Psychologies in Revolution

Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History

Hannah Proctor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030350284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book situates the work of the Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977) in its historical context and explores the 'romantic' approach to scientific writing developed in his case histories. Luria consistently asserted that human consciousness was formed by cultural and historical experience. He described psychology as the 'science of social history' and his ideas about subjectivity, cognition and mental health have a history of their own. Lines of mutual influence existed between Luria and his colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain, but Psychologies in Revolution also discusses Luria's research in relation to Soviet history – from the October Revolution of 1917 through the collectivisation of agriculture and Stalinist purges of the 1930s to the Second World War and, finally, the relative stability of the Brezhnev era – foregrounding the often marginalised people with whom Luria's clinical work brought him into contact. By historicising science and by focusing on a theoretical approach which itself emphasised the centrality of social and political factors for understanding human subjectivity, the book also seeks to contribute to current debates in the medical humanities.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. ProctorPsychologies in RevolutionMental Health in Historical Perspectivehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Hannah Proctor¹

(1)

Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Hannah Proctor

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

‘Let us assume a brain has been removed from its cranium and placed on a glass table before us.’¹ In a discussion of the localisation of brain function, Alexander Luria (1902–1977) invited his readers to imagine a brain removed from the body and displayed in isolation, its gelatinous surface visible from all angles. In such a situation, he explained, it would be possible to observe a fleshy grey mass of tissue ridged with ‘deep furrows and raised convulsions’.² The ‘uniform and monotonous’ appearance of this lump of dead meat, however, belies the living brain’s extraordinary complexity and dynamism.³ Observing a brain in such a manner, Luria suggested, tells us very little about human experience. His solution was to reconnect brains with people and to situate those people in the world. As he commented in a lecture series delivered in 1976, towards the end of his life:

In order to explain the highly complex forms of human consciousness one must go beyond the human organism. One must seek the origins of conscious activity and ‘categorical’ behaviour not in the recesses of the human brain or in the depths of the spirit, but in the external conditions of life. Above all, this means that one must seek these origins in the external processes of social life, in the social and historical forms of human existence.⁴

Writing almost four decades earlier, he described his aims in strikingly similar terms:

Modern psychology has come to the firm view that human personality is shaped by its concrete sociohistorical circumstances. We can think of no form of behaviour that can be studied in isolation from this historical context, by itself, independent of the specific sociohistorical conditions determining it.⁵

Luria consistently asserted that human consciousness could not be understood in isolation from history, culture or society.

Born in Kazan in 1902, Luria trained and began to work as a psychologist in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. He moved to Moscow in 1923 where, aside from a brief spell in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the early 1930s, he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He received a medical qualification in 1937 after which his research extended to encompass neurological investigations. Reading lists of institutions, disciplines and organisations with which Luria was associated over the course of his long working life indicates that his was a career of almost bewildering diversity which saw him engage in fields across and occasionally beyond the psy-ences⁶—from psychoanalysis to criminology, neurosurgery to ‘defectology’, experimental medicine to pedagogy. Luria’s bibliography, which runs to approximately 350 publications in Russian alone, is similarly expansive.⁷ His writings encompass monographs on handwriting, memory, speech and children’s play; theoretical articles on the relationship of Marxism to psychoanalysis; diagram-heavy textbooks on the localisation of functions in the cerebral cortex; batteries of tests for use by clinicians; and two case histories written in a literary style for a mass audience. His clinical work brought him into contact with a correspondingly broad range of test subjects and patients, both ‘normal’ and pathological. Luria’s shifts in disciplinary focus and institutional affiliation were partly dictated by the shifting priorities of the Soviet state, which forced him to abandon certain disciplinary approaches at particular moments. Yet in spite of these external exigencies and the undeniably capacious scope of his expertise, Luria’s central concerns remained remarkably consistent across his long career. Indeed, he resisted drawing any clear distinctions between his work in such seemingly discrete disciplinary spheres at all. As his biographer and erstwhile collaborator Evgenia Homskaya notes:

All his life he worked at the junction of several different sciences. He always saw the subject of his study in its entirety (as a ‘whole’) and was able to synthesise fragmentary knowledge into a harmonious system.⁸

He coined the term ‘neuropsychology’ to describe the new ‘synthetic’ scientific discipline he sought to create.⁹

Luria dedicated time and energy to establishing conversations with psychologists, educators and neurologists in the West, ensuring that his work reached an international audience beyond the Eastern bloc. K.E. Levitin recalled that Luria’s apartment had a ‘huge custom-made mailbox’ to accommodate his voluminous correspondence.¹⁰ Luria’s position in ‘world science’ is assured; his publications still cited and revered.¹¹ His mid-career shift from psychoanalytic and psychological research into neurological investigations reflects broader developments in the psy-ences across the twentieth century, in dialogue with yet divergent from his contemporaries on the other side of the iron curtain. Aside from his autobiography and biographies (written mostly by former colleagues and a family member),¹² almost all of the existing literature on Luria is written by and for practicing psychologists, neurologists and educators.¹³ Yet Luria himself emphasised the importance of situating theories in history noting that ‘the eye of science does not probe “a thing”, an event isolated from other things or events. Its real object is to see and understand the way a thing or event relates to other things or events.’¹⁴ Psychologies in Revolution intends to apply this insight to Luria’s own publications, contending that analysing Luria’s research in isolation from the historical circumstances it emerged from and influenced would be like analysing someone’s personality by examining their brain on a glass table.

In 1976, a year before his death, Luria wrote to his old friend the American psychologist Jerome Bruner, to inform him that he was working on a ‘highly personal’ and possibly final book, declaring his intention ‘not to write an autobiography but rather a history of a social atmosphere after the revolution with all the enthusiasm of trying to find new ways’.¹⁵ The resulting text, The Making of Mind, written directly in English and published posthumously in 1979, forgoes a description of Luria’s childhood experiences and begins instead in 1917 with the October Revolution (by which time he was already 15 years old):

I began my career in the first years of the great Russian Revolution. This single, momentous event decisively influenced my life and that of everyone I knew. … My entire generation was infused with the energy of revolutionary change—the liberating energy people feel when they are part of a society that is able to make tremendous progress in a very short time.¹⁶

Luria clearly aligned his own personal and professional development with the fate of the Soviet project with which his adult life was almost coterminous (he died in 1977, less than a decade before the introduction of Mikhail Gorbachev’s sweeping reforms).¹⁷ But as he noted in the autobiography’s conclusion: ‘People come and go, but the creative sources of great historical events and the important ideas and deeds remain.’¹⁸

Psychologies in Revolution eschews a detailed biographical approach to Luria as an individual, makes no attempt to describe his temperament or emotional sensibilities, says almost nothing about his family life and little about the many people with whom he collaborated professionally. Instead, it seeks to bring the ‘social atmosphere’ in which he conducted his research into sharper focus. Beginning in the aftermath of the October Revolution when Luria actively engaged in attempts to conceptualise what a properly Marxist approach to human consciousness might entail, through the period of the First Five Year Plan (1928–1932) when he participated in projects seeking to gauge the cognitive impact of Stalinist policies, to the Second World War which saw him turn his attention to the rehabilitation of brain-injured soldiers, Psychologies in Revolution focuses on moments in Luria’s career that coincided with particular moments in Soviet history, considering how both his research and the people it brought him into contact with were shaped by that history. Pushing Alexander Luria the man into the background also allows for the people he encountered in his research to come more clearly into view.¹⁹ Psychologies in Revolution is less interested in the ‘extraordinary person’²⁰ behind the name embossed on the spine of Luria’s books than in the often marginalised Soviet people Luria and his collaborators sought to understand, describe, diagnose or treat.²¹

The Science of Social History

In February 1927, a basket appeared at a train station in Moscow addressed to the city of Briansk. Suspicious about its contents, workers at the station opened the basket to discover it contained a corpse. Dressed in a tunic, wrapped in paper and tied up with ropes, a woman’s dead body was squashed into the basket. She had evidently been killed with a blunt instrument. The paper around her body was found to be a disposable tablecloth, which revealed where the murder had taken place: a restaurant called ‘The Bear’. As this gruesome scene unfolded in Moscow, a man in Kyiv received a letter containing a baggage check coupon. The anonymous letter which accompanied it informed him that he could collect his wife in Briansk, a city approximately five hours by train from Moscow, explaining that she could not be sent all the way to Kyiv as the letter’s sender did not have sufficient funds. The man in Kyiv was subsequently summoned to Moscow and identified his wife’s body in the basket.²² In the wake of this strange incident seven people were arrested; none of them were told of what crime they were suspected of committing. Before undergoing questioning by police the suspects were taken directly to a special laboratory where they were given a series of word association tests by a team of psychologists led by Luria, in an attempt to establish who had committed the murder. Although his work with criminals was short-lived, Luria’s published work contains numerous examples of particular, peculiar and sometimes distressing glimpses into the lives and experiences of Soviet people from a range of social backgrounds—including industrial workers, rural school children, deaf babies, Uzbek kolkhoz members, orphaned teenagers and brain-injured Red Army soldiers—whose desires, thought processes, proclivities, memories and cognitive capacities he attempted to develop methods for understanding and treating.

Luria described psychology as the ‘science o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Criminal
• 3. The ‘Primitive’
• 4. The Child
• 5. The Aphasic
• 6. The Synaesthete
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter