Nostalgia for a Personality: roaming like a babe in the woods (From personal archive V.P. Zinchenko)

Abstract

The paper analyses such polysemantic terms as “subject”, “individual”, “personality”, and which form sincretic notions, e.g. “subjectivity of personality”, “multisubjectivity of personality”, etc. The author claims that he was unable to find in the works of other authors meaningful connections between the concepts of «subject» and «personality». The concept of «subject» is used in such a wide meaning that its content potential is close to zero. It highlights the complexity of understanding the subject, and provides evidence of the difficulties that the author finds in the works of the leading philosophers and psychologists who are concerned with the issue of personality. As a result, the author concludes that the analysis of the different forms of reflexivity and, their base practices are the theory of psychology of the subject. The second term of the triad – the individual or the individuality, is both the subject and the subject matter and objective of an infinite number of studies. At the same time the concepts of «subject» and «personality» are not congruent to the concept of «individual», although many attempts to define or describe the personalityare repelled by the notion of individual. The phenomenon of personality expresses a rather late result of human development. The interpretation of these terms by G.G. Shpet, S.L. Rubinshtein, B.M. Teplov, A.N. Leontiev, etc. is refurbished. The author believes the main issue of psychological research is personality. On the ontological plane,there are two notions of personality: down — to the subject — to a function or a collection of functions; and up — to the personality — to an ideal, to the limit of self-construction, to spirituality and freedom.

Keywords

• psychology
• subject
• individual
• individuality
• personality