With little guidance from a faculty in disarray (owing to the
abrupt change in the intellectual and political climate), Luria
was allowed to fashion his own education. The product may not
have been ideally systematic, but it represented a fascinating
amalgam of the leading ideas in the social sciences of the
times.
Luria was interested in Utopian socialism and, particularly, the
problem of change: What was the source of ideas about society?
How can one use such ideas to bring about social change? His
social thinking (and hence the medium for his social activities)
was, from the beginning, focused on the individual. How can the
individual be linked to larger social units ?
In his search for an answer to this question, Luria was drawn to
read the neo-Kantian social-science philosophers of the late
19th century- Dilthey, Richert, and Windelbandt, for whom the
relationship between psychology and history was a pivotal issue.
Although Wundt had set up a psychology laboratory in 1880, there
was nothing approaching a consensus about what kind of science
psychology could, in principle, represent. Even Wundt, who
maintained that the experimental method was an appropriate tool
of psychology, did not believe that laboratory methods were
appropriate to all aspects of the science. Rather, experimental
methods could be used to study only elementary psychological
processes; folklore and ethnography had to be relied upon to
supply information about higher psychological functions.
Dilthey and his colleagues were not willing to concede this
interpretation of either part of Wundt's enterprise. One of
their central questions was what kind of laws were possible from
the study of human psychological processes. Should one strive
for general ("nomothetic") laws that describe "Man" but are
unable to account for the specific behaviors of any individual
"man"? This was the model of the natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften ) and the model adopted by Wundt for the
study of sensory processes. Or should psychology attempt only to
describe the intricate complex reality of individuals, providing
"idiographic" accounts in the tradition of the humane sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften ) such as history ?
Luria's interest in these matters was not narrowly academic.
Caught up in the romantic enthusiasm of the revolution, he sough
a scientific basis for influencing human affairs. Perhaps for
this reason, he was not satisfied with the choice between an
idiographic, descriptive psychology and a nomothetic,
generalizing psychology. The generalizing, "scientific"
psychology of Wundt, Brentano, and other laboratory
psychologists seemed too remote from any real-life process that
one could observe outside the laboratory. It was bloodless,
artificial, and of no use whatever in dealing with the problems
facing humanity.
But the neo-Kantians offered no usable alternative. They could,
to be sure, provide much more illuminating descriptions Of
recognizable psychological processes. But their method left them
handcuffed as scientists; they could not lawfully influence the
objects of observations. They were helpless to initiate or guide
change.
What the situation seemed to require was a new kind of
psychology that could deal with the richness of individual
psychological experience but admit of generalizations of the
sort that made the natural sciences powerful. For several years
psychoanalysis seemed to Luria a promising basis on which to
found the kind of psychology he sought. Freud's writings were
the source of many interesting hypotheses about the motivational
sources of behavior, but his hypotheses about various symbolic
processes seemed overly abstract and difficult to study by
objective means. Jung's studies using the free-association
method, however, appeared a promising tool that could make the
motivational determinants of individual behavior accessible to
analysis. By elaborating the basic free-association technique,
Luria hoped to create an experimental science of individual
mental life, a science that would be both idiographic and
nomothetic.
These early speculations about the future direction of
psychology were never published, although Luria prepared a
manuscript on the subject, when he was 19 years old, that he
kept throughout his career. They did, however, guide his early
clinical and experimental work. He spent time at Kazan's
psychiatric hospital, where, using Jung's free association
method, he interviewed patients. Accepting a position in a
laboratory devoted to increasing the efficiency of industrial
workers, he carried out studies of the effect of fatigue on
mental activity. It was in the course of this work that he
developed the first, rudimentary techniques for combining
experimental procedures with the free- association technique; he
used an old Hipp chronoscope to measure the reaction time of
workers, at different levels of fatigue, who were asked to
associate to various verbal stimuli.
This very early activity would be of little interest if it were
not so clearly and generally reflected in Luria's later work;
but as the articles collected here attest, the basic techniques
Luria developed while still a student were retained and applied
through all the many phases of his career.
1923 was a turning point for Soviet psychology, a turning point
that affected Luria almost immediately. Until that year,
academic psychology remained relatively unaffected by the
October Revolution. i The leading Russian psychologist was G. I.
Chelpanov, who had been the director of the Institute of
Psychology in Moscow since its founding in 1911. Chelpanov was a
psychologist in the tradition of Wundt and Titchener, a ''brass
instrument" psychologist for whom introspection under highly
controlled conditions provided the essential data of psychology.
His institute pursued pretty much of the same issues, by the
same techniques, as those pursued in many laboratories in
Germany and the United States.
By 1923 this approach to psychology was under attack for a
number of reasons, many of which were similar to the reasons
used in arguments against similar approaches to psychology in
the United States. Introspectionist psychology was criticized
for its methodological shortcomings; different laboratories
could not agree on basic elements produced by trained
introspectors. Arguments about the existence or nonexistence of
imageless thought and "determining tendencies" had produced
sufficient theoretical chaos to make many psychologists
receptive to Watson's call for a psychology of behavior that
eschewed the concept of conscious experience altogether. There
was also widespread dissatisfaction with the very narrow limits
of introspective psychology; it could not include the study of
small children, of mental patients, or of people engaged in
productive activity. To these complaints Soviet critics added
the charge that introspective psychology was neither materialist
nor Marxist.
The issue of the proper framework for Soviet psychology,
especially for its titular leader? Chelpanov, came to a head at
the First Psychoneurological Congress, held in Leningrad in
1923. Chelpanov tried to defend the activities of his institute.
He even admitted a role to Marxism as a set of ideas applicable
to the social organization of human activity. His defense
failed, and he was removed from his post and replaced by K. N.
Kornilov, a former schoolteacher from Siberia, who had been on
the staff of Chelpanov's institute for several years.
Kornilov was an advocate of a kind of objective psychology that
was similar in many respects to Watson's behaviorism, although
he did not reject discussion of mental states in the same,
thoroughgoing way as Watson. Kornilov called his approach
''reactology," which he took to mean the study of mental effort
as reflected in peripheral motor activity. He "measured" mental
effort by studying the reaction time and strength of simple
motor responses, assuming that the more strength spent on the
motor component of a response, the less remaining for the
"mental" component. Confirmation of this generalization was seen
in the fact that the strength of simple reactions was greater
than the strength of complex reactions. Kornilov pointed to his
method as manifestly a materialist interpretation of mind; and
with this achievement as a rallying point, he was able to gather
a group of young scholars to undertake the reconstruction- of
psychology along materialist and, he asserted, Marxist lines.
One of those invited to the institute in Moscow was A. R. Luria,
whose research on worker fatigue using reaction time methods
made him a pioneer reactologist in Kornilov's eyes.
Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology" (1925)] dates
from this very early period in the history of Soviet psychology
(and Luria's scientific career), when the proper subject matter
and theoretical stance of psychology in the USSR were very much
a subject of debate. Only a very few propositions were generally
accepted: Psychology should be an objective science, based
wherever feasible on experimental methods; it should be
consistent with the principles of Marxist dialectical
materialism.
Agreeing on these principles and implementing them turned out to
be two very distinct tasks. It was not clear what ideas and
techniques from previous psychological research could be
retained.
Neither was it clear what Marxist writing implied for psychology
(a problem that existed for many branches of Soviet science, and
was to be the source of repeated disputes over the years). In
this atmosphere of uncertainty and change, a wide variety of
scientific programs were offered, among them Luria's suggestion
that psychoanalysis be used as a model upon which to build a
materialist, Marxist psychology. Although this suggestion did
not prevail, the terms in which Luria made it are clearly
prophetic of both his own later work and those influential
movements in psychology that attempted to incorporate
psychoanalytic notions of motivation into experimental
psychology.
The publication in which "Psychoanalysis as a system of monistic
psychology" appeared, Psychology and Marxism, contained papers
from the Second Psychoneurological Congress. Kornilov, who wrote
the lead essay, was its editor. This volume contained
contributions from several branches of psychology, all of them
offering programs of research for a reconstructed Soviet
psychology. Most interesting from the vantage point of history
was an essay by a former schoolteacher, Lev Semyonovitch
Vygotsky, who had begun to do research on problems of education,
especially education of the handicapped and retarded. On the
basis of his presentation, which treated consciousness as the
internalized modes of behavior from one's social environment,
Vygotsky was invited to join the staff of Kornilov's institute.
This event became the central organizing point of the remainder
of Luria's scientific career.
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.
It is important to keep in mind that when Vygotsky appeared on
the scene he was still a very young man, a 26-year-old who had
been a philologist until a very few years earlier, when his
attention was drawn to problems of psychology. By no means was
the sociohistorical school of psychology he pioneered a finished
product. It was no more than a schema, a point of view that had
to be fleshed out in theory and experimental practice. In the
years between 1924 and 1934 (when Vygotsky died of tuberculosis)
the "troika" of Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria began to carry out
its reconstruction of psychology from first principles. It was a
slow task, and Luria was not a man to put all else aside while
waiting for new ideas to ripen when he had not finished
harvesting the fruits of his previous labor. Instead, he seems
to have applied his prodigious energy to both tasks
simultaneously he continued to extend his original methods to
new problems while slowly changing their content and contexts to
incorporate the ideas that were growing out of the continuous
interactions with Vygotsky. . .
Progressively, as the years pass, we can see the central ideas
of the sociocultural approach coming to dominate Luria's
research.
A Child's Speech Responsesand the Social Environment" (1930) ]
reports one of several large research projects using the
free-association technique to determine how a child's social
environment affects the form and content of his/her linguistic
and cognitive processes. In this use of the free-association
technique, Luria is applying his notion that Jung's method for
studying the dynamics of individual behavior can also reveal
social determinants of mental life. But the theoretical
rationale for this work no longer retains any references to Jung
(in part, most likely, because Luria was severely criticized for
his earlier advocacy of psychoanalytic ideas). Instead, we see
the prototype of ideas that were to be made famous by Vygotsky
in his book Thought and language, first published in 1934:
language is the product of sociohistorical circumstances and the
forms of interaction between child and adult; it is a vital tool
of thought and is susceptible to specific influences, which
differ in their cognitive impact depending on the social context
in which they are imbedded.
Perhaps because these ideas have remained very much alive in our
own psychological tradition, the research Luria reported retains
considerable relevance. His insistence that the street urchin is
not generally more backward, but certainly less educated, than
children raised in normal families is as contemporary as any
current Journal article discussing the education of "culturally
different" children ("He is not more backward than the
schoolchild ... He is just different...."). His demonstration
that a given child will be at different "stages of development"
with respect to familiar and abstract (school-based) words and
that schooling 'levels" different cultural experiences is an
extremely important finding that seems to have been lost by the
time cross-cultural research came into vogue in the 1960s.
Experimental Psychology and Child Development"(1930) and "Paths
of Development of Thought in the Child" (1929)] review research
on intellectual development in children as it was then being
carried out in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and America. It
was characteristic of both Luria and Vygotsky that they
attempted to place their research within the general circle of
contemporary scientific ideas influencing psychology. In order
to be maximally persuasive, they sought to demonstrate both the
correctness of their own approach and the points where it made
contact with (and then diverged from) the ideas of their
contemporaries.
These articles show, even more clearly than previously
translated works, Luria's early and pervasive interest in the
development of behavior. They show, too, the strong influence of
Piaget, Werner, Karl and Charlotte Buhler, and William Stern,
both as positive contributors to an eventual psychology of
higher psychological functions and as foils against which Luria,
Vygotsky, and their colleagues pitted their own theories.
Of special interest in terms of current research is Luria's
report on the development of writing, a topic that has emerged
in the mid-1970s as a major area of concern in educational
research and practice. His study of written language represents
a rejection of notions (such as De Saussure's) that writing is
simply language written down or the contention of the Prague
linguistic circle that writing is merely the graphic
representation of language elements that are reacted to in a
static way for purposes that are almost entirely restricted to
language's communicative function. Rather, he subsumes language
under the general category of a mediated psychological activity
whose specifics are determined by the activities that implement
the purposes of writing in the first place. Thus, instead of
beginning with a study of writing as a way of representing
language,) Luria traces the ''prehistory" of writing back to
primitive mnemonic activities whose purpose is the
representation of past events in the present. This approach to
writing (see also Vygotsky's article "The prehistory of written
languages," in Vygotsky, 1978) suggests interesting ways to
introduce writing into young children's school activities and
serves the more genera] purpose of motivating studies of the
relation between writing and talking in the course of human
development.
[During the mid-1930s], Luria and his colleagues carried out [a
series of studies] with identical and fraternal twins. . . Very
little of this work was published in either Russian or English.
In 1935 and 1936 a few articles were published in the Works of
the Medical- Genetic Institute (the institution in which the
work was carried out); and one article, on the comparative
development of elementary and complex mental functions in twins,
was published in the now-defunct American journal Character and
Personality (Luria, 1937). . . It was not until the late 1950s
that more accessible accounts of this work appeared in Russian;
and when they did, the study of twins as a means of
differentiating biologically and culturally determined
psychological processes (which was the impetus for the work) had
disappeared entirely. In keeping with this de-emphasis on the
significance of twins in cognitive research, no mention is made
in the title of the article of the fact that the subjects in
Luria's studies of constructive play were identical twins.
Selecting them for study is justified only on the grounds that
their identical heredity and similar home environments make it
easier to discern the effects of planned environmental
(educational) intervention.
This discussion of constructive play is an excellent example of
the way in which Luria linked basic, theoretically oriented
research with problems of broad social concern. The article
appeared in a publication devoted to educational applications of
research, and Luria places the problem squarely in the context
of conflicting programs of pedagogy. But the intervention
experiment he describes is firmly rooted in the sociohistorical
theory of mental development. This is evident in his discussion
of the conceptual underpinnings of the different approaches to
organizing preschool curriculum units devoted to constructive
activities. In his rejection of the highly structured approach
attributed to Montessori and her followers or resort to totally
unguided free construction, we see reflected Vygotsky's
insistence on a distinction between elementary functions,
involuntarily applied, and higher functions that incorporate
planning elements in a deliberate manner. It is the task of the
educator to create an environment to move the child from the
spontaneous application of elementary skills to the deliberate
application of higher, analytic skills. The test of the
effectiveness of such a program of instruction is more than the
satisfactory completion of the instructional task itself. If the
educational program is really successful, it will result in
qualitative changes in the structure of the child's activity in
a variety of seemingly remote tasks that, theory dictates, bear
a specific analogy to the instructional tasks. The latter part
of the paper, which assesses the children's ability to handle a
variety of perceptual and classificatory tasks, represents the
more general test of the consequences of differential tuition in
the block-building task, and a test of the basic theory as well.
. .
In the late 1940s psychology again came under attack, but this
time in a way that involved the direct and active intervention
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and its
chairman, Joseph Stalin. . . Stalin strongly favored adoption of
Pavlovian psychophysiology as a model upon which all of
psychology should be built. All other approaches were considered
erroneous, and their adherents were put under tremendous
pressure to renounce their previous activities and join in the
reconstruction of psychology along Pavlovian lines.
Luria was not exempted from this general requirement, all the
more so since he had been associated with a school of psychology
that had come under special scrutiny in the past. From
approximately 1937 through 1947 he left the study of cognitive
development and embarked on a career as a neurologist (the
fruits of this work are surveyed in the third section of this
book). About 1948, however, he was told to leave the Institute
of Neurosurgery, where he had been working for several years,
and was assigned to the Institute of Defectology, an institution
that had been founded by Vygotsky about twenty years earlier.
There he turned once again to the problems that had occupied him
earlier in his career, but it was not possible to approach them
in the style he had come to adopt in the 1930s.
What Luria fashioned was an experimental approach that has its
closest parallel in studies contained in The nature of human
conflicts, but with a conceptual structure that grew directly
out of the basic principles of the sociohistorical school and a
language that was thoroughly Pavlovian. Thus, the basic method
is the combined-motor method, but with a very careful
concentration on the way the verbal and motor components of a
child's response enter into complex functional- systems to
enable the child to meet the requirements of the task. Critical
here is the issue of whether speech comes to precede and guide
the motor response (which is possible only when its excitatory
and inhibitory components are well Integrated) or whether it
only accompanies action. This issue has its direct parallel in
the studies of writing, carried out 20 years earlier, in which
it was important to discern when the child's writing came to
precede and guide his activity instead of following or
accompanying it.
It is somewhat ironic that this work, which in some respects
camouflaged Luria's main lines of concern, generated enormous
interest in his work among American psychologists. One cannot be
certain, but I suspect that the Pavlovian framework Luria used
to describe and motivate this work, especially the promise that
reflex theories could be extended to the study of language
(Pavlov's "second-signal system") were the cause of the work's
popularity in the United States. The late 1950s and early 1960s
were the high watermark of neobehaviorist theorizing about
language, and many psychologists found an obvious parallel
between Luria's view that language responses come to mediate
motor responses and various lines of mediational
stimulus-response theories that had been elaborated here on the
conditioning models of Hull, Spence, and Skinner. This was also
the period when experiential studies of children's intellectual
development within a learning-theory tradition were just
beginning to come into vogue, and Luria's ideas about the role
of speech in this process were exceedingly congenial.
During the last decade and a half of his life, [Luria] published
several books summarizing his work on [the study of the brain's
organization of higher psychological functions], a body of
learning he liked to call neuropsychology. . .
"L.S.Vygotsky and the problem of functional Localization" (1966)
is] an overview of Vygotsky's theory and its implications for
the study of brain-behavior relations. This article certainly
deserves study by anyone interested in Luria's approach to
neuropsychology (and, I would argue, anyone interested in the
study of human cognition) because it lays out in capsule form
his general enterprise, of which neuropsychology was only one
aspect. . .
This suggestion is completely consistent with Vygotsky's view
that "localization of higher nervous functions can be understood
only chronologically, as the result of mental development."
American colleagues have often bridled at Luria's
characterization of their neuropsychology as "atheoretical."
They correctly point to the theories of brain function that
guide their work and their meticulous attempts to establish the
reliability and validity of their tests.
Unfortunately, Luria and his Western counterparts never really
understood each other on this point. Luria's summary of
Vygotsky's views (which he had a large role in shaping) makes it
clear that his idea of theory is an enterprise infinitely more
ambitious than all those undertaken by any but a handful of
psychologists from other countries. He often said that in order
to have a theory of brain-behavior relations, it is necessary to
have a theory of both the brain and behavior. . . .
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
"Psychoanalysis as a Monistic Psychology," in The Selected
Writings of A.R.Luria ed. by Cole, Michael, pgs. 3-41.
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
"A Child's Speech Responses and the Social Environment," in The
Selected Writings of A.R.Luria ed. by Cole, Michael, pgs. 45-77.
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
"Experimental Psychology and Child Development," in The Selected
Writings of A.R.Luria ed. by Cole, Michael, pgs. 78-96.
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
"Paths of Development of Thought in the Child,"in The Selected
Writings of A.R.Luria ed. by Cole, Michael, pgs. 97-144.
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
"L.S.Vygotsky and the Problem of Functional Localization," in
The Selected Writings of A.R.Luria ed. by Cole, Michael, pgs.
273-281.
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
Note:
This scanned article was originally found at
http://www.scrippscol.edu/. The article was found on a personal
webpage at
http://www.scrippscol.edu/scripps/~core/1997/COREI/Lightdark/A.R
.Luria.html.
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/
schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu
People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds,
People who possess strong feelings even people with great minds
and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys
and girls
L.S. Vygotsky