Re: [xmca] A magic moment: swearing-in gaffe

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Interesting linkage, Eric.
Selective discoordination there certainly was.\
mike

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:08 AM, <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:

>
> 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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