Reading :: Psychologies in Revolution

Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History

By Hannah Proctor

I continue to be fascinated by histories of Soviet psychology, specifically the cultural-historical school. So when I ran across this book, I had to read it. Although Luria is best known internationally as a pioneer of neuroscience, Proctor primarily reviews Luria’s early work (1920s-1940s) and his later accounts of it (most of his books on this work were not published until well after Stalin’s death in 1953). 

Specifically, Proctor rereads Luria’s accounts in historical context, looking for places where his research participants’ utterances overflow or cut against Luria’s explanations. She organizes the text by presenting different figures in Luria’s studies, each of which gets a chapter: 

• The criminal (covered in The Nature of Human Conflicts)

• The “primitive” (illiterates in Central Asia, covered in Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations)

• The child (covered in Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child)

• The aphasic (covered in The Man with a Shattered World)

• The synaesthete (covered in The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory)

Proctor argues that 

Somewhat confusingly Luria’s research was animated by two distinct and indeed contradictory understandings of history: on the one hand, he treated individual human development as a recapitulation of civilisational development (the ontogenetic maturation from childhood to adulthood was treated as a counterpart to a phylogenetic progression from primitivism to civilisation), while on the other hand he emphasised the contingent impact of specific cultural and political experiences on individuals. (p.10) 

And that 

the pages of Luria's books attest to continued incongruities between the psychic territories he attempted to navigate and the maps he employed; incongruities that ultimately, I argue, led him to develop a new mode of scientific writing that found a different way of describing the diverse psychic terrains he encountered. (p.12)

This new mode was Luria’s so-called “romantic science,” a qualitative case study that drew heavily on literary conventions:

It was only in these case histories that Luria developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating. Unlike the majority of his publications, these works are written in a detailed and empathetic style alert to the particularities of the conditions of the people they describe rather than seeking to relate those people’s consciousness to some abstract normative ideal. (pp.22-23)

(Luria’s two famous romantic science case studies are The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist.)

Luria’s path was made difficult because of his (Vygotskian) quest for what Proctor calls an “advanced” human subject, whom readers of this blog will recognize as the New Soviet Man, standing at the peak of Vygotsky’s peak psychology:

Luria’s research was premised on normative assumptions about individual human development. He argued that the ‘advanced’ human subject was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolu-tion of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilisation’ and the maturation of the(‘healthy’) individual from baby to adult. An interest in tracing the progression from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms of thought united Luria’s seem-ingly diverse strands of work. At the apex of his mountain of development stood the ‘civilised’ or ‘cultured’ [kul’turnye], educated and healthy adult. Luria, however, had little to say directly about this ‘advanced’ figure. He could only discern its outline, as though it stood on a high mountain silhouetted in front of the glaring sun. Instead, he looked at the base in order to explain the route to the peaks. (p.8)

With this introduction, Proctor goes into the chapters centered around the different figures. All are fascinating, but let’s zero in on Luria’s expeditions to Central Asia in 1931-1932. I’ve discussed these on my blog. Luria and Vygotsky hoped to demonstrate that through literacy, people develop psychological tools or mediators that in turn provide them with capabilities including abstract thinking. In his expeditions, Luria found differences in how illiterate, semi-literate, and literate Uzbeks reasoned about categories and even whether they saw optical illusions. Yet some of these results were disputed by Kurt Koffka, the Gestaltist psychologist who accompanied the 1932 expedition, and the expedition itself was condemned by the Party for supposedly denigrating the mental capacity of Uzbeks. Luria put the research away, only to publish it 40 years later as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

Proctor is fascinated by how the direct quotes from the Uzbek subjects contradict Luria’s interpretations and suggest different meanings, as well as Luria’s apparent ignorance of the political pressures that might affect the Uzbeks’ answers. She expresses these as paradoxes and ironies:

“Paradoxically, however, Luria conceived of the imposition of a particular mode of life and thought as a form of liberation. For Luria, the transition to abstract thinking did not represent a process of assimilation but of emancipation.” (p.74)

“Ironically, the lack of illusions that Luria identified in Uzbek people was precisely what he hoped could be overcome through the transition to the socialism [sic]. For Luria, illusion, fantasy and imagination were all crucial components of ‘advanced’ thinking.” (p.79)

Luria was hampered, as Proctor sees it (and I agree), by a teleological understanding of history, which he also applied to individuals:

“A loosely Marxist conception of history as advancing teleologically through a series of economic stages was combined with the Leninist conviction that such development could be artificially accelerated, conforming to what Francine Hirsch describes as ‘state-sponsored evolutionism’” (p.82)

“Luria followed the Communist Party line, conceiving of his work in explicitly anti-imperialist terms and insisted that psychological propensities were not biologically determined. Luria’s rejection of biological essentialism was, however, coupled with a continued emphasis on cultural superiority framed in terms of historical development: a hierarchical framework that undermined his professed egalitarianism. Despite defining itself as anti-imperialist, his progressive framework for understanding Uzbek society bore comparison to the frameworks employed by Western anthropologists, whose work he drew on heavily. Luria frequently drew parallels between Uzbekistan and other supposedly ‘backward’ places, including other regions of the USSR as well as communities in Africa. For all his self-proclaimed attentiveness to cultural specificity, his emphasis on the interchangeability of ‘backward’ places understood cultural difference in terms of temporal development.” (pp.83-84)

And perhaps most importantly:

“Despite insisting that no way of seeing is ‘a natural and inevitable achievement of the human mind’, Luria’s understanding of difference distributed humanity across one developmental slope and was thus implicitly value laden. … Luria placed Uzbek people, culturally if not biologically, lower on the rungs of a single developmental ladder.” (p.85.)

Proctor provides some historical context about how Stalinism dealt with the cultural diversity of the USSR: it embraced ethnic dress and superficial customs while leading diverse ethnic groups to a substantively homogeneous Communist future. “Luria’s contradictory depiction of Central Asia, which simultaneously cel￾ebrated tradition and progress, was in keeping with this state discourse” (p.88).

Finally, she notes how Luria seems oblivious to the implied power differences. In addition to the fact that the expedition traveled with security services, Luria “wilfully overlooked the historical situation of the encounter where any translation from Uzbek into Russian implied a power relation” (p.91). 

Later, Proctor adds: “Stalin depicted the fight between old and new ways of life, tradition and modernity, capitalism and communism, by imagining the latter as a vul￾nerable newly born baby. Luria’s experiments in Central Asia celebrated  the birth of the new but bore witness to the tenacity of the old (and it was for this reason that his work was eventually denounced).” (p.116). She adds:

as was evident in his experiments in Central Asia, a contradiction existed between Luria’s discussions of abstraction as a cognitive capacity, on the one hand, and as a research methodology, on the other. For Luria not only advocated abstraction as a mode of thought but simultaneously insisted that a properly Marxist approach to psychology should treat cognition as time bound and historical. (p.251)

And 

In the context of the Central Asian expeditions, Luria’s declared sensitivity to cultural particularity was complicated by his continued imposition of pre-existing normative frameworks onto the Uzbek people he encountered, muffling the specificities of their utterances. Classical scientific abstraction returned through the back door. (p.251)

Proctor does similar close readings with the other figures. Toward the end of the book, she argues that Luria was stymied by the abstract, clinical style of writing he used to recount his research as well as the impulse to provide dialectical syntheses. But in later life, his two “romantic science” books moved from synthesis to a recognition of fragmentation (p.227). “The majority of Luria’s publications described people in relation to abstract ideals, whereas his ‘romantic’ works sought to understand the people they described on their own terms” (p.228).

I personally found this book very rewarding, both for its deep connections among historical events and for its thoughts on how Luria’s “romantic science” represented a more capacious genre (based on Soviet realism) that could better address the ambivalences in his data. If you’re interested at all in Soviet psychology and specifically the cultural-historical school, definitely pick up this book.