CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE EXPERIENCE AS A GROUND OF PROFESSIONAL SELF-DESIGNING (ON THE BASIS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS OF PROMINENT SCIENTISTS)

Abstract

The article makes an attempt to compare autobiographical memoirs of such scientists as S.B. Krymskii, H.P. Shchedrovyckii,, Yu. Orlov, Yu.V. Sheveliov, Karl Yaspers in order to define common moments of their childhood and adolescence that have constituted the foundation for their further professional selfdesining regardless  all the difference of their life circumstances. Such moments really were defined. The point concerns the emotional basis on which the building of professional (and also personal) values and senses is constructed. This emotional foundation comprises several components. The main of these components are:

a) trust to the world, which is grateful to a tender and cheerful mother;

b) the experience of strong and significant feelings;

c) altruistic motivation of choice regarding future profession (for instance: “to make happy a large number of people” according to S. Krymskii);

d) strongly marked cognitive interests (intensive reading, the interest to serious scientific literature);

e) formation of diligence as a manifestation of inner duty to realize some overindividual value of sense (rewriting of “Capital” of K. Marx by H. Shchedrovyckii in his childhood);

f) leadership (including adolescent aggression, tolerance concerning the conflict);

g) wise selfishness (denial of comfort and temporary advantages to achieve  a great goal (auto-realisation) for the sake of future great achievements).All the points noted above are illustrated significantly by quotations of autobiographical memoirs by authors whom we chose.  The article presents the speculations regarding connection of these components of emotional childhood and adolescence experience with further professional activity of authors chosen for analysis.

To our mind the particular importance is given to the event outlast in the childhood which was the breaking point in the life of the author.

For S. Krymskii such an event was the strong impression at the sight of starry heaven, when the problem of infinity arose vividly in front of the seven years old boy. He realized it himself as “the first philosophical impulse” that embodied into the idea of “axiological universe”.

For Yu. Sheveliov such an event became the statement of a familiar person (“as a tack stabbed into heart”), after which he had discovered Ukraine and devoted his scientific activity to it.

A frightful event occurred to Yu. Orlov, when he and his grandmother were attacked by wolves and could hardly escape the danger. Since that moment he had spent all his life in the circumstances of dangerous struggle against the Soviet Union regime. Even the name of his book is “Dangerous Thoughts”.

Keywords: professional selfdesigning, autobiographical memories, significant event, kind mother, cognitive interests, aggressiveness, eudemonism

Accepted: 10.05.2015

Reviewed: 24.05.2015

Published: 07.07.2015