Chapter 2: The Postulate of Congruity and the Principle of Self-Motion of Activity

At the very foundation of empirical psychology there lies a certain methodological premise, which has the character of a postulate. It could be designated “the postulate of congruity.” To the individuum is attributed a primary striving for an “inner goal,” which drives all manifestations of activity without exception. This is essentially talking about the primary adaptive orientation of all mental processes and behavioral acts. The concepts of “adaptability,” “adaptive orientation,” and so forth, are interpreted here in an extremely broad sense. They refer not only to the adaptation of the individuum to the natural environment (preserving bodily integrity, ensuring survival, normal functioning, etc.) but also adaptation to the social environment by fulfilling the requirements, expectations, and norms of society, which secures the subject’s value as an upstanding member of society. By “adaptation,” we also mean the processes of “self-adjustment”: self-regulation, subordination of higher interests to lower ones, and so forth. Finally, it is especially important to emphasize that we are not talking only about processes that lead to subordination of the environment to the subject’s original interest, but also to the actualization of the subject’s fixed object-related orientations: satisfaction of the need that initiated the behavior, achievement of an established goal, solution of the original problem, and so forth. Whether the individuum adapts himself to the world or subordinates the world to his original interests, in either case he defends himself before the world in ways already known to him, and ways that are gradually being discovered, forming the basis for the manifold phenomena of human activity. Thus, adaptation is understood as the subject’s tendency to