Publication Details

Abstract

The paper analyzes the influence of structuralism upon psychology. Structuralism, attempting to hide its idealistic agnosticism, fetishized the notion of structure, field, gestalt, system, model. In spite of the experimental fertility of gestaltism it failed in elucidating the substance of perception, thinking, forgetting. Informative proceedings, e. g., showed that the notion of ’’good shape” can be reduced to the principle of redundancy. In the developmental psychology of the structural conception, represented by Piaget, it contains a suggestion of a certain non-dialectical rigidity in isolating the development of thinking from the social and biological development. The Moreno structures represented by his sociometry contain in their theoretical conception the micro- and macrostructures obviously a defence of bourgeois society. The use of his method for the less pretentious interpretations remains, though, in the inventory of psychological methods, concretely in social psychology. A similar principle applies to the notion of role. Also the contemporary model proceedings are of heuristic value, but they profess — in broad generalizations — all negatives of philosophical structuralism, namely the replacement of phenomenon, relation by substance.