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Chapter 15
investigation. This does not look like the relation of mineralogy to physics, or like the complete separation of psychology from philosophy and idealism.
To show what kind of jump Chelpanov made in his psychological views since 1922, one must not dwell upon his general philosophical statements and accidental phrases, but upon his theory of the analytic method. Chelpanov protests against mixing the tasks of explanatory psychology with those of descriptive psychology and explains that they are absolutely contradictory. In order not to leave any doubt about the question as to which psychology he~ regards as of primary importance, he connects it with Husserl’s phenomenology, with his theory of ideal essences, and explains that Husserl’s eidos or essence is basically equivalent to Plato’s ideas. For Husserl, phenomenology stands to descriptive psychology as mathematics does to physics. Phenomenology and mathematics are, like geometry, sciences about essences, about ideal possibilities; descriptive psychology and physics are about facts. Phenomenology makes explanatory and descriptive psychology possible.
Despite Husserl’s opinion, for Chelpanov phenomenology and analytic psychology partially overlap and the phenomenological method is completely identical with the analytic method. Chelpanov explains Husserl’s refusal to regard eidetic psychology and phenomenology as being identical in the following way. By contemporary psychology he understands only empirical, i.e., inductive psychology, despite the fact that it also contains phenomenologieal truths. Thus, there is no need to separate phenomenology from psychology. The phenomenological method must be laid at the basis of the objective experimental methods, which Chelpanov timidly defends against Husserl. This is the way it was, this is the way it will be, the author concludes.
How can we square this with his claim that psychology is only empirical, excludes idealism by its very nature and is independent from philosophy?
We can summarize. Whatever the division in question is called, whatever shades of meaning in each term are emphasized, the basic essence of the question remains the same and it can be reduced to two propositions.
1. In psychology empiricism indeed proceeded just as spontaneously from idealistic premises as natural science did from materialistic ones, i.e., empirical psychology was idealistic in its foundation.
2. For certain reasons (to be considered below), in the era of the crisis empiricism split into idealistic and materialistic psychology. MUnsterberg (1920, p. 14), too, interprets the difference in terminology as unity of meaning. We can speak of causal and intentional psychology, or about the psychology of the spirit and the psychology of consciousness, or about understanding and explanatory psychology. But the only thing of principal importance is that we recognize the dual nature of psychology. Elsewhere MUnsterberg [1920, pp. vii-viii] contrasts the psychology of the contents of consciousness with the psychology of the spirit, the psychology of contents with the psychology of acts, and the psychology of sensations with intentional psychology.
We have basically reached an opinion which established itself in our science long ago: psychology has a deeply dualistic nature which pervades its whole development. We have, thus, arrived at an indisputably historic situation. The history of the science does not belong to our tasks and we may leave aside the question as to the historical roots of dualism and confine ourselves to pointing out this fact and explaining the proximate causes which led to the exacerbation and bifurcation of dualism in the crisis. It is, essentially, the fact that psychology is attracted to two poles, this intrinsic presence of a “psychoteleology” and a “psychobiology,” which Dessoir [1911, p. 230] called the singing in two voices of contemporary psychology, and which in his opinion will never cease.

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