Psychotherapy and Science: the Problem of the “Schism”

The differentiation between psychotherapy and scientific psychology, including its applied branches, allows to remove the problem of the “schism” between them, set in 1996 by F.E. Vasilyuk on the basis of Vygotsky’s “philosophy of practice” and is still discussed in the domestic literature on the methodology of psychology. Tracing the history of the “schism” problem in Russian psychology, the author concludes that this “imaginary problem” is a consequence of the syncretic association of psychotherapy and applied branches of psychology into a single conglomerate of “practical psychology” that was made by methodolo gists without bothering with special cultural-historical and typological analysis of modern anthropropraxis. The methodology and conceptual apparatus for this kind of analysis is proposed, which allows us to conduct a reasoned demarcation between two types of modern anthropropraxis: “functional-technological” and “existential-personal”. The first includes anthropopractic, derived from the modern European sciences, the second is represented by a new for the modern era — psychotherapy, which appeared due to the “mutation” of the clinical discourse produced by psychoanalysis.

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