ABSTRACT
Every modern science, in our opinion, should conform to the basic premise of Marxist method. This, of course, includes psychology; and if psychology has, in fact, not always measured up to this requirement, it is only because it has been more closely allied to the principles of idealistic philosophy than to the fundamental tenets of a scientific, materialistic outlook. The monistic approach was especially prominent in the attitude of and Engels toward the mind, which they saw as a property of organized matter, rooted in the activity of the human body and in the influence of the social conditions of production on it. In establishing its concepts, psychoanalysis proceeds from a number of fundamental postulates that are often entirely different from the general experimental psychology. In contrast to scholastic, atomizing psychology, psychoanalysis starts out with the problems of the whole person; it proposes to study the person as a whole, and the processes and mechanisms that shape behavior.
