Basic Paradigms In Modern Psychology

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The concept of a scientific paradigm is detailed in the classic work of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote in 1962. In this work, he designates a paradigm as a system of ideas and representations that unites members of scientific communities, scientific achievements recognized by members of these communities as a system.

However, we are primarily interested not in the paradigm as such, not in the crises of science and paradigm changes in the philosophical and sociological sense, as described by Kuhn, but in the paradigms prevailing in modern psychology and psychotherapy.

Understanding the paradigm as the rules and standards adopted in the modern psychological scientific community, there are several such paradigms that guide psychologists.

V. A. Yanchuk in the monograph "Methodology, theory and method in modern social psychology and personology: an integrative-eclectic approach" (Minsk, 2000) identifies the following paradigms: behavioral, biological, cognitive, psychodynamic, existential, humanistic, hermeneutic, social constructivist, systemic, activity-based, gender (feminist) and synergistic.

It can be assumed that psychologists who refer themselves to different psychological schools also adhere to different paradigms: psychoanalysts - psychodynamic, Rogerians - humanistic, etc. Of course, this is a simplified view of the problem. So, for example, psychologists working in the cognitive-behavioral approach, even by name, can be attributed to specialists working in two paradigms at once - cognitive and behavioral; gestaltists, in my opinion, use both existential, and humanistic, and systemic paradigms.

By and large, any practicing specialist in the field of psychology cannot keep within the framework of one paradigm, but in one form or another uses most of them.

Usually, all the variety of psychological approaches and schools are divided into three large groups: psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral and existential-humanistic, sometimes (as, for example, V. E. Kagan speaking at the conference "Horizons of Psychology" in St. Petersburg on April 23, 2016 d) adding a transpersonal approach. In this regard, one could talk about three or four main paradigms in psychology (depending on whether or not we recognize the transpersonal approach as related to the scientific one).

As an example, the main provisions of the psychodynamic paradigm could be called:

1. The subject of research is the human psyche.
2. The main direction of research is the area of the unconscious (the existence of which is accepted a priori).

3. The principle of historicity is a symptom, a problem develops over time, has a cause in the person's past, etc.

Humanistic paradigm

1. The subject of research is personality, the system of personality relations.
2. The focus of attention is on the subjective sphere, first of all, on feelings, etc.

In this short article, I do not intend to give a detailed description of the paradigms currently accepted in psychology - just a sketch as an example.

Based on Kuhn's terminology, psychology is currently a metaparadigmatic science. There are a large number of paradigms that penetrate each other, enter into synthesis with each other. The clearest example is the fusion of cognitive and behavioral paradigms in the cognitive-behavioral approach.

Also, the emergence and increasingly widespread recognition of new paradigms - eclectic and integrative (or even, as in Yanchuk's - integrative-eclectic), however strange it may sound - metaparadigmatic paradigms.