Temporal structure of the police officer's professional self-consciousness: attempt of paradox modelling

Introduction. The author attempts to substantiate the temporal conception of understanding the processes of formation of law enforcement officers’ professional self-consciousness at all the stages of building the career. The main idea of the conception is postulating the principle of continuous development of personal self-consciousness if all the components of the structure of self-consciousness are not in “linear” relations towards one another, but are transformed in time and space, and have multi-area, variable and emergent potential. The objective is to consider the main ideas, approaches and prerequisites which make it possible to define the temporal modelling as a new method of studying law enforcement officer’s professional self-consciousness. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis includes theoretical developments and conceptions, certain provisions, main ideas, approaches and prerequisites developed by representatives of analytical and existential philosophy, sociology and legal psychology which enable the author to define the approaches to temporal modelling as a new method of studying police officer’s professional self-consciousness. The research was based on general scientific methods: dialectical, inductive, deductive analysis and synthesis, pedagogical surveys, modelling. Results and Discussion. The paper reveals the structure and content of professional self-consciousness within the temporal conception of forming the inner experience of the personality of the professional. The temporal model provides the specialists’ general comprehension of basic mechanisms and conditions of transformation of time as a resource of self-development of the subject of professional activity during his inner psychological work. Besides, the main source and form of personal existence in time and space is the professional activity which is structured and mediated through dominant values and contexts of legal ideology. As a rule, the complete merging of a person with professional activity determines its dependence on the time of active professional self-realization until retirement. This is a hard form of external constructing of time and space of personality of the professional where a person has to search for alternative forms and areas free from work for personal self-realization. Thus, the developed structure of law enforcement activity, its moral psychological aspects objectify the time of personality, significantly influence the formation of its inner and external experience, psychological readiness of the subject for full-fledged life activity. Conclusions. The temporal model of the subject’s professional self-consciousness is the specific way of organization of structural elements of his inner experience, value and semantic systems and views on the profession continuously changing in time and space. The temporal characteristics of the subject of professional activity are defined through police officer’s successful self-realization and self-development within professional performance.