A short introduction
Victor F. Petrenko holds two doctoral degrees (1978, 1988) and specializes in general psychology and experimental psycho-semantics. He is a university professor at Moscow State University (MSU) (1994), a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) (1997), the head of the Laboratory of Psychology of Communication and Psychosemantics at the Psychology Department, MSU (1988), and Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychology of the RAS. Seventeen PhD students attained their doctoral degrees under his supervision. His work has been focused on the psychology of consciousness and psycho-semantics, personal construct theory, problems of the unconscious, altered states of consciousness, ethnic and cross-cultural psychology, cultural-historical theory, psychology of art, philosophical issues of psychology, psychology of religion and political psychology. Prof. Petrenko is founder and editor-in-chief of the journal "Methodology and History of Psychology." His main publications are (325 in total): Petrenko V.F. (1983). Introduction to Experimental Psycho-semantics: A Study of the Forms of Representation in Ordinary Consciousness. Moscow State University Press; Petrenko V.F. (1985). Psycho-semantics of Consciousness. Moscow State University; Petrenko V.F. (1988, 2005). Fundamentals of Psycho-semantics. Moscow State University; Petrenko V.F., Mitina, O.V. (1997). Psycho-semantic Analysis of the Dynamics of Public Consciousness. Moscow State University; Petrenko V.F. (2010, 2013). Multidimensional Consciousness. Moscow: Publishing House Eksmo; Petrenko V.F. Suprun A.P. (2015, 2016). Methodological intersections of psycho-semantics of consciousness and quantum physics. M. Ed. Nestor-History; Petrenko V.F., Mitina O.V. (2019). Political psychology: psycho-semantic approach. M. Science; Petrenko V.F., Suprun A.P. (2015). Methodology of psycho-semantics in the context of the philosophy of post-non-classical rationality and quantum physics. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Т. 85. No. 5. pp. 434-442; Petrenko V.F., Mitina O.V. (2017). A psycho-semantic approach to reconstruction of political mentality: research methods and examples. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Т. 87. No. 1. pp. 49-62; Petrenko V.F., Kucherenko V.V. (2019). Theory and practice of sensorimotor psychosynthesis. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Т. 89.No. 1. pp. 56-64.Publications:
The world as cognitive construct
Today’s article examines our decidedly limited mental representation of the world, and how it is fundamentally linked to the systems of meaning available to us, to our perceptual constructs. It lays out incredible data to show just how much and in how many ways our perception can be manipulated, and the role we often take in our own delusion.
Nadia Hassan reads ‘Communicating through the collective unconscious’
In this fascinating second episode of the Essentia Readings podcast, Nadia reads Prof. Victor Petrenko’s work. Nadia’s commentary towards the end is particularly spellbinding! This podcast is available through all major platforms.
Inducing the mental creation of experiential realities
Can people—even those ostensibly not hypnotizable—be coaxed into creating entire virtual realities that they then take for facts? Can the same techniques be used to alter our memories of the past? If so, is this significant for our understanding of what reality—the real reality—actually is? Psychologists Prof. Petrenko and Dr. Kucherenko share astonishing results produced by Russian clinical and experimental psychology, which answer these questions in the affirmative.
Communicating through the “Collective Unconscious”
Prof. Petrenko shows that we may be regularly, though implicitly, using the so-called “collective unconscious”—a transpersonal field of subjectivity we all share, but which we can’t explicitly access through introspection—to tap into each other’s minds, minds in the animal kingdom as a whole, and perhaps even beyond.
Contact with universal consciousness through the research of human mentality
One of the most respected psychologists in the Slavic world—where materialist prejudices are less pronounced—Prof. Victor Petrenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, discusses his views on the nature of mind and reality. He shows, through remarkable experiments, that our very perception is conditioned upon our ability to tell ourselves, conceptually, what we are perceiving. It is possible that we simply do not perceive what we have no conceptual categories to make sense of. This way, we may be immersed in effectively alien aspects of reality that we cannot cognize. This captivating essay introduces to a Western audience the high-quality—and arguably less metaphysically biased—scholarship of the Slavic world in an area of knowledge whose relevance to our lives cannot be overestimated.
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