Reading :: S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology

S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology
By T.R. Payne

I've often read that Leontiev's activity theory borrows heavily from the theory of S.L. Rubinshtein, whose work loomed large in Soviet psychology. But not much of Rubinshtein's work has been translated into English, and I continue to be monolingual, so I have not been able to investigate these claims directly. Fortunately, I ran across a citation to this 1968 book—which predates the Vygotsky boom as well as much of Leontiev's and Luria's English translations. It's a fascinating time capsule and helped me to get a broader understanding of Rubinshtein's context and influence.

Vygotsky (here, "Vygotskij") is mentioned, especially in relation to psychic development (p.47). The mention is brief, but Payne notes that despite Soviet criticism of Vygotsky, "the principle of historical development has remained one of the fundamental principles of Soviet psychology" (p.47). 

Like Vygotsky, Rubinshtein also addressed a crisis in psychology: "a crisis of the philosophic basis of the science," which had fragmented into schools including introspectivism and behaviorism; "the task facing psychology is the re-establishment of a unified object," which "can only be achieved by the transformation of the concepts of behavior on the basis of the Marxian concept of human activity," conceived as "a dialectic of subject and object" (p.50). 

Rubinshtein developed these ideas in:

• Fundamentals of Psychology (1935), which was the basis for 
• Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940; second edition, 1946) (p.51) (Note: Payne is not clear about the timeline on p.51, but clarifies it on p.71)

In 1947, FGP was criticized for borrowing too heavily from bourgeois sources, but it remained a classic in the USSR (p.51).

In 1940, Rubinshtein laid out four principles governing Soviet psychology:

1. "the principle of psycho-physical unity"
2. "the principle of psychic development"
3. "the principle of historicity"
4. "the principle of the unity of theory and practice" (p.52)

"Rubinstejn sees these four principles as the expression of the one basic principle of Soviet psychology, i.e., the principle of the unity of consciousness and behavior" (p.52).

Rubinshtein saw the crisis in psychology as "the equation of the psychic with the phenomena of consciousness" (p.79), and his resolution was to understand consciousness as interconnected with the material world—reconstructing psychology on the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism (p.82). In this understanding, activity is the dialectic between subject and object (p.84). When the human psyche emerged, we entered a qualitatively new stage of the evolutionary process, "brought about by the changing conditions of the organism which demanded a new form of activity—work activity—which in its turn demanded a new corresponding form of psychic regulation" (p.89). Interestingly, Rubinshtein went directly to the same source that had been cited by Vygotsky & Luria and that would later be cited by Leontiev: Engels' story in the Dialectics of Nature of how humanity emerged through labor (p.90). In this story, the division of labor emerges because "man's activity is no longer directed to the immediate satisfaction of his own personal needs but to the satisfaction of those of the community" (p.91). Among the implications: human activity is the material object of psychology (p.125). So, for Rubinshtein, psychology is the generalized science of human activity (p.125). 

Let's pause here to note a couple of things:

• In claiming that psychology is the generalized science of human activity, Rubinshtein opens the door for either making psychology an interdisciplinary science or for reallocating responsibilities from other disciplines to psychology. Keep in mind that during this period, the USSR had banned sociology, so that's one big competitor out of the way. This impulse of uniting all studies of human activity under a single framework is still active in CHAT circles.
• The paragraph above sounds a lot like Leontiev's activity theory. (Recall that Rubinshtein was on Leontiev's dissertation committee in 1940.) But notice that Rubinshtein has not discussed a few key things that we associate with activity theory. One is tool mediation, which Leontiev appears to have retained from his time in the Vygotsky-Luria Circle. The other is levels of activity; I'm not clear on whether these were Leontiev's own invention or whether he synthesized them from another contributor.

Overall, this was a fascinating book. The first two sections overview psychology's development in the USSR and will be interesting to anyone who is concerned with this period. The remaining two sections deal more specifically with Rubinshtein. If you're interested in either of these, definitely pick this book up.