V.N. Ilyin's Lectures on Psychology

Abstract

The publication is devoted to the programs of Vladimir Ilyin lectures on Russian religious and social psychology deposited in the archive of Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of the Russia Abroad. The introduction includes information about Vladimir Ilyin studies in psychology and about his lectures on Russian religious and social psychology. V.N. Ilyin considered psychology in the context of morphology, his main philosophical conception. In Ilyin’s opinion, the Christian psychology is the part of hamartiology (the theological doctrine about original sin). According the Ilyin’s interpretation, religious psychology includes Christian psychotherapy, the analysis of human soul, the research of various mental diseases. Ilyin analyzed correlation of amartology and existentialism, spiritual transformation and personal creativity. Ilyin showed the idea of Christian psychology on the examples from literary works of N.S. Leskov and F.M. Dostoevsky, Orthodox patristic (John Climacus, Ephrem the Syrian etc.), the biographies of Russian Saints (Sergey of Radonezh, Seraphim of Sarov). He considered that the combination of medicine and church practice, the union of a doctor and a priest can be productive for psychotherapy and psychiatry. Then Ilyin devoted the following courses of lectures to the doctrine about characters and psychological types (with examples from literature - N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov, F.M. Dostoevsky etc.), the conception of social psychology in the context of orthodox doctrine about “sobornost” and Russian religious philosophy (V.S. Soloviev, S.L. Frank, L.P. Karsavin, N.A. Berdyaev etc.). Ilyin offered Christian interpretation of sociology and social psychology for creation harmony between personality and society.