АССОЦИАТИВНАЯ ПСИХОЛОГИЯ

Associationist Psychology

Various trends in psychology that use association as their main principle. The pre-history of the subject goes back to Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza; as a rule, each of the trends is divided into materialist and idealist branches.

Hartley and later Priestley, following Hobbes, developed the materialist tradition; they explained psychological activity by the general laws of association and maintained that such activity is conditioned by cerebral oscillations. The idealist aspect of associationist psychology reduces psychological activity to the association of subjective conceptions and is based on Hume's phenomenalism (Hume spoke of "clusters of impressions") and on Herbart.

Associationist psychology took final shape mainly in Britain in the 19th century (J.S. Mill, James Mill, Alfred Benn) and combines the materialist and idealist wings through mechanism (psychological atomism, mental chemistry, etc.). In the 20th century, associationist psychology continued in behaviorism, which greatly exaggerates the mechanistic tendencies inherent in it.

Ассоциативная психология

См. Ассоцианизм.