The Origins of Cultural and Historical Understanding of Human Motivation: the French Sociological School

This article analyzes the motivation of human behavior in one of the first thoroughly elaborated approaches of cultural and historical areas in the world psychology — in the French sociological school. The representatives of the school - E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl, M. Halbwachs, M. Moss, and others — in a sense significantly determined the «mainstream» of motivational research of their time. In the early decades of the last century they have developed notions of the society as being a very special source of human motives. The society has a particular ability to create «sacred» by the deification of certain objects, or leaders or state as a whole, as well as all sorts of ideas and symbols that attract people to conduct either a heroic act or a crime. Some of Durkheim ideas and his colleagues still represent a «zone of proximal development» for modern psychology of motivation. For example, «collective representations» dictating to people a large part of their actions, the totems as social groups representations, «immersive individuals» who feel themselves as a part of the social whole, social frameworks that determine the motives and behaviors of people.

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