Marxism, Psychology, and the Soviet Mind

Abstract

Marxism, Psychology, and the Soviet Mind Garret J. McDonald (bio) Hannah Proctor, Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's "Romantic Science" and Soviet Social History. 268 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN-13 978-3030350307. 59.99. Wladimir Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, trans. Erik Butler. 128 pp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0262035699. $19.95. Anton Yasnitsky, ed., A History of Marxist Psychology: The Golden Age of Soviet Science. 218 pp. New York: Routledge, 2020. ISBN-13 978-0367340063. $46.95. Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of the Russian psychologist Alex Kozulin's call-to-arms, Psychology in Utopia (1984), which presents six case studies of famous Russian and Soviet psychologists in an effort to contextualize the development of Soviet psychology within Soviet social history. Kozulin examines the interactions among Marxist philosophy, the science of psychology, and social history, challenging other scholars to expand upon his work. While the text does not advance any overarching conclusions per se, Kozulin aimed for the book to represent "a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that [distinguishes] between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in an ideologically coherent form."1 Designed to challenge both Soviet and Western scholars, who had long conceptualized psychology as either merely a single component of a broader history of Soviet science or as a theoretical issue entirely excluding historical analysis, [End Page 145] Psychology in Utopia opened the doors to thoughtful historical analyses of Soviet psychology. Five years later, the historian of Soviet science David Joravsky's seminal text, Russian Psychology (1989), provided the definitive response, one that continues to dominate the English-language historiography.2 Sweeping in scope and ambition, Russian Psychology examines the entirety of the development of the Russian "sciences of the mind" (namely psychology, psychiatry, physiology, and psychoanalysis) from the mid-19th century to the 1970s. The world contemporary to Kozulin and Joravsky—littered for years with consistent accusations by Soviet dissidents and Western media that Soviet psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience had been coopted by the regime to enforce party ideology and repress dissenting voices (a notion only recently reexamined in the academic literature)—was ripe for these publications, which stood well above any of their Cold War era counterparts due to their meticulous research, intricate analyses of the inner mechanisms of Soviet psychological practices, and earnest consideration of the influence of Marxist philosophy and society at large in scientific developments.3 For almost a decade after the Soviet collapse and subsequent "archival revolution" of the 1990s, Joravsky's scholarship remained the sole go-to text on Soviet psychology. In fact, during this period Western interest in the Russian sciences of the mind seemed to wane altogether, with the exception of Daniel Todes's notable exploration of the laboratory practices and research of Ivan Pavlov and a few disjointed studies concerned with the legacy of Freud and [End Page 146] psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union.4 As academic interests in the field grew once again in the first decade of the 21st century, none challenged Joravsky's monumental text directly. Scholars instead carved out niches within which to explore individual scientists or specific social and political issues, such as criminality, homosexuality, and governance.5 This has remained the case until quite recently, as a few brave scholars seek to build a broad consensus concerning the precise development, forms, and functions of a distinctively "Marxist" psychology and take sincerely, yet critically, the ideas born of the marriage between the socio-economic philosophy of Marxism and the sciences of the mind. Psychology and Revolution Hannah Proctor's monograph Psychologies in Revolution represents an ideal starting point as a bridge between the traditional biographical approach and Kozulin's call for a broader social history of psychology. The text is, at least in part, a biography of the Russian neuropsychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luriia (1902–77), built upon Joravsky and more recent literature concerned with Luriia's collaborator, Lev Semenovich Vygotskii (1896–1934).6 The book is, however, much more than a conventional biography. Luriia—whose life and work spanned the experimental psychology of...