Marx points out that true research is detailed truth. It is research—both theoretical and experimental—which reproduces the process being studied under deliberately changed conditions, that makes it possible to discover the truth.
This book is devoted to solving this task in relation to the social psychology of interpersonal relations and of the individual as the subject of these relations. The reader will find out the views of one Soviet psychologist, the author of the book, but the latter hopes that through this visual prism of psychological facts, the reader will get a clearer view of the fundamentals of the theory of Soviet psychology as a coherent system of scientific knowledge. This is yet another of the tasks of these studies. Taking into account that the foreign reader, interested in the state of Soviet social psychology, may very probably not be acquainted with the general course of development of psychology in the USSR, the author has preceded the main part of the book with a brief historical introduction (Chapter I), thus including the problems of social psychology worked out by Soviet psychologists in the context of the development of world psychology, and elucidating the links between these problems and the main trends of the development of psychology in the USSR.
Prof. Petrovsky has written and edited two hundred scientific works, Including the books Psychology, The History of Soviet Psychology, General Psychology, Age-Group and Pedagogical Psychology, The Social Psychology of the Collective, The Psychological Theory of the Collective, and The Individual Activity and the Collective. His books have been translated and published in Bulgaria, the GDR, China, Cuba, Romania, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Finland and Japan. In 1971- 1972 Prof. Petrovsky was a member of the UNESCO International Commission on the Development of Education he published a Joint monograph Learning To Be in 1972). Since 1972, he has been a member of the General Assembly of the International Association of Scientific Psychology.
Translated from the Russian by Frances Longman
Designed by Vyacheslav Chernetsov
Many thanks to Daniel Baker for the original scans.
Mir Books 