Associationism

Associationism, a school of thought in psychology that dominated in the mid-19th century and taught that mental life represents a sum of individual "elements" (sensations, representations, experiences) connected (associated) with one another. Thus, according to Associationism, the processes of memory, imagination, thinking, etc., are nothing other than the result of the combination of individual representations, according to the laws of association by contiguity and by similarity. The school of Associationism contributed much to the development of psychology, introducing natural-scientific methods into it and pushing for the necessary, within certain limits, dissection of complex mental processes. Recently, a peculiar revival of the principles of Associationism has been observed, but no longer in the field of subjective psychology, but in the field of the objective study of the behavior of animals and humans. Thus, reflexology in its broad interpretation and American psychology of behavior ("behaviorism") strive to explain all behavior, even in its most complex forms, by the mechanical connection ("association") of simple conditioned reflexes with conditioned reflexes of a higher order (super-reflexes).

The school of Associationism encountered serious criticism from a number of psychologists. It was pointed out that the mental "stream" is distinguished by its indivisibility, having a holistic character (James), and that, besides simple associated sensations and representations, there are organizing principles in the psyche, such as, for example, apperception (Wundt), determining tendencies (Mach), acts (Stumpf), and so on. This criticism usually pointed to the distinctiveness and indivisibility of mental processes and at the same time had a clearly idealistic character, often refusing a materialistic explanation of holistic mental phenomena. Recently, a number of scientists (Wertheimer and others) have developed a methodology for the objective investigation of holistic mental processes, such as even the simplest mental functions, e.g., perception. By this, a step was objectively taken along the path of applying the foundations of materialist dialectics to questions of psychology, which considers every process, including the mental one, in its qualitative distinctiveness. The Marxist school in psychology rejects the teachings of Associationism as mechanistic and, while relating the laws of association only to certain areas of the psyche, also studies a number of other regularities of the psyche, which are ultimately connected with associative ones, but specifically differ from the latter (see Psychology, Dialectical Method).