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Re: [xmca] A magic moment: swearing-in gaffe
I believe that Luria's combined motor method provides a perfect snapshot of
what was seen January 20th! For your enjoyment please peruse Mike Cole's
excellent summary:
found at:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/Localz/MCole/luria.html
By the testimony of his autobiography and his early published writings,
Alexander Romanovich was interested in the issues that made up the crisis
in psychology for several years before he met Vygotsky. While still a
student he read widely in German and American psychology. He was very
sympathetic to German act-psychology and at the same time he was fascinated
by Freud and Jung. This combination may seem odd, but it reflected his
search for a theory of motivation and some way to address questions of
emotional conflicts and the method of free associations. As he summarized
his notions about psychoanalysis:
Here, I thought, was a scientific approach that combined a strongly
deterministic explanation of concrete, individual behavior with an
explanation of the origins of complex human needs in terms of natural
science. Perhaps psychoanalysis could serve as the basis for a scientific
reale Psichologie, one that could overcome the nomothetic-idiographic
distinction (1979, p. 23)
In emulation of the psychoanalytical writers, he conducted clinical
research on free associations, but he mistrusted the results of such
efforts, feeling that any conclusions he tried to reach about the flow of
his subjects' thoughts were insufficiently grounded. As he wrote in his
autobiography, " While I was able to fill notebooks with [a patient's] free
associations, I was in no position to carry out my plan to use such data to
capture `the concrete reality of the flow of ideas (1979, p.24").
In response to this dissatisfaction he created a methodology designed to
embody a psychodynamic theory of mind in an objective set of laboratory
procedures. The centerpiece of this methodology was an experimental
technique that he called the combined motor method, which, he hoped, would
provide a way of rendering Freud's clinical methods accessible to
experimental treatment.
The fullest existing description of this work is contained in a monograph
published in English in 1932 under the title The Nature of Human Conflicts:
Or Emotion, Conflict and Will. Unfortunately, this fascinating book is not
yet available in Russian; rather Russian papers describing this experiment
provided only a partial glimpse of the overall project. The book also
provides a window on how Luria's early work was taken up and transformed
under the influence of Vygotsky, and why Vygotsky would find in Luria such
a useful colleague.
In the first chapter Luria outlines his basic presuppositions and his
experimental strategy. He explicitly rejects mechanical determinism,
declaring "The structure of the organism presupposes not an accidental
mosaic, but a complex organization of separate systems . . . [that] unite
as very definite parts into an integrated functional structure." (pp. 6-7)
Since this structure is the consequence of a long complicated development,
both ontogenetically and cultural-historically, and because the parts are
integrated into a whole functional system, how can it be possible to
isolate elements in this system for purposes of psychological analysis?
Phrased differently, since no two people are constructed alike, how could
one possibly obtain valid evidence about the thought processes of another
person?
The answer that Luria provided was that other people's thoughts could not
be observed directly. But they could be revealed indirectly in so far as
they could be reflected in a publicly displayable, voluntary behavior. He
phrased his strategy as follows:
We should on the one hand, produce the central process of the
disorganization of behavior; on the other hand, we should try to reflect
this process in some [other] system accessible and suitable for
examination. The motor function is such a systematic, objectively reflected
structure of the neuro-dynamic processes concealed from immediate
examination. And there lies before us the use of the motor function as a
system of reflected structure of hidden psychological processes. Thus we
proceed along the path we call the combined motor method. (p. 18)
The first phase in his technique was to induce a well-coordinated,
publicly available behavior as the medium of coordination necessary for the
psychological analysis to be accurate. He used various devices for this
purpose. Often the subject was requested to hold the left hand steady in a
device that could record its movements, while simultaneously being asked to
press a button or squeeze a bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented by
the experimenter. Once this behavior became stable, the analyst sought to
disrupt it selectively in line with his hypothesis about particular
internal psychological states.
The combined motor method was applied to psychodiagnosis in a wide variety
of real life circumstances consistent with Luria's goal of demonstrating
the possibility of a methodology powerful enough to reach beyond the
laboratory to engage the kinds of long-term emotions which typically
organize human behavior. It also combines general laws with specific cases.
The book is full of examples. When he spoke about this wrok in later life,
Luria ordinarily emphasized studies with suspected criminals because they
were the basis for lie detector tests. But the book also contains a variety
of purely experimental, non-applied verifications of his methodology. For
example, he conducted experiments with normal adults who were first told
various stories, and then hypnotized to suppress knowledge of certain
words, following which the analyst had to ferret out the "hidden" words
from the ways in which their motor behavior was selectively disrupted. He
also conducted experiments with people suffering various neuroses and brain
damage as a means of further verifying the effectiveness of his methods.
Work on the combined motor method is concentrated in the first two sections
of The Nature of Human Conflicts which was published in 1932 in English,
but contains a record of research from 1923-1930. I find the book
fascinating reading in part because I know that at the start of this
period, Alexander Romanovich was intent upon creating the combined motor
method as a model system for the study of the psychodynamics of individual
thought. In doing so, he had achieved one model for resolving the crisis in
psychology. By the end of this period, he was engaged with Vygotsky and
Leontiev (who had participated in some of the early experiments on The
combined motor method) in creating a new school of psychology founded on
The principle that the mind is mediated through culture. From this
perspective, the combined motor method sets up a mini "cultural system" and
it is within the confines of this microcosm that one can study how culture
serves as the medium of propagating ideas from one person to another. As
Luria expressed this relationship at The end of The Nature of Human
Conflicts, " The analysis of complex cultural mechanisms is the key to the
understanding of the simple neurodynamical processes 1932, p. 428).
One sees many variations on this method in Luria's later work such as his
studies on the development of self control in normal and abnormal children;
unfortunately, this work was carried out at a time when it was required to
communicate in terms that sounded like Pavlovian theory, so the continuity
between the early and later work is difficult to notice, or at least, it
was for me.
<cconnery@ithaca
.edu> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent by: cc:
xmca-bounces@web Subject: Re: [xmca] A magic moment: swearing-in gaffe
er.ucsd.edu
01/21/2009 03:27
PM
Please respond
to "eXtended
Mind, Culture,
Activity"
FYI--- Obama was one of the few who did not endorse the Chief Justice's
nomination to the Supreme Court.
Cathrene
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