Summary
Nane S. Movsesyan
Key words – Identity; self-awareness; Enlightenment paradigm; ethnic self-awareness; national “I”; public and spiritual “We”.
In terms of ethnopsychology the Enlightenment paradigm of Armenian mentality was characterised by three stepwise approaches. In the first stage a critical approach to public “We” (M. Baghramian) was adopted as a basis followed by consideration of spiritual “We” in the light of ethics (Kh. Abovian). The second stage of ethnopsychology was characterised by a cognitive and critical (M. Nalbandian, Raffi, G. Artsruni) approach that studied the reasons of the main faults of national “We”, revealing lack of self-awareness and awareness about others, as well as, devastating consequences of national idealism. The third stage of selfawareness was first characterised by conjugative approach (Kh. Alishan) which affirmed that an Armenian was not only a bearer of national “I” with either faulty public or only spiritual “We”, but bothof them that survive inside him simultaneously uniting those “I”s in one system and thus creating the image of national “I” and collective “We” the main characteristic and peculiarity of which is the contradictory essence (H. Asatryan).