Development of the psyche in phylogenesis: the paradigms of theoretical analysis and the stages of the process

To objectively understand the development of the human psyche within the framework of phylogenesis, it is necessary to clarify the content of this concept itself.

Phylogeny is a process of development of a biological organism in connection with historical circumstances and factors that accompany this development and serve as its sources. Schematicized this can be represented in the form of a branching tree that grows, and in the process of growth, some branches die, and others develop.

The term ontogeny introduced into the circulation by E. Haeckel and suggesting the consideration of development as a process of realizing the genetic potential of the organism or its elements and functions is somewhat different in content.

To date, science has developed quite a few directions and doctrines that explore the development of the psyche in phylogeny. Their main difference is that they use different approaches and basic criteria for assessing certain parameters of the human psyche.

Let us consider some of them.

Anthropopsychism - the teaching that Rene Descartes founded - is based on the assumption that the position of the psyche is only axiomatic in a species such as man. In this sense, Descartes deduces the idea of the evolutionary regularity of the appearance of the psyche and its external conditioning.

Representatives of another school - panpsychism (first of all, representatives of the French materialism Helvetius, Diderot, Lametrie) believed that the development of the psyche in phylogeny is not subject to limitation, but inherent in everything that surrounds us, for example, stone, water, wood. In this they saw the spirituality of everything.

More moderate in comparison with the theory of panpsychism is a view on the development of the psyche in phylogeny, which was followed by the founders of biopsychism - E. Fromm, A. Lowen. They attributed the presence of the psyche to only living nature, including plants.

Quite common in the scientific world is the view of representatives of neuropsychism - the scientific school, the founder of which is usually called Charles Darwin. According to this teaching, the development of the psyche in phylogeny can occur only in those organisms that have a nervous system. This school, in fact, was not only dominant in Soviet science, but, perhaps, the only one that did not cause ideological criticism and persecution. However, many questions remained that could not be answered by neuropsychism, although the contribution of some of its representatives to the world science is difficult to overestimate.

The founders of a narrower direction of neuropsychism, brain psychopsychism, tried to find out how the psyche develops in the process of phylogenesis, one of the main scientific ideologists of which was the outstanding neuropsychologist KK Platonov. Representatives of this paradigm insisted that the psyche is an attribute of those organisms that have not just a nervous system, but the most perfect element of it - the brain. The brain, indeed, only in the higher animals has a tubular structure, while insects, for example, have a nodular structure of the structure of the nervous system.

Despite the essential differences of all these systems of knowledge, they all recognize that the presence of a person's consciousness and mind is a distinctive sign of him as a biological species. And this concerns not only mental development during the phylogenetic process. This property also characterizes the development of the psyche in ontogeny.

The evolution of the psyche includes several stages:

- transition from motor-sensory perception and reflection to a perceptual form;

- movement from the perceptual form to the intellectual stage;

- the development of mental capacity from the intellectual level to consciousness, within which the basic parametric properties of the psyche of the individual are the ability to create a subject-material environment in images, to master the language, to master and adequately apply knowledge and behavioral norms in everyday life.

The consideration of each of these phases is a rather extensive task, taking into account the multitude of interpretations and the purely subjective nature of the actual base that is used in this direction of science.