And Luria's autobiography, more generally.
I don't if I can keep up with this part of the discussion adequately
and note the Eugene got a little busy elswhere too. Whew.
Anyway, way back, there is the whole complicated story of who these
people were, which gets at the question of how could a youngster
growing up in 1917 in Kazan be a utopian socialist and a young man
in 1925 be a supporter of the Revolution? I don't know. It happened to
a lot of people, and not just Russians. Luria's teenage work with homeless
kids was done in that spirit.
The combined motor method was directed at solving the inadequacy of Jungian
free associating as a way of finding what other people were thinking, their
"hidden psychological processes." The answer was to create a culturally
mediated system of voluntary activity and study its selective disruption
under highly constrained circumstances. A lot of the work was done using
hypnotism very cleverly. There was no cultural historical thoery
in the first 2/3 of NHC. The, bingo, you see Luria grab ahold of the cultural
historical idea and his form of psychological research made culturally
coordinated joint activty the medium through which other minds can be known.
That was all pre-Stalinist times. The work was done jointly for a while
with Leontiev. They may well have thought it only just that poor kids should
get a crack at the universities and heights of society. So, like their
counterparts in the united states, but in a different set of cultural
historical circumstances, they lived with overwhelming, terrifying, and
ever present fear.
Kundera's characterization of the Czechs who wanted Soviet power as
"the best of their generation" was only partly ironic.
Luria was strangely not a political person. He always defered
to Leontiev as the expert on marx. He invented the combined motor
method, but who ever heard of that? A lie detector test, now that
is something to invent before the American claim priority! The
absence of concern seemed not unlike those of other scientists
who supported their government's policies. I don't think he changed
much in this respect until the 1930's when the terror was obvious
even to youthful enthusiasts.
When I knew him, he always expressed every orthodox views
and focused on how the brain works. He was very respectful and
seriously playful with patients. He carried out many international
activities constantly, extending them to a voluntary, informal
discussion group every wedensday evening to which all the foreign
students in the psychology faculty were invited. No payed him. No
one, so far as I know, gave a damn.
A note on the stucture of the English edition. The intro
is my history of Luria as he would have approaved of, devoid
of person and politically correct. The aftward was me speaking.
For several years the agency which controlled the rights to the
English edition refused the book because of my aferword. So
Vladimir Zinchenko, on behalf of Luria's daughter, who wanted
the afterward published "as is" censored the book. What he cut
out was enough to render the account incomprehensible to Americans
but decodable by Russians-- who where not allowed to read it.
In this regard, Vygotsky appers to me to have been more politically
aware, perhaps because his father was not an important Kremlin doctor
(whose time would come). One of the deleted items was an account
by Luria's wife of Vygotsky going to Luria's father and telling hiim
to get his sone the hell out of the limelight-- the start of the
medical career Nate refers to.
As you can see, a complicated story for me.
mike
PS. Phillip just sent me this great two page description of the'
reinvention of question asking reading for use by teachers of
historically underachieving groups. It is based on the combined
motor method. For good or evil?
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