Bruce said,
" agree that it should be read politically, but I'm not quite sure what you
mean by 'so-called Marxist science', Nate. It is obvious to me reading 'The
crisis of psychology' that Vygotsky was as early as 1926 opposed to
Stalinist encroachments on scientific activity (he explicitly attacks the
notion of 'Marxism by quotes' as a basis for psychology), but just as clear
to me that he saw himself as developing a form of Marxism that was adequate
for the scientific study of mind. Maybe this was what you meant."
Kozulin uses "so called Marxist science" (not in quotes)in the context you
mention, Vygotsky was very much concerned with creating a Marxist approach
to psychology. I was using it in this sense.
Bruce said,
" There's also a danger of being ahistorical about it. The dividing line was
the period of the First Five Year plan in1928-32. This was the period in
which science became totally subordinated to Stalinist politics. I have no
doubt that, had he lived, Vygotsky would have at the very least ended up in
the Gulag (think of the downgrading of psychology in1936 and also of the
incident with the 'The Uzbeks have no illusions' telegram).
I have more doubts about Luria, less because he kept his head down by
shifting to the approved area of neuropsychology, but more because of the
story about the lie detector (which occurred, I thought, in the 20s, rather
than at the time of the purges).
This is from Mike's intro to *Making of Mind that I have on my website:
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/luria.html
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Although Vygotsky became a major figure in Luria's life almost from the
outset of their acquaintance, his influence on Luria's research and writing
came about more slowly. There were reasons for a gradual, rather than
an-abrupt, change in the course of research. As the initial essay in this
volume suggests, Luria had already evolved a rationale for research' which
was operative when he met Vygotsky at the beginning of 1924. The extent of
the research completed by Luria and his colleagues in the early 1920s is
difficult to judge, because there were few journal outlets for Soviet
psychologists (Luria enjoyed telling how he got the paper for printing
research carried out in Kazan from a soap factory); but Luria's (1932)
monograph The nature of human conflicts contains several studies that appear
to have been carried out in 1923 and 1924. (That monograph is worth reading
both for the intrinsic interest of the research it reports and for
fascinating glimpses into the history of Luria's career and Soviet
psychology.) The early chapters explain "the combined motor method," in
which the subject had to carry out a simple movement in response to verbal
stimuli while reaction time and the dynamics of the movement were being
recorded. Using this technique, Luria (assisted by Alexei N. Leont'ev, his
lifelong colleague and current Dean of the Psychology Faculty at Moscow
University) studied the influence of motives on the organization of
voluntary motor activity. This academic research was carried out in such
real-life settings as a purge of Moscow University (where students with
inadequate academic records or "undesirable " family backgrounds were
appearing before a board of examiners). It not only was relevant to an
experimental psychoanalysis (an idea Luria was no longer pursuing when the
book was written in 1930) but had promising potential for application, which
Luria pursued in the criminal justice system, where he developed the
combined-motor method- into the prototype of the modern lie detector. The
very popularity of the research seems to have extended his participation in
it.
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