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Russian And Soviet Psychology Schools

Figure 1 displays an overview of the Russian and Soviet Schools of thought in psychology modified from Ehrsam (1985). In his paper “Zur Entwicklung einer marxistischen Persönlichkeitspsychologie in der UdSSR (On the Development of a Marxist Personality Psychology in the USSR)” he identifies three main roots of Russian and Soviet Psychology. They are based on Ivan Sechenov’s reflex theory, Wundt’s experimental psychology and Lenin’s reflection theory.

Sechenov proceeded in his theoretical and experimental investigations from the principle of materialistic monism, i.e. the inseparable connection between the psychic and the physiological, as well as from the principle of the interaction between organism and environment. On this basis, in his investigations of the reflex process going back to Descartes, he worked out the central role of information reception and discovered the inhibiting influence of the brain on reflex activity, thus referring to the possibility of active, selective behavior of the organism.

Figure 1: Russian and Soviet Schools of Thought modified from Ehrsam (1985)

Based on this, Sechenov can be considered the founder of the reflexive conception of the psychic, which had an impact far into later Soviet physiology or psychology. Sechenov published his theories in 1863 (Graham, 1972), which was banned by the Tsar’s censorship. This theory was the basis for both Bekhterev’s Reflexology and Pavlov’s Higher Nervous Activity concept.

The second root was the German Wundt school, which was represented by Chelpanov and his disciples.

The third root was the principle of Reflection Theory, formulated by Lenin (McLeish, 1975, p. 178), following Marx and Engels. In this theory the basis is the conviction, that the mind, or psyche, is a ‘reflection’ of the objective, external world. According to this view, the mental and spiritual life of man is ultimately the product of social influences. The economic structure and class relations of society constitute by far the most important part. The emotions, the will, the intellect are considered to be processes which arise, develop, and change in their manifold ways as a consequence of particular material and social environments. The subjective life of a man is not something ‘locked away’, something personal, or unique, or individual, and developing in isolation from reality, with a special history of its own, out of contact with the real changing world of physical and social relations. Soviet psychologists cannot conceive a man as a contemplative being: human qualities presuppose a world of interaction and human relations.

In the initial stage of Soviet psychology, already at the Second All-Russian Congress of Psychoneurology in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1924, two main currents crystallized: the reactological direction led by Kornilov and the reflexological direction developed by Bekhterev and his strong scientific school. The Wundt school, represented by Chelpanov, played a minor role. In addition, at the beginning of the 1920s, Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity gained increasing importance. All the currents or schools mentioned here were based to a greater or lesser extent on the reflexive conception of the psychic founded by Sechenov - a proof of the strong appeal of this theory and its usefulness for working out new theoretical foundations for psychological research.

One theory that gained many adherents in the 1920s was reflexology, created by Bekhterev. On the basis of Sechenov's conception of the reflex activity of the brain, Bekhterev tried to explain human behavior with the help of reflexes; in his view, only the reflex method was considered scientifically acceptable for psychology and physiology. Therefore, he limited the subject area of his reflexology to the connection of external stimulus effects and externally visible reactions and thus reduced psychology to physiology or reflexology.

With parts of his theory of higher nervous activity, especially the theory of the second signal system, Pavlov crossed the border between physiology and psychology. Thus, in contrast to Bekhterev, he did not deny the existence of psychology. Pavlov's theory could thus serve as foundation for developing psychophysiology, based on which such scientists as Bernshtein, Anochin, Merlin and others could build their discoveries.

However, due to its great contradiction between its Marxist theoretical building and experimental-methodical work, reactology could not provide basis for the new tasks assigned to psychology by social practice either. These tasks can be characterized by the completion of the socialist reconstruction of the people's economy and agriculture and the related struggle for the improvement of the material situation of the working people. Thus, there was no doubt in necessity to create a new psychological theory and that it was not enough to modify the old teachings. According to Vygotsky, the very foundation of psychology must be transformed. Thereby the Soviet psychology entered the second phase of its development - the phase of emergence of Marxist psychological theory - which lasted approximately from 1931 to 1945 (see Budilova, 1975).

The theoretical search proceeded in two directions. At the beginning of the nineteenthirties the problem of social-historical conditionality of the psyche became the main problem. It was worked on in the cultural-historical school founded by Vygotsky and his collaborators. The most important of these was A.V. Leontiev.

Kornilov, under whose leadership such psychologists as Vygotsky, Luria, Teplov, Smirnov and others gathered at the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology, was the first Soviet psychologist having attempted to create a comprehensive Marxist program for psychology.

As a starting point for emerging of the system of Marxist psychology, he submitted a thesis that the psychic is a property of highly organized matter, that its essence consists in the reflection of the material world. He defined physiological and psychological phenomena as two sides of a unified process, although the psychic would have an independent quality. Both, physiology and psychology had to study reactions, but the main difference between them, in Kornilov’s view, was the fact that psychology had to start from the social meanings of reactions, while physiology had to abstract from the social components. In this context, he preferred the concept of reaction to that of reflex, since the reflex concept excluded any subjective content, while the reaction concept grasped the physiological-reflexive as well as the psychological processes in their unity. However, there was a great contradiction between Kornilov's general Marxist claim and the concrete results obtained by conducting experiments going back to Wundt, for measuring the reaction time, intensity and form of movement to an external stimulus (see Ehrsam, 1985).

Later, in the middle of the same decade, the problem of consciousness and activity came to the fore. A thorough analysis of the psychological problems in Marx's works and the study of his conception of activity made it possible to combine the thoughts about psychology expressed by him at different times in different works into an internally coherent system of ideas. With the help of this philosophical-deductive approach, in 1934 Rubinshtein expressed the idea of unity of consciousness and activity and psychophysical unity as two essential principles for the construction of a Marxist psychological theory and substantiated it in his book "Fundamentals of Psychology” (Ehrsam, 1985).

On the basis of these principles researches were carried out on different levels. In addition to the already mentioned psychologists like Vygotsky, A.N. Leontiev, and Rubinshtein, Teplov chose the concrete problem of abilities and deepened more and more into the experimental investigation of the individual differences between people. Ananyev created an experimental school dealing with the problems of sensory reflection, while Uznadze in his theory of set (i. e. attitude) studied the role of unconscious mental states in human activity.

Besides the schools mentioned, the psychophysiological research based on Pavlov's theory was also being advanced due to Anokhin, who dealt with the mechanism of conception of disturbed functions of the organism, which ultimately led him to the principle of reafference. Bernshtein was the most radical critic of the reflex concept.

The school deserving special attention for its theoretical level is the culture-historical school founded by L. S. Vygotsky, already mentioned above.

Vygotsky consistently proceeded from the social genesis of psychic functions and activities. He considered a man to be qualitatively different from an animal. In this framework, the stimulus-response scheme was not sufficient for Vygotsky to study the higher mental functions, since it could not capture the historical and social experience of a man. He assumed that in the course of their social development, especially through their labor activity, people artificially created new stimuli, which he called signs. Such signs were, for example, words, numbers, characters, works of art, maps, etc., and served as ways of social communication. These new, socially created artificial stimuli made self-stimulation possible and thus made a man relatively independent from the immediate external stimulus influence. This is how, according to Vygotsky, the simple stimulus-response scheme of the predominantly physiologically oriented psychologists was significantly expanded by the introduction of the sign system (Ehrsam, 1985).

Based on this theory of signs, Vygotsky developed the second pillar of his theory - the interiorization concept. He asked himself how the socially created signs are appropriated by the individual and came to the conclusion that they are gradually interiorized in the course of ontogenesis.

Vygotsky used the term interiorization to capture the process of transformation of an external action into a mental activity. Accordingly, the ideational activity is a phylo- and ontogenetically seen product of a preceding material activity. Besides his interiorization concept and the sign theory, his historical method was the most important contribution to the discussion at that time about the development of Marxist psychology. Here, in contrast to the then prevailing procedure of philosophical deduction, he attempted to analyze the essence of psychic processes with the help of historical reconstruction (Ehrsam, 1985).

After Vygotsky died, these fundamental ideas were essentially continued by his student A.N. Leontiev. The concept of appropriation played a central role in his early works. According to this, in contrast to the adaptive behavior of animals, humans actively appropriate the specifically human experience, which is of socio-historical nature, by engaging in an active confrontation with the objective world and interaction with other people. Through this process of appropriation, the individual reproduces historically formed abilities and skills.

This concept of appropriation was specified in the later works in the form of the concept of activity. With the help of the category of "representational activity," Leontiev attempted to overcome the stimulus-response scheme that had hitherto predominated in the works of Soviet psychologists by a tripartite scheme with the middle member of subject-bound activity.

In doing so, he defined activity as a unit of life mediated by psychic reflection, whose real function is to orient the subject in the representational world (Ehrsam, 1985).

Another important theory, which had an impact on Soviet psychology was formed in the 1930s and was devoted to the study of non-conscious psychic phenomena in their connection with the activity of the individual - thus an attempt to describe unconscious psychic processes, which was contrary to the Freudian theory. The theoretical head of this school was Uznadze, also a student of Wundt like Chelpanov (Ehrsam, 1985). In his theory of set (i. e. attitude), the role of nonconscious mental states in people's actions was revealed, expressing the personality's readiness for a certain activity in an emerged objective situation. The research conducted on the basis of the principle of unity of consciousness and activity made two major contributions to the developing of Marxist psychological theory: first, the elucidation of individual characteristics of unconscious information processing, and second, the description of the subject function of personality in the concept of "objectification". By this Uznadze understands the conscious human behavior towards the environment, the precondition of which is the unconscious “ustanovka” (i.e. set or attitude) mechanism (Ehrsam, 1985).

An other essential direction of psychological research in this second stage of the formation of Marxist psychology in the Soviet Union was increasingly oriented on the psychophysiological investigations of the Pavlov school. Anokhin, Bernshtein, Orbell, Kupalov and others contributed to the research. Anochin's contribution must probably be evaluated as the most significant one (Ehrsam, 1985).

Since 1930 Anochin's laboratory had been engaged in the mechanism of compensation of mental punctures of the organism, which also gave information about the principle of reafference, already discovered in 1935. According to this principle, a copy of every efference and every command from the brain to the executive organ is made, which is comparable with the reactivity when the reaction is being carried out. Thus, the brain has the possibility to control the success of the action being performed and to correct it if necessary. According to Anokhin, the reafference extended the reflex arc by a fourth link and completed it to the reflex circuit. It explains the process of feedback in terms physiology and helps clarify the question, how the organism can decide whether the sanctioning afference satisfies the criteria of adaptation to the environment.

This "cybernetic" extension of the reflex arc, long before the discovery of cybernetics, points to the seminal theory of reafference, which ultimately leads to today's "modern" theories of action regulation. (Ehrsam, 1985)

Thus, in the course of profiling of psychology in the phase lasting until the end of the Soviet Union, three centers of institutionalized psychology were formed in Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi. At Leningrad University, a broad experimental study of sensory reflection - sensations, perceptions and ideas - was carried out; in addition, general psychological studies were conducted under the direction of Ananyev. In the second half of the 1950s under Lomov's leadership the research in the field of industrial and engineering psychology as well as social psychology began. The Psychology Department of Moscow University, founded by Rubinshtein and later headed by A. N. Leontiev, developed the theory of the historical conditionality of the psyche of a man and the theory of the functional systems realizing the higher psychic functions. At the same time, Galperin and his colleagues developed the theory of the formation of mental actions. Luria elaborated a new branch of psychology - neuropsychology. The research work of the Chair of Psychology at the Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, which was headed by Kornilov until his death in 1957, then by Dobrynin and Petrovsky, among others, focused on the problem of personality.

The theory of set (attitude), established by Uznadze, was further being developed in Tiflis (Georgia) by Prangishvili and Natadze (Budilova, 1975).