Abstract
Focused on Luria’s The Nature of Human Conflicts, or Emotion, Conflict and Will published in English translation in 1932, this chapter explores experiments, including word association tests, Luria conducted in police cells with people suspected or convicted of murder and explores connections between these experiments and his contemporaneous engagement with psychoanalysis. Luria’s short, matter-of-fact case histories give vivid, violent and sometimes bizarre insights into the lives of ordinary Soviet people in Moscow during the period of the New Economic Policy (1922–1928). This chapter asks what implications Luria’s lack of interest in the social details revealed in his clinical material had on his experimental methods and conclusions.
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Notes
- 1.
K.E. Levitin, ‘The Soul’s Frail Dwelling-House’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 36, 5 (1998), 3–45, p. 27. Originally published in Russian as Mimoletnyi uzor [A Transient Pattern] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Zhanie, 1978).
- 2.
A.R. Luria, The Nature of Human Conflicts or Emotion, Conflict and Will, trans. by W. Horsley Gantt (New York, NY: Liveright, 1932), p. 78.
- 3.
The book was initially set to be published under the English title ‘Human Nature and its Conflicts’, to which Luria objected given the book’s lack of focus on human nature. This resulted in the shuffled word order. He had proposed as alternatives: ‘“Affection [sic], Conflict & Will” or “Psychophysiology of affection [sic] and conflicts”’. Luria to W.H. Gantt, April 10, 1931, Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University, WH Gantt Papers, B45 F28.
- 4.
Luria to Sergei Eisenstein, February 17, 1930, Moscow, Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), Sergei Eisenstein Papers, 123-1-19321/26.
- 5.
In 1931 Luria wrote the following oblique message to his English translator: ‘You ask about the Russian edition of my book. It, unfortunately, has not yet happened; I hope that it will appear in the winter of this year.’ Luria to W.H. Gantt, August 17, 1931, Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University, WH Gantt Papers, B45 F28. Reflecting on his research with criminals in the 1970s he claimed that a huge unpublished manuscript remained from the experiments, which he said he sent to the Institute for Criminal Investigation at that time. He mentions his boss K.N. Kornilov’s increasing hostility to psychoanalysis as the reason he was forbidden from publishing another article based on some of these experiments, which may also have been a factor in the fate of the publication of the book, Levitin, pp. 71–72. The publication of The Nature of Human Conflicts in English was preceded by the publication of articles in German: A.R. Luria, ‘Die Methode der abbildenden Motorik bei Kommunikation der Systeme und ihre Anwendung auf die Affektpsychologie’, Psychologische Forschung, 12 (1929), 127–179 and A.R. Luria, ‘Die Methode der abbildenden Motorik in der Tatbestandsdiagnostik’, Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie, 35 (1930), 139–183.
- 6.
Luria to Sacks, July 19, 1973, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City.
- 7.
These experiments were conducted by Mark Lebedinsky, who would go on to work with Luria and others in Kharkiv. See Anton Yasnitsky and Michel Ferrari, ‘From Vygotsky to Vygotskian psychology: Introduction to the history of the Kharkov School’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 44, 2 (2008), 119–145. Luria also collaborated with Lebedinsky on the experiments with people with aphasia and Parkinson’s at the laboratory of the Clinic for Nervous Diseases at the First Moscow University.
- 8.
For a rough chronology of the experiments and papers the book comprises and shifts in influence and terminology evident across the text, see Michael Paul George Hames, ‘The Early Theoretical Development of Alexander Luria’, PhD, University of London, UCL, 2002, pp. 149–156.
- 9.
A.R. Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 40, 1 (2002), 26–53, p. 29. Originally published in K.N. Kornilov, Psikhologiia i Marksizma [Psychology and Marxism] (Leningrad: Gosudarstvenoe psikhologii, 1925), pp. 47–80.
- 10.
Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis…’, p. 14.
- 11.
Luria, The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology, ed. by Michael Cole and Sheila Cole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 18.
- 12.
Luria, Making of Mind, pp. 18–19.
- 13.
On Kazan’s strategic importance in the Civil War, see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2005), p. 67 and W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 187–193.
- 14.
Leon Trotsky, ‘The Significance of the Taking of Kazan in the Course of the Civil War’, The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, Vol 1, 1918: How the Revolution Armed, trans. by Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1979), p. 332.
- 15.
On the revolution’s impact on academic institutions, see Michael David-Fox, Revolution of Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Loren Graham characterises the post-revolutionary period in scientific research institutions as being a ‘curious amalgam of political control and popular ferment’. Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 93.
- 16.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 19.
- 17.
Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008), p. 33.
- 18.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 19.
- 19.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 20.
- 20.
Karl Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 36, 5 (1998), 46–75, p. 63.
- 21.
Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, p. 63.
- 22.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 22.
- 23.
Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, pp. 62–65.
- 24.
For an account of the activities of the Kazan Psychoanalytic Society drawing on papers from the Luria family archive, see van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 78–82.
- 25.
Luria, ‘The Kazan Psycho-Analytical Society, Russia’, Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytic Association, 4 (1923), 397–399, p. 397.
- 26.
Luria, ‘Kazan’, p. 397.
- 27.
Luria, ‘Kazan’, p. 399.
- 28.
On Soviet Taylorism, Aleksei Gastev and industrial psychology, see Rainer Traub ‘Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of “Scientific Management” in the (Early) Soviet Union’, Telos, 37 (1978), 82–92, Kendall E. Bailes, ‘Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924’, Soviet Studies, 9 (1977), 373–94 and R.S. Schultz and R.A. McFarland, ‘Industrial psychology in the Soviet Union’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 19, 3 (1935), 265–308.
- 29.
Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, p. 67.
- 30.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 28. A slightly different account is given in a 1974 speech transcribed by Levitin in which Luria claims to have written to Kornilov to inform him of the experiments he was conducting on reaction time. Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, p. 67.
- 31.
On the ‘International Solidarity’ psychoanalytic children’s home run by Vera Schmidt in the building, see Vera Schmidt, Psychoanalytische Erziehung in Sowjetrussland: Bericht über das Kinderheim-Laboratorium in Moskau [Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia: Report on the Children’s Home-Laboratory in Moscow] (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924) and Yorkdanka Valkanova, ‘The Psychoanalytic Kindergarten Project in Soviet Russia, 1921–1930’, SCRSS Digest, 13, 2 (2016), 12–15. On the building, see William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 133–139, N.L. Penezhko, V.N. Chernukhina and A.M. Marchenkov, 6 Riabushinsky Gorku—Dom Na Maloi Nikitkoi, 6 [6 Riabushinsky Gorky—The House at 6 Mal. Nikitskaia] (Moscow: Nasledie, 1997), p. 74 and James L. West, Riabushinsky’s Utopian Capitalism’ in Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 165.
- 32.
Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 59.
- 33.
‘The psychoanalytic movement slowed down, and about the year 1930 came to a standstill. From this date it officially ceased to exist, and all publication of its work ceased likewise’, Elias Perepel, ‘The Psychoanalytic Movement in U.S.S.R.’, Psychoanalytic Review, 26 (1939), 298–300, p. 300. For a representative selection of essays from the period both defending and attacking psychoanalysis, see Zigmund Freid: Psikhoanaliz i russkaia mysl’ [Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and Russian Thought], ed. by V.M. Leibin (Moscow: Izdatel‘stvo Respublika’, 1994), pp. 145–372. On the fate of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, see Alberto Angelini, ‘History of the Unconscious in Soviet Russia: From its Origins to the Fall of the Soviet Union’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 89 (2008), 369–388, V.N. Buzin, ‘Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union: On the History of a Defeat’, Russian Social Science Review, 36, 6 (1995), 65–73, Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), Gary N. Goldsmith, ‘Between Certainty and Uncertainty: Observations on Psychoanalysis in Russia’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 47 (2002), 203–224 and Miller, pp. 53–113.
- 34.
A. Lurii a, ‘Krisis burzhuaznoi psikhologii’ [The Crisis of Bourgeois Psychology], Psikhologiia, 1–2 (1932), 63–88, p. 66.
- 35.
Mark Solms, ‘Freud, Luria and the Clinical Method’, Psychoanalysis and History, 2 (2000), 76–109, p. 92.
- 36.
René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 87. See, Sarah Marks, ‘Suggestion, Persuasion and Work: Psychotherapies in Communist Europe’, European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 20, 1 (2018), 10–24, pp. 13–15, which particularly emphasises the continued presence of psychoanalytic practices in parts of the Eastern bloc that came under Communist control in the aftermath of the Second World War. On the use of psychoanalytic therapeutic methods in Soviet psychiatry during the Second World War, see Benjamin Zajicek, Scientific Psychiatry in Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Politics of Modern Medicine and the Struggle to Define ‘Pavlovian’ Psychiatry, 1939–1953, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2009, p. 148. Luria wrote the entry on psychoanalysis for the 1940 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which is descriptive and measured rather than vehement in its criticisms. A. Luriia, ‘Psikhoanaliz’, Bolshaiia Sovietskaia Entsiklopediia, tom. 47 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1940), pp. 186–187.
- 37.
Given Luria’s own remarks about the profound effect meeting Vygotsky in 1924 had on his intellectual development, it is also worth noting how closely Luria’s criticisms of psychoanalysis in his repentant article recall those articulated by Vygotsky, who argued that psychoanalysis ‘directly reduces the higher mental processes—both personal and collective ones—to primitive, primordial, essentially prehistorical, prehuman root, leaving no room for history’. Lev Vygotsky, ‘The Historical Meaning of The Crisis in Psychology’ in The Collected Works of Lev Vygotsky, vol. 3, ed. by Robert W. Rieber and Jeffrey Wollock, trans. by René van der Veer (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1997), pp. 233–343, p. 263.
- 38.
Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis…’, p. 47.
- 39.
For a detailed discussion of this introduction, see my article Hannah Proctor, ‘A Country Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Alexander Luria, Death Drive and Dialectic in the Early Soviet Union’, Psychoanalysis and History, 18, 2 (2016), 155–182.
- 40.
Luria, ‘Russian Psychoanalytic Society’, Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytic Association, 7 (1926), 294–295, p. 294.
- 41.
Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, p. 68.
- 42.
On Spielrein see, John Launer, Sex versus Survival: The Story of Sabina Spielrein, Her Life, Her Ideas, Her Genius (Lexington, KY: Lulu, 2011) and Angela Sells, Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 2017). In the years preceding the October Revolution, Russian psychiatrists were influenced by and paid visits to Jung. See, Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 103, pp. 142–143.
- 43.
Miller claims that the Institute for Psychoanalysis intended to translate and publish Freud’s ‘most influential works’, followed by works by Jung, Sandor Ferenczi and Melanie Klein, Freud and the Bolsheviks, p. 60. Etkind discusses Spielrein’s involvement in translating Jung’s works into Russian, claiming that she was initially wary as she hadn’t read Russian translations of psychoanalytic works so was unsure of the terminology, Eros of the Impossible, p. 165.
- 44.
Etkind, p. 173.
- 45.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 23.
- 46.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 25. For a description of these experiments, see also Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, p. 67.
- 47.
Kornilov may have participated in denunciations of psychoanalysis but soon after reactology was similarly ‘proclaimed an erroneous deviation from truly Marxist psychology and denounced in June 1931, by the decision of the Institute’s local cell of the Communist Party’, Anton Yasnitsky, Vygotsky: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 2018), epub, p. 328.2.
- 48.
On Luria’s work with Kornilov at the Moscow Institute of Psychology and its relation to his psychoanalytic work, see Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 86–89 and Levy Rahmani, Soviet Psychology: Philosophical, Theoretical and Experimental Issues (New York, NY: International Universities Press, 1973), pp. 25–30.
- 49.
Luria, ‘Psychology in Russia’, Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35 (1928), 347–355, p. 349.
- 50.
Luria, ‘Psychology in Russia’, p. 350.
- 51.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 25.
- 52.
On the understanding of sublimation prevalent in Soviet psychology and in NEP-era discourse more broadly, see Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), pp. 151–156 and Hannah Proctor, ‘Reason Displaces All Love’, New Inquiry, February 2014, in which I discuss relationships between Taylorist understandings of workplace efficiency and the sexual theories of psychologist Aron Zalkind, including Revoliutsiia i molodezh’ [Revolution and Youth] (Moscow: Izdanie Kommunistich. un-ta im. Sverdlova, 1925) and Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti [The Sexual Question in Soviet Social Conditions] (Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926).
- 53.
Levitin, p. 68.
- 54.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 32.
- 55.
Luria to W.H. Gantt, April 10, 1931, Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University, WH Gantt Papers, B45 F28.
- 56.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 32.
- 57.
Carl Jung, The Collected Works of CG Jung, vol. 2, Experimental Researches, ed. by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire, p. 321.
- 58.
Luria, Nature, p. 22.
- 59.
Luria, Nature, p. 43.
- 60.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 35.
- 61.
Luria, Nature, p. 39. Luria also published a text on these experiments in Russian: Eksamen i psikhika [Exams and the Mind] (Moscow: Tr. Akademii Kommunisticheskogo Vospitaniia imni Krupskoi, 1931). See also Levitin, p. 70.
- 62.
See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 97–105.
- 63.
Luria, Nature, p. 48.
- 64.
Luria, The Nature of Human Conflicts or Emotion, Conflict and Will, trans. by W Horsley Gantt (New York, NY: Liveright, 1932), p. 57.
- 65.
Luria, Nature, p. 51.
- 66.
Luria, Nature, p. 53.
- 67.
Luria, Nature, p. 51.
- 68.
Luria, Nature, p. 52.
- 69.
Luria, Nature, p. 75.
- 70.
Luria, Nature, p. 76.
- 71.
Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, ‘Introduction to the Russian translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. by René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 10–18, p. 15. First published in Russian in Sigmund Freud, Po tu storonu principa udovol’stviia [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] (Moscow: Sovremennye Problemy, 1925), pp. 3–16.
- 72.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Introduction…’, p. 13.
- 73.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Introduction…’, p. 15.
- 74.
Luria and Vera Schmidt, ‘Russian Psycho-Analytical Society’, Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytic Association, 8 (1927), 454–455, p. 454.
- 75.
Luria, Nature, p. 79.
- 76.
Hames, p. 151.
- 77.
Luria, Nature, p. 79.
- 78.
Levitin, p. 71.
- 79.
Luria, ‘A.R. Luria’ in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6, ed. by Gardner Lindzey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 253–292, p. 258.
- 80.
Luria, ‘The New Method of Expressive Motor Reactions in Studying Affective Traces’, Proceedings and Papers of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology (held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 1st–7th 1929) (Princeton, NJ: Psychological Review Company, 1930), pp. 294–296. Only a summary of Luria’s paper is contained here. On Luria’s trip to Yale, see Anton Yasnitsky, ‘Rekonstruktsiia poezdki A.R. Lurii na IX Mezhdunarodnyi Psikhologicheskii Kongress’ [A reconstruction of A.R. Luria’s journey to the Ninth International Psychological Congress], Voprosy Psikhologii (2012), 86–93.
- 81.
Luria, Nature, p. 116.
- 82.
Luria, ‘New Method…’, p. 295.
- 83.
He likens the criminal to an ‘idiot’ and a child. Luria, Nature…, p. 83.
- 84.
C.G. Jung, Studies in Word Association: Experiments in the Diagnosis of Psychopathological Conditions Carried Out at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Switzerland, trans. by M.D. Eder (London: William Heinemann, 1918), p. 299.
- 85.
Jung, Studies in Word Association, p. 334.
- 86.
Jung, Studies in Word Association, p. 341.
- 87.
Jung, Studies in Word Association, p. 334.
- 88.
Jung , ‘New Criminal Psychology’ in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol 2, Experimental Researches, ed. by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 586–596, pp. 587–588.
- 89.
Luria, Nature, p. 115 (modified translation).
- 90.
Luria, Nature, p. 109.
- 91.
Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 2009), p. 98.
- 92.
Luria, Nature, p. 423.
- 93.
Luriia, ‘Printsipial’nye voprosy sovremennoi psikhologii’ [Principle Questions of Contemporary Psychology], Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Banner of Marxism], 4–5 (1926), 129–139, p. 129.
- 94.
A.R. Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 40, 1 (2002), 26–53, p. 27. Originally published in K.N. Kornilov, Psikhologiia i Marksizma [Psychology and Marxism] (Leningrad: Gosudarstvenoe psikhologii, 1925), pp. 47–80.
- 95.
Luria, Nature, p. 428.
- 96.
Luria, Nature, p. 428.
- 97.
For example, there is no sense of how Luria’s experiments connected to social order policing policies or to the new criminal code introduced in 1922. It is also unclear whether the criminals Luria came into contact with have been classified by the state as ‘socially harmful elements’ [sotsial’no-vredye elementy]. See, David R. Shearer, Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 98.
Levitin, p. 70.
- 99.
Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 167, p. 168.
- 100.
Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), p. 50, p. 8. See also, Louise Shelley, ‘Soviet Criminology after the Revolution’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 70, 3 (1979), 391–396 and Peter H. Solomon ‘Criminalization and Decriminalization in Soviet Criminal Policy, 1917–1941’, Law & Society Review, 16, 1 (1981–1982), 9–44.
- 101.
Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 2009), p. 11. He describes how ‘psychiatrists like all expert doctors now had the right to operate as “judges of scientific facts”, to participate in criminal investigations and in court hearings as expert witnesses with nominal independence from police interference’, p. 110.
- 102.
Healey, pp. 113–114.
- 103.
Petrovna, ‘Sluchai izuvecheniia muzha’ in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, ed. by M.N. Gernet (Moscow: Pravo i zhizn, 1924), pp. 82–101, p. 82, cited in Kowalsky, p. 3.
- 104.
On Gernet and the Moscow Bureau for the Study of the Criminal Personality and Crime [Moskovskii kabinet po izucheniiu lichnosti prestupnika i prestupnosti], see Kenneth Pinnow, Lost to the Collective, pp. 57–59, pp. 144–145 and ‘From All Sides: Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Scientific Collaboration, and the Soviet Criminological Laboratories of the 1920s’, Slavic Review, 76, 1 (2017), 122–146.
- 105.
See N. Brukhanskii’s Materialy po seksual’noi psikhopatologii [Materials of Sexual Psychopathology] (Moscow: MM and C Sabashnikovy, 1927), pp. 9–18.
- 106.
Petrovna, p. 100.
- 107.
Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 125. In a discussion of Brukhanskii’s theorisations of crowd psychology Samuel Goff similarly claims that ‘Violent or disorderly acts may be the outward manifestations of a kind of unregulated individualism [for Brukhanskii], but they can only be properly analysed relative to social living’. Samuel Goff, ‘Physical Culture and the Embodied Soviet Subject, 1921–1939: Surveillance, Aesthetics, Spectatorship’, PhD, University of Cambridge, 2017, p. 195.
- 108.
Naiman, p. 124.
- 109.
See, for example, his discussion of a 1927 case by G.N. Udal’tsov, in which the clinical diagnosis of a formerly religious student is discussed in terms of his difficulties adjusting to the demands of the new regime (Beer, pp. 165–166). Healey similarly notes: ‘Psychiatrists in their public statements [about rape cases] accepted the primacy of the economic and social determinants to the formation of human personality’, p. 111. Kowalsky observes that criminologists ‘relied on socioeconomic interpretations of crime’, p. 16. And Pinnow writes that the ‘the practice of social diagnostics expanded so dramatically in Russia during the 1920s’, Lost to the Collective, p. 59.
- 110.
Kowalsky, pp. 38–39.
- 111.
M.N. Gernet, ‘Predislovie’ [Introduction], Prestupnyi mir Moskvy (Moscow: Pravo i zhizn’, 1924), p. i.
- 112.
Gernet, p. xxvi.
- 113.
Gernet, p. xxvi.
- 114.
Gernet, p. xli.
- 115.
Gernet, p. xl.
- 116.
Gernet, p. xli.
- 117.
The article gives the figure 29 though the press tended to report 33. See Mark Vincent, ‘Making a Soviet Murderer: The Case of Moscow Serial Killer Vasili Petrov-Komarov’, http://www.pushkinhouse.org/blog/2018/6/25/making-a-soviet-murderer-the-case-of-moscow-serial-killer-vasili-petrov-komarov. Vincent discusses another article dealing with the case by V. Larin in Mark Vincent, ‘Cult of the “Urka”: Criminal Subculture in the Gulag, 1924–1953’, PhD, University of East Anglia, 2015, pp. 90–92.
- 118.
Mikhail Bulgakov, ‘The Komarov Case’, Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories, trans. by Alison Rice (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1991), pp. 195–206, p. 195.
- 119.
S.A. Ukshe, ‘Ubiitsy’ [Murders], Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, pp. 41–81, p. 55.
- 120.
Ukshe, p. 47.
- 121.
Bulgakov, ‘Komarov Case’, p. 198.
- 122.
Ukshe, p. 69.
- 123.
Ukshe , p. 69. In his opening remarks the author similarly attributed any peak in the murder rate to the effects of the First World War, Civil War and famine, p. 45.
- 124.
Luria, Nature, p. 81.
- 125.
Luria, Nature, p. 90.
- 126.
Vygotsky to Luria, Zakharino Sanatorium March 5, 1926, Georg Rückriem, ed., Lev Lemenovic Vygotskij: Briefe/Letters, 1924–1934 (Berlin: Lehman, 2009), p. 216
- 127.
Rückriem, p. 216.
- 128.
Jacques Derrida’s insights about Freud’ s economic conception of the relation between pleasure and unpleasure in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ are apposite here. Freud, he says, implicitly supposes that we know what pleasure is but that he fails to actually tell us anything about it—‘Nothing is said of the qualitative experience of pleasure itself. What is it? What does it consist of? … The definition of the pleasure principle is mute about pleasure, about its essence and quality. Guided by the economic point of view, this definition concerns only quantitative relations.’ Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 276.
- 129.
Luria to W.H. Gantt, August 17, 1931, Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University, WH Gantt Papers, B45 F28.
- 130.
Luria, Making of Mind, p. 73.
- 131.
Luria, Nature of Human Conflicts, p. 111.
- 132.
T.V. Akhutina, ‘A.R. Luriia: zhiznennyi put’ [A.R. Luria: The Way of Life], Kul’turno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia, 2 (2012), 2–10, p. 3. Kozulin speculates that Soviet lie detectors were based on Luria’s experiments rather than making claims about American variants, Psychology in Utopia, p. 87.
- 133.
Levitin, p. 71. Here Luria also claimed his method was not adopted in the USSR but that there had been renewed interest in it in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
- 134.
Gantt to Luria, April 22, 1933, Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University, WH Gantt Papers, B45 F28. On the lie detector in America, see: Ken Adler, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York, NY: Free Press, 2007).
- 135.
A.R. Luriia, ‘Experimental psychology in forensic investigations’ [Eksperimentantal’naia psikhologiia v sudebno sledstvennom dele], Sovetskoe Pravo [Soviet Law], 2, 26 (1927), 84–100, p. 85. The other article published in Russian discussing these experiments is: ‘Psikhologiia v opredelenii sledov prestuplenii’ [Psychology in the Investigatory Determination of Crime], Nauchnoe Slovo, 3 (1928), 77–104.
- 136.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 89.
- 137.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 89.
- 138.
Sigmund Freud, ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914)’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 7–66.
- 139.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings (1906)’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 105.
- 140.
Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Legal Proceedings’, p. 108.
- 141.
Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Legal Proceedings’, p. 111.
- 142.
Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Legal Proceedings’, p. 112.
- 143.
Freud , ‘Psychoanalysis and Legal Proceedings’, p. 113. For a useful discussion of the psychoanalytic concept of denial and its implications for historians, see Catherine Hall and Daniel Pick, ‘Thinking About Denial’, History Workshop Journal, 84 (2017), 1–23.
- 144.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 93.
- 145.
Jung, Studies in Word Association, p. 300.
- 146.
Jung, p. 321.
- 147.
Luria, Nature, p. 129. A detailed discussion of the experiments in hypnosis and suggestion included in the book is beyond the scope of my discussion here. Luria’s primary collaborator for these was Boris Efimovich Varshava who was also a member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society and who died in 1927. K.I. Platonov, a major figure in Soviet psychotherapy, mentions collaborating with Luria in the early 1930s and Luria recommended an early article by Platonov for publication by an American journal (Hames, p. 169). Hypnosis and suggestion remained therapeutic methods in the Soviet psy-ences and hypnosis was approved of by Pavlov. See, for example, K.I. Platonov, The Word as a Physiological and Therapeutic Factor: The Theory and Practice of Psychotherapy According to I. P. Pavlov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), Aleksandra Brokman ‘Sterility and Suggestion: Minor Psychotherapy in the Soviet Union, 1956–1985’, History of the Human Sciences, 31, 4 (2018), 83–106 and Wolf Lauterbach, Soviet Psychotherapy (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984).
- 148.
Luria, Nature, p. 132. Interestingly in these artificially constructed situations Luria claims he did use the method of ‘free association’ referring to his method as ‘experimental psychoanalysis’, p. 151.
- 149.
Levitin, p. 70.
- 150.
Anton Yasnitsky and René van der Veer eds., Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 46. Luria’s father also served as a Kremlin doctor and his role in treating Vyshinsky’s gastronomic complaints may also have been a factor in protecting his son.
- 151.
Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 2000), p. 194. On the status of confession in agitation trials in the 1920s, see Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
- 152.
Cassiday, p. 193.
- 153.
On shifts in Soviet law and policing in this period, see Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and Louise I. Shelley, Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control (London: Routledge, 1996).
- 154.
Luria, Nature, p. 114. Luria uses the term ‘catharsis’ in relation to confession in A.R. Luria, ‘The New Method of Expressive Motor Reactions in Studying Affective Traces’, Proceedings and Papers of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology (held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 1st–7th 1929) (Princeton, NJ: Psychological Review Company, 1930), pp. 294–296, p. 295.
- 155.
Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 113–123 and Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) (particularly Chap. 5).
- 156.
Luria may have explored suggestibility in other experiments in the period, but he drew a clear line between conscious and hypnotic states.
- 157.
Lev Sheinin, ‘Rasskaz o cebe’ [Story of Myself], Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an investigator] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1968), pp. 5–20, p. 5.
- 158.
Sheinin, pp. 8–9.
- 159.
Sheinin, p. 5.
- 160.
According to William G. Rosenberg, temporal contradictions were at the heart of NEP-era political policy: ‘NEP was a period in which those in power were forced somehow to come to terms with complex social and cultural residues of pre-revolutionary Russia, implicitly at odds with ongoing goals of building socialist or communist order.’ ‘Introduction: NEP as a “Transitional” Society’ in Russia in the era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–11, p. 3. These kinds of juxtapositions can be found in first-hand accounts of foreign visitors to Moscow in the period. See, for example, Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. by Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Dorothy Thompson, The New Russia (New York, NY: H. Holt and Co., 1928). In his 1927 account of Soviet Russia René Fülöp-Miller, described ‘a fantastic between-world … a medley of mixed forms chaotically jumbled together … the Asiatic past with the latest achievements of technology’. René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, p. 215.
- 161.
Sheinin, p. 6.
- 162.
Horace Kallen, Frontiers of Hope (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1929), p. 289. Kallen does not mention Luria by name, referring only to a ‘brilliant young scholar’, but Luria makes reference to the passage in a letter to Kallen responding to Kallen’s book. Luria praises Kallen’s depiction of Moscow but adds wryly that he and his wife did, in fact, have a separate room in which to cook. See, Luria to Kallen, September 29, 1929, Horace Kallen Papers, Cincinnati, OH, American Jewish Archives (AJA), Box 19, Folder 18, Luria, Alexander R. 1929–1972.
- 163.
Kallen, Frontiers, p. 290.
- 164.
Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis…’, p. 32.
- 165.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Introduction…’, p. 16.
- 166.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Introduction…’, p. 17.
- 167.
Luria, ‘Psychoanalysis…’, p. 27.
- 168.
Luriia, ‘Printsipial’nye voprosy…’, pp. 137–139.
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Proctor, H. (2020). The Criminal. In: Psychologies in Revolution. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_2
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