Aportaciones de la antropología de Karol Wojtyla para una psicología personalista

Abstract

The split that occurred, a little over 140 years ago, between psychology and philosophy has meant an impoverishment for psychology, with the aggravating circumstance of dealing with a naive illusion of independence, since, in reality, psychology cannot ignore the anthropological and epistemological principles and foundations offered by philosophy, and only philosophy. All theoretical models in psychology assume some philosophical and anthropological assumptions, but since psychology does not want ‒or cannot‒ talk about philosophy, these assumptions are not properly reviewed and this supposes a great impoverishment of psychology: its philosophical-anthropological foundations they are uncertain, unknown and unnoticed by many psychologists, they are not usually questioned, analyzed, criticized and, therefore, they are usually excluded from the scientific debate, weighing down the progress and scope of psychology. The absence of a solid and rigorous basic anthropology that supports the development of psychology as a science is a fact that, in addition, encourages the dispersion of the knowledge generated and makes it impossible to integrate the advances produced in the academic field. Currently, its philosophical-anthropological foundations are unreliable, have important errors and do not fit the complex and complete reality of human nature. An added difficulty is that there is not one psychology, but many different psychologies, diverse theoretical models that have had their own particular development and assume different anthropological presuppositions, that is, they start from different ways of understanding human nature and assume varied theoretical proposals, both in the basic and applied fields, with which they try to explain similar phenomena from very different perspectives. These different proposals and models, in many cases, seem to be incompatible with each other, highlighting the absence of common solid criteria that lead to coherent integration and development, which negatively affects the credibility of psychology as a science. Faced with such a situation, we consider it necessary to propose an adequate anthropology that allows sustaining and integrating the knowledge generated by psychology and thus promoting a more fruitful, rigorous, comprehensive development and, ultimately, adjusted to the truth of the person. We believe that an author who offers substantial elements to achieve such a goal is the Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyla, whose original and powerful anthropological doctrine has inspired reflection on human action in the fields of education, affectivity, marriage, relationships between faiths and culture, ethics, work and its conciliation with the family, among others. The general objective of this Doctoral Thesis is to propose the basic elements that would characterize a psychology with a personalist orientation, based on Wojtyla's anthropological categories developed, fundamentally, in Persona y Acción (Wojtyla, 2011) and Mi Visión del Hombre (Wojtyla, 2010), although elements exposed in Amor y Responsabilidad (Wojtyla, 2013) and El Hombre y Su Destino (Wojtyla, 2005) will also be used. This general objective is specified in the following specific objectives: (1) critically analyze the anthropological foundations of the main theoretical models that have existed in Psychology, highlighting their limitations; (2) review the key elements of Wojtyla's personalist anthropology that contribute to the foundation of a personalist psychology; and (3) analyze some problems that contemporary psychology faces in the light of Wojtyla's anthropology in order to promote some lines of development of a personalist psychology. To develop such objectives, the present work is structured through the following chapters: a first chapter in which the inevitable relationship that exists between psychology and philosophical anthropology is based, the vision of man that characterizes the main psychological orientations is analyzed, emphasizing its limitations and proposing the importance of developing a model based on personalist anthropology that allows to overcome the previous limitations; a second chapter in which the use of the expression "personalist psychology" is justified through an approach to personalist anthropology and some of the contributions that have been made to date that can be considered precursors of a personalist psychology; a third chapter in which the anthropology of Karol Wojtyla is exposed, briefly attending to certain biographical aspects and others related to his intellectual itinerary to allow an adequate understanding of his proposal; a fourth chapter in which the keys to Wojtyla's personalist anthropology will be put into dialogue with some of the nuclear issues that affect psychology, namely, the notion of behavior, the debate on the criteria for differentiating normal from abnormal or pathological behavior, the development and composition of the personality, the problem of happiness and well-being as the highest aspirations of man, as well as the issue of the fulfillment of man in relationships interpersonal and social, all this, highlighting the contributions made by Wojtyla's anthropology to overcome certain problems that psychology presents in these issues; Finally, the conclusions derived from the analysis carried out are presented. In short, Wojtyla provides an anthropology of ontological scope that considers subjectivity and personal interiority, showing, through phenomenological-experiential evidence, the existence of various objective structures and properties in the person. This anthropology allows us to critically review and integrate contributions made from psychology that, although they could be intuited as true, have lacked sufficient and adequate objective foundations that would allow them to be justified and ordered coherently in a systematic theory of the person. We consider that the analyzes carried out in this study represent a modest contribution in relation to the immense task that is presented to all psychologists who aspire to develop a psychology of the integral person. The categories and/or properties of the person that Wojtyla exposes in his anthropology seem to offer a rigorous and robust base on which to begin this journey.