PERSONALITY (TRANSLATED INTO UKRAINIAN BY OLGA HONCHARENKO (EDITORED BY SVITLANA POVTOREVIA) BY: BALEY S. OSOBOWOŚĆ / STEFAN BALEY. – LWÓW: LICEALNA BIBLIOTECZKA FILOZOFICZNA, 1939. – T. 5. – 36 P.)

Abstract

Dedicated to Stepan Baley (1885–1952) – a native of Ternopil region, a famous Ukrainian and Polish psychologist, teacher, Doctor of Philosophy (1911), member of the National School of Education (1917), Doctor of Medicine (1923), Professor (1927), Academician of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor of the Department of Educational Psychology of the University of Warsaw (1928–1952). Field of scientific interests – child psychology, pedagogical psychology, pedagogical psychodiagnostics, pedagogical psychotechnics, psychology of maturation, experimental pedagogy, psychology of educational contact, social psychology, psychology of creativity. Famous works: “Psychology of Educational Contact” (1931), “Psychology of the Age of Maturation” (1932), “Essay on Psychology in Connection with the Development of the Child’s Psyche” (1935), “Educational Psychology in Essay” (1938), “Personality” (1939), “Paths of Self-Knowledge” (1947), “Introduction to Social Psychology” (1959) and others. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the structural approach becomes leading in scientific knowledge and in the knowledge of the essence of man in particular. Thus, in the psychology of the Geneva scientist Jean Piaget, a structure is a system of transformations that has its own, purely systemic laws, as opposed to those that are based on the properties of individual elements, and which is self-preserved or enriched as a result of the application of transformations, and the latter do not go beyond their own limits and do not involve external elements in their processes. The structural approach to the study of personality is used by the Viennese psychopath Sigmund Freud (in the topical structure of the human psyche there are three layers: Id, Ego, Super-Ego), the German personalist William Stern (the structure of personality is unity in diversity), the American personalist Gordon Willard Allport (personality is a dynamic organization that determines the uniqueness of its interaction with the environment, primarily social), the Russian scientist Lev Vygotsky, etc. The polyphony of personality theories attracts the Ukrainian psychologist Stepan Baley, but does not dissolve in himself. Remembering the advice of his teacher Kazimierz Twardowski, he steps towards the truth through conscientious research accessible only to valid arguments. S. Baley, like Brentano and Twardowski, understands consciousness as a spiritual thing that has its own structure. He is characterized by the study of personality from the standpoint of integrity. The determined unity of the personality structure is internally differentiated, implies a relationship between elements. In this case, the study of personality acquires a formal character: it is a question of a way of representing the personality structure in the form of a model. But, at the same time, the structural study of the “I” of the personality of S. Baley has a significant difference, which consists in predicting the functional connections of mental phenomena with corporeality, while an important prerequisite for using Brentano’s mereological model of research is the consideration of consciousness as a closed whole. The prerequisite for such a difference in Baley’s views was Tvardovsky’s understanding of psychological dispositions in the field in which the work of a psychologist constantly encounters the work of a physiologist, and mainly, a neurologist. Baley’s treatment of personality as a psychophysical unity is also connected with his medical education. Thus, the scientist aimed to eliminate the gap between the body and the soul, which were a separate subject of study of the “sciences of the spirit” and the sciences of nature, respectively. The use of synthetic possibilities of structural methodology allowed the scientist to get closer to the knowledge of the essence of man. In the center of attention of S. Baley is the desire to show that knowing oneself is an independent experience of forming subjectivity, the goal of which is the formation of a person as a co-participant in social existence. S. Baley provokes reflections on what the educational process in educational institutions should be like, so that a young person, upon leaving them, will be able to take care of himself throughout his life.