Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud had made a valuable contribution to the development of modern psychological and medical thought, as they had outlined new directions in psychiatry and physiology. Their works and their ideas are considered to be actual nowadays and form the fundamentals of teaching about psychics, mental activity and nervous system functioning. Even though their research refers to different fields of this area of medicine, still their ideas correlate in systematization of knowledge about psychiatrics and neuropathology. Pavlov’s teaching about reflexes and experimental approach to studying higher nervous activity allowed to discover and study basic laws and mechanisms of brain functioning. Freud’s psychic analysis from another side allowed describing the nature of human behavior and main factors that contribute to his behavior.
Sigmund Freud Austrian physician neuropathologist and psychiatrist, and studying pathological processes in human psychics was nearly the first one who tried to describe them and explain from physiological point of view. He considered human psychics to be independent from other processes in human body, and it was ruled by unconscious powers, which lie out of human cognition. Human soul is “reined” by psychic conflicts of unconscious passion to pleasures (primary sexual), passion to aggression and other animal instincts. Human conscious is adapted to this psychic conflicts and human behavior is mainly described by the level of this “adaptation”. From this perspective, Freud tried to explain not only behavior of individuals but also the development of history, morality, art, wars, law, state, religion and other institutions and products of social activity.
Works of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Russian physiologist and professor of Military-Marine Academy in St. Petersburg, about the nature of conditional and unconditional reflexes allowed him to expand this theory on the nature of psychic processes of higher nervous system. His works about physiology of digestion prompted him about application of the same concepts to the explanation of higher nervous activity, explanation of laws of behavior, etc. he developed the physiological theory of reflection that explains the process of cognition and perception on different levels (bounds between language, reasoning, sensitive reflection and logical cognition). The fundamentals of his works had found application not only in psychic medicine, but in the cybernetics and robotics where there is a need in modeling devices that imitate different aspects of nervous activity.
Pavlov and Freud used different approaches when studying the nature of human psychics and behavior. If Pavlov used experiment and inductive method, then Freud came from his theories about alienation of psychics from physiological processes in human body. Even though their approaches were different, they both succeeded in explanation and description of major mechanism of behavior and their theories are used widely in medicine and in other branches of science nowadays. The popularity of their theories, their potential in being used for explaining of different psychic anomalies witnesses about multi-sided nature of human soul and human psychics, as it can not be viewed only from one perspective: materialistic(according to Pavlov) or idealistic (according to Freud).