The Mechanism of Awareness of Life Meanings in Light of the Cultural-Activity Approach

Abstract

In modern psychological literature, the term “awareness” is largely undefined. All possible philological epithets are applied to it. This is and understanding, and recognition, and clarification, and discretion, etc. These epithets are not concepts that would reflect the essence of the phenomenon, its mechanism, but rather interchangeable terms of everyday language, reflecting the procedural aspect of consciousness. One of the evidence of the conceptual lack of development of the term “awareness” is the fact that it is completely absent in well-known psychoanalytic dictionaries. In philosophical and general psychological dictionaries, it is given an extremely vague meaning. Despite the widespread use of it, the question does not lose its acuteness: what exactly is the awareness of the unconscious, how does it unfold, and in what terms can we recreate the mechanism of its construction? If we generalize the understanding of awareness, which is implied by various psychoanalytically oriented authors, then it can be reduced to the following definitions. First, awareness is the process of verbalization of unconscious personal meanings and their integration into consciousness. Second, awareness is the thinking aimed at summarizing the disparate elements of experience and combining them into a holistic structure that gives the experience internal coherence and causal validity. Two designated definitions of awareness are associated with two ontological dimensions of dialogue: a) “I am for Myself”; b) "I am for the Other." If we break into two independent parts the dialogical unit of «I for Myself» / «I for the Other», then it turns out that awareness in its phenomenological aspect naturalizes and loses the constructive-analytical element, which, in turn, being placed on the pole of the Other, is alienated from the living phenomenological basis personal experience, as a result of which the identity of the conscious is deprived of “free self-revelation”. Our point of view, the indicated gap is bridged within the framework of the cultural-activity methodology, in the context of which awareness can be viewed as a reflective activity developing in the dialogue that constructs life meanings, indirectly by key-symbolic formations. Based on this theoretical position and analysis of empirical material that reflects the process of dream analysis during psychological counseling, a reconstruction of the mechanism of awareness is carried out. It consists in replacing the real life situation with its key-symbolic referents, the operation of which allows to generalize and separate the life meaning of the situation from the life situation itself and indirectly by the transcendental position of the Other (in the common sense), to transfer the meaning extracted from the dream to the life situation, using it as a means critical reevaluation of the existing structure of life meanings and the construction of a new structure, presented in the form of a matrix of rational action (new conscious a way of building relationships with oneself and the outside world).