’s own language, thus giving them a chance “to come true”. As a result, the unconscious is rendered both history-oriented and manageable (determined) by culture, adapted to the space and norms of conscious culture.

Psychoanalysis, after all, is the cultural psychotherapy practice of adapting and managing unconscious impulses and complexes.

“Psychology today is an example of the increasing differentiation of scientific knowledge. It is marked with “methodological liberalism” and “methodological pluralism”, with an abundance of theoretical and applied lines, approaches, and tendencies” (Zinchenko, Pervichko, 2012, 33).

Third, let us come back to conscious mentality, the process of its formation, and its existence in the spiritual subculture system and try to understand it using a consistent approach to culture and its key subsystems and structures. When dealing with “consistent culturological” patterns, it is helpful to avoid the “automatic” “blind-conformist” position and bear in mind the necessity and the character of a systemic view. The need for cultural inner self-organization, existential optimization, self-preservation and other needs makes it unavoidable, but we should primarily do it for the most important socio-ontological culture function to be realized - victory over nature/chaos/entropy via the creation and maintenance of a strict order. The function of enforcing uniformity and integrating society becomes one of the most important for culture. That is why “culture itself needs some cohesion. It should be a structure which is subjected to unified constructive principles for carrying out its social function” (Lotman, Uspenskiy, 1993, Vol.3, 342). Structuring via common constructive principle should appear, and it does appear at the inner programming core level, which is the level of culture. This purpose dictates that psychology based on culturology should switch from “parts” to “the whole”; from the historical study of separate feelings and other psychic states to learning about mental structures which are integral to certain cultures, such as world-feeling, world-view and world-conception, in the mutuality of their cultural psychological form and their informational content [2].

Fourth, since culture and soul-bound culture are not identical, the cultural determination of the psyche should be considered within the cooperation of psychology and culturology and beyond the self-sufficient psychic reality of spiritual culture. For example, it should be considered without any exaggeration, through- out the whole culture field, within and between all its subsystems’ boundaries. Here culture solves various material-practical problems, and the psyche becomes a substrate and a way of existence for different practical mind forms and modifications and turns into a “ministerial”, applied science. It is pragmatically specialized; it supports the solving of problems of this sort. Historically, these practical utilitarian modifications of the psyche appear earlier than self-sufficient (self- governing) spiritual ones. One cannot say that they have not been studied so far.

But this research, as a rule, is of a purely empirical and, to some extent, random character because they are “prompted” by the practical needs of the fields where the particular modifications of the ‘pragmatic applied’ psyche were shaped and functioned (it is worth noting that the “culture of communication interaction in a dynamic and complex society acts as a factor which provides limitations on the crises which abound in modern society” (Dontsov, Perelygina, 2011). They were not treated through the lens of the whole cultural “horizon” as its legitimate elements/subsystems, following its regularity, and arranged according to the general logic of culture.

The logic of culture conceived by culturology which is an undoubtedly non- linear, multidimensional, multi-faceted one-organizes the conceptual space of psychological studies into culture and its phenomena. First and foremost, it entails the macro-regresses, macro-structure of culture: along with spiritual culture, it embraces a huge and complex subsystem of material culture and has expanded recently (late 1990s — early 2000s) to the state and status of a separate subsystem’s information-communication element. This element used to exist in a diffuse form, in ontological cohesion and functional subordination to material and spiritual subsystems [3]. The very material culture comprises two large subsystems entailing two key dimensions of human practical existence: nature­reforming (people’s life in nature, its utilization as a basis for socio-cultural being) and socio­organizing (ways and means by which people self-organize into teams, communities and collectives). All these systems not only collectively determine the contents and forms of the mass and individual psychology of modern people that set them apart from their predecessors, but also produce modifications of the psyche for themselves, for, so to say, their own needs. Every time there are specific functional systems of mind and psyche that represent and subjectively interiorize; they ensure that people, who happen to be included into these systems or socio-cultural chronotopes, appropriate their laws, properties, processes and conditions. Culturology- oriented psychology substantiates its studies with regard to the general content, build-up and functioning of these subsystems’ “wholeness” and their separate components’ specifics. For instance, the whole nature-transforming subsystem of material culture compounded of interactions comprising different material activities (producing and consuming), equipment, technology and fragments of the nature being transformed requires a certain corresponding type of mentality/ consciousness (professional, productive and consumption-related ones). How- ever, in the framework of this system it is necessary to identify mental man/ collective dependences on the technical-technological complexes that are used, which are formed by the latter psychic abilities, attitudes and processes without which technical effective employment is impossible. In the same way, a socio- organizing subsystem of material culture produces the socio-practical mind as a complex of psychological abilities, properties and processes that permit the free independent being of people to exist (Zaks, 2012; Zaks, 2013). Within this sys- tem, one should inevitably single out functional mental systems determined by people being in the forms offered: social institutions, communication and behavior patterns (social statuses, roles, discourses, behavior styles, integral “life-style” models. “One of the basic elements of social relations is inter-group interaction, based on a set of personality notions concerning his social milieu and relationships as well as a specific ways to perceive and assess them” (Dontsov, Perelygina, 2011, 85). A specific (although not “separate”, as in ontologically or functionally marked out) psycho-complex of normative consciousness is in consonance with attributed to all socio-organizing subsystem normative element which plays the role of a universal technology of the social. In a modern Russia context, its necessity can be convincingly proved “by contradiction”: an array of social norms are worked out and declared in all spheres of life, but ... they do not work, as they stumble across the “immaturity” of obedient mind, which was smartly de- scribed by M.E. Saltykov-Schedrin. Evidently, this regrettable tradition must be counter-balanced, not only with some socio-managerial efforts (a special “norm- affirming” policy aimed at establishing a rigorous normative order) but also with psycho-pedagogical energy, which is based on knowledge that entails the peculiarities of the “composition”, formation and activity of normative consciousness in a socio-cultural system.

Let us shift our perspective from the specific to the general — psycho-cultural universals equally defined by the specifics of the culture as a whole (“the fifth” item in my listing). Problematic objects here are presented by concrete psychological phenomena or mental contradictions, or steady subjects’ psycho-types. A culture- generating character unites all these phenomena: derivation from culture itself rather than from life (naturally, with its cultural content and determination). It is clear that the psychological cognition of these objects is based on the modern vision of culture developed by the humanities and culturology. Among the concrete psychic phenomena are, for example, typical modern mental states such as nostalgia, apathy, future shock, culture shock, and optimism/pessimism. All these states can be explained only within the context of the cultural specifics embedded in people’s inner world. For example, nostalgia could not exist as a mass state, culture should not act as collective memory, and, consequently, should not cultivate the value of the past and an active retrospective of the past (“retro-consciousness). Culture shock directly results from mental habit and attachment to one’s own culture (while future shock is caused by attachment to a culture’s “present”, its absolutizations). Culture is used as a construction material for, and is an original source of, psychological systems. Therefore, any more or less important changes trigger psychological evolution: a transformation and rearrangement of the mental world, often unaccountable and unnoticeable at first sight, let alone conceivable changes. Mental contradictions present a reflection of the onto-functional problems of culture, as well as the dynamics associated with its activation and the intensification and exposure of the principal internal controversy of culture and social life. An example can be problems dealing with the dialectic between the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative. The degree of a confrontation’s psychological intensity might lead and indeed gives rise to a traumatic outcome: tradition trauma for those with a creative mentality and novelty/pioneering trauma for conservatives [4]. In everyday life, we witness numerous instances of both political and cultural psychic traumas such as freedom trauma, or violence/enforcement/ non-freedom trauma; democracy trauma and dictatorship/anti-democratic rule trauma.

Finally, let us consider culture-produced subjects’ psycho-types which are solely explainable within a cultural context. In line with its own arrangement’s logic and functional, contensive, formal unification/universalization (dominants-universals), culture shapes the same universal psycho-types of subjects: a practitioner/a man of spirit; a practitioner/a theorist; a model creator/an “after the model” worker; physicists vs. lyricists; a conservative-traditionalist/a pioneer; a norm follower/a deviance follower (tends to deviate from norms); a producer/a consumer; a mass culture man/ a man of elite, etc. The vast majority of these psycho-types should be reflected on, both philosophically, anthropologically, culture-logically and psychologically. “It is important to take into account the principal incompleteness of scientific and practical material as a matter of study by virtue of the constant actualization of an object at individual, group and socio-institutional levels” (Zinchenko, 2011). Psychological (theoretical) models of people with these or other socio-cultural dominants and, as their practical consequence, projective algorithms-recommendations on dealing with people of these types, influencing them, their embedding in micro- and macro groups, institutions, etc., as well as ways to manage and use them fruitfully can be formulated.

It is worth mentioning the results of a study into the relations between the specifics of how Russia residents categorized their social environment and how prone they were to optimism or pessimism. These data are analyzed in an A.I. Dontsov and I.A. Zelenov paper (Dontsov, Zelenov, 2010), based on a survey involving 1,535 respondents from 100 Russian towns. Psychologists emphasize the revealed coherence between the respondents’ pessimism and their perception of “few ‘us’ and a lot of ‘them’ ” (ibid., p. 142).

But, of course, a lot of problems arise at the intersection of psychology and culturology, science and life, theory and its application. One might assume the mentioned socio-cultural psycho-types are hypothetical and ideal (in Weber’s terminology); that’s all right. The ideal (constructed, probable) in theory often manifests itself (let it be a tendency, or an exception) in the psychology of real people. In this case it would be much better to stay ahead of processes than to be behind them, facing the “uncared-for” reality of mental properties and problems.

2. Mentality → culture. This shorthand expression states that this variant of our macro-objects’ mutual links relates to the role and the place of the mental in culture. In the light of these sciences’ interrelations, it indicates the role of psychology in culturology. It should be admitted that the fundamental role and place of the psychological in culture, the causal dependence of culture on psychology, have not been reflected on adequately so far. We see in this link a dependence of anthropological extent and depth: since in all respects the centre of culture is man, his mental characteristics are the genetic and functional cultural core6. This is a specific of [5] biological genesis as well, the one that makes a man not only somatically but also mentally a creature of nature with culture cultivated by him and for him being an expression of, addition to and development of his natural psychological forces [6]. In this sense, culture is defined by “resolving capacities of human material” (Mamardashvili, 1990, 340). If one could perceive, say, a culture of dolphins or bats, it would significantly differ from the human one. But culture is also determined by its own fruitful work with psychology, its organic neuro-psychologically-provided specifics of cultural-historic genesis: from the peculiarities and modifications of practical consciousness to “cerebral functions” (Vygotsky) which already possess a spiritual-mental character and qualitatively special informative contents. Clifford Geertz expressed this ambivalent dependence between mentality and culture as follows: “Man’s nervous system does not only allow him to acquire culture, it must make him do this in order for culture to function. Culture acts through developing, providing and expanding organically, logically and genetically prior to cultural abilities but more likely it is an integral part of these abilities as they are” (quoted in Cole, 1997, 192). It can be easily detected that here the second “item” of cultural- psychological relations alters first. At that, the essence of the second one does not change: the world of culture and its certain ‘lots” are defined by the specifics of corresponding psycho-and-mind modifications.

Below is just one but a very typical example concerning the mental foundations of spiritual culture, their programming “inbuiltness” in arrangement and the functioning of this culture subsystem: the human aesthetic attitude to the world. The very existence of this spiritual value-based attitude and its specifics are characterized by the combination of the inborn and cultural properties of the human mentality. The basis of aesthetics (underlined by the ancient greek etymology of the word “aesthesis”, which was actualized by A. Baumgarten) is comprised of immediate sensitive human contacts with the world via such senses as sight and hearing. It is these organs that fill the human mind with a diversity of concrete “sensitive” objects and create a chaotic vortex of things, phenomena, events and images. Alongside with it, there emerge psychological and mental problems. One of them is the necessity to transform the chaos of sensitive data in order to be capable of orienting in the world. The second is even more spirit-mind-functioning- related whole (“spiritual consciousness and psyche”): a man’s subjectivity (“self”) starts to endure the pressure of this sensitive world. A human undergoes some sort of dependence from it (non-freedom), hence, he feels existential discomfort, an inner imbalance. The main reasons for these particular instances of dependence and discomfort result from the fact that the inner world is discordant and full of conflict, life-threats and loss bearing, catastrophic events (processes). Culture responds to this naturally and with a historically conditioned spirit/psychological dependence on an aesthetic attitude, aesthetic culture creation. The exploratory learning of the world through aesthetic consciousness and its special psychological substrate and “machinery” (in essence, specific aesthetic mentality) with the help of certain phenomena of this and only this consciousness associated with aesthetic value-meanings passing through it, turns chaos into order, imbalance into harmony, subjective dependence, pressure, discomfort  into a joyful sensation of freedom. Aesthetic culture adds aesthetic practices to spiritual cognition (“contemplation”) of the world of sensation; people create “perfect” forms that harmonize their inner world. The general “exploration effect” unites the satisfaction of “natural” mental needs (information certainty, psycho-physiological comfort, emotional satiety and discharge, oblectation of sight and soul) and socio-cultural, soul-related ones (experience of a form, order, meaning, one’ own creativity and inner freedom, self-assertiveness and a high degree of satisfaction with it all). An A. Blok line, “I recognize and accept you, life”, and the idea that then impossible is possible can serve as a generalization of this desirable effect. Other spheres of culture, especially spiritual ones, are built up according to the needs and functional peculiarities of the psychic –spiritual world of humans. Culture provides sort of a complete circuit, the same system character of reproduction in this or that culture area: thus, specific spiritual, psychic structures (conscience, first of all) contribute to morale validity, and the functioning of the latter represents a basis, space and a way for the moral-psychic to exist.

I should state with regret that in spite of L. Vygotsky findings, psychology has not managed to possess a complete understanding of spiritual forms of the psyche so far, it sometimes even ignores them, does not identify or differentiate; there is no specially-designed language to study them and psychology does not make use of insights of the humanities, mainly, philosophy.

Other aspects of fundamental appositions of psychic and culture were originally reflected on by Z. Freud. He was the first to reveal a fundamental controversy between super-human cultural reality (super-ego) and nature-born psychological organization. He treated it as an inconsistency between a culture and someone’s psyche, or its reluctance or inability to take into consideration the mental characteristics of “normal” people which manifests itself as violence to their minds, with a traumatic impact on mentality. Fully realizing the necessity and crucial role of culture, Z. Freud, however, postulated a principal proposition of cultural imperfection (inconveniences), of dissatisfaction with culture (Freud, 2010) and substantiated this with a convincing critique of culture. Freud’s vision and theoretical-methodological “move” highlighted the promising and improperly developed problems that affect mentality/culture relationships. These problems include individual and socio-psychological issues that are generated by the culture itself and its concrete phenomena: their structure and functioning, intensity, imperative character, totality and very “supernaturedness”. This, in combination with the properties mentioned, appears to be in conflict with the natural features of the psyche, which due to mental tension results in multi-aspect negative phenomena (deviant and criminal behavior, mental and nervous disorders, etc.).

Evidently, culture itself and cultural studies should find solutions to these problems on the way “towards” man and his mentality, enabling a greater adaptation of culture to man’s characteristics and, at the same time, provide assistance to man, his psyche and his mind in their adjustment to culture. It is clear that these and the aforementioned issues, those that have already emerged and those that exist at the intersection of culture and mentality, are challenges for both culturology and psychology. They affect their interdisciplinary relations and symbioses (the psychology of culture is just one of many possible variants). The collaboration of psychology and culturology, the necessity of which is focused on in this article, seems to be very promising.

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Notes

[1] Richard D. Lewis, an English culture studies and psychology scholar, argues that science finds all the new evidence to the fact that people are similar in their inner, moral and ethical dimensions and differ in external manifestations, rituals, customs, and clothes. That is why the integration of cultural universalism and relativism principals has recently become a more widely debated topic (Lewis, 2001, 9).

[2] One of the authors suggested his own view on the complex psycho-semantic composition and structure: such culture-generating integral phenomena as world feeling and world view, as well as the analysis of their peculiarities and roles in art (Zaks, 1990; Zaks, 2009).

[3] This, in truth, historic “autonomisation” of information-communication-driven component and its transformation in a separate, and, indeed, dominating subsystem of modern culture is dealt with in philosophic, sociological and culturological theories of mass-media (M. Mcluhan, N. Luhmann, U. Eco and others) and information society (M. Castells, J. Baudrillard, P. Virilio, etc.).

[4] Ongoing social changes, the instability of external reference points, and the absence of solid absolute values that define an individual’s place in the world besides his own choice can cause discomfort and anxiety, and form a sense of amorphous identity (M. Hogg, A. Giddens, R. Lifton, and others).

[5] Vygotsky L.S., in particular, developed cultural-historical theory of human mental and personal development, widened the knowledge of conscious rethinking it on the basis of historic, semiotic and social approaches. “Higher mental functions”, one of the basic concepts of modern psychology, was introduced by Vygotsky and further explored by A. N. Leont’ev, A.V. Zaporozhets, D.B. El’konin, P.Y. Galperin.

[6] The psychological aspect of a man in his relationships with exactly corresponds to the interpretation of culture as s system of artificial “upgrading” — amplifiers of natural human forces culture formulated by M.K. Mamardashivili (1990). He even treated civilization on a whole as “accretion” to mind (Mamardashvili, 1990, 107).