nouncements by different groups of Marxists-psychologists. It would not be correct, for instance, to raise the problem of the district soviet [74] and Marxism, although the theory of Marxism has undoubtedly no fewer resources to shed light upon the question of the district soviet than upon reflexology and although the district soviet is a directly Marxist idea which is logically connected with the entire whole. And nevertheless we make use of other scales, we utilize intermediate, more concrete and less universal concepts. We talk about the Soviet power and the district soviet, about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the district soviet, about class struggle and the district soviet. Not everything which is connected with Marxism should be called Marxist. Often this goes without saying. When we add to this that what psychologists usually appeal to in Marxism is dialectical materialism, i.e., its most universal and generalized part, then the disparity of the scales becomes still clearer.

Finally, there is a special difficulty in the application of Marxism to new areas. The present concrete state of this theory, the enormous responsibility in using this term, the politiôal and ideological speculation with it—all this prevents good taste from saying “Marxist psychology” now. We had better let others say of our psychology that it is Marxist than call it that ourselves. We put it into practice and wait a little with the term. In the final analysis, Marxist psychology does not yet exist. It must be understood as a historical goal, not as something already given. And in the contemporary state of affairs it is difficult to get rid of the impression that this name is used in an unserious and irresponsible manner.

An argument against its use is also the circumstance that a synthesis between psychology and Marxism is being accomplished by more than one school and that this name can easily give rise to confusion in Europe. Not many people know that Adler’s individual psychology links itself to Marxism. In order to understand what kind of psychology this is, we should remember its methodological foundations. When it argued its right to be a science it referred to Rickert, who says that the word “psychology” applied by the natural-scientist and the historian has two different meanings and therefore distinguishes natural-scientific and historical psychology. If one would not do this, then the psychology of the historian and the poet could not be called psychology, because it has nothing in common with psychology. And the theorists of the new school assumed that Rickert’s historical psychology and individual psychology were one and the same thing [cf. Binswanger, 1922, p.

333].

Psychology has been divided into two parts and the debate is only about the name and the theoretical possibility of the new independent branch. Psychology is impossible as a natural science, the individual factor cannot be subsumed under any law; it does not want to explain, but to understand (ibid.). This division was introduced into psychology by Jaspers, but by understanding psychology he meant Husserl’s phenomenology. As the basis of any psychology it is very important, even irreplaceable, but it is not itself and does not want to be, individual psychology. Understanding psychology can only proceed from teleology. Stem founded such a psychology; personalism is but another name for understanding psychology. But he attempts to study the personality in differential psychology with the means of experimental psychology, of the natural sciences: both explanation and understanding remain equally unsatisfactory. Only intuition and not discursive-causal thinking can lead to the goal. The title “philosophy of the ego” it considers to be honorary. It is no psychology at all, but philosophy, and wishes to be so. And such a psychology, about whose nature there can be no doubt, refers in its constructions, for example in the theory of mass psychology, to Marxism, to the theory of the base and superstructure, as to its natural foundation. In social psychology it has yielded the hitherto best and most interesting project of a synthesis of Marxism and individual