I
The Psychoanalytic Society, the Institute of Psychology, and *the Combined Motor and Verbal Response Method’
Another possible reason for the move to Moscow was Luria’s forthcoming marriage to Vera Nikolaevna Blagovidova, also a student at Kazan University. She became an actress at the Moscow studio of Alexander Tairov, one of post revolutionary theatre’s ‘big five’. In Moscow Luria’s interest in painting, poetry, architecture and theatre developed, and he became friends with Sergei Eisenstein. Luria never referred to his first wife in his autobiographical writings. She fell in love with another man, perhaps when Luria was in America in 1929. Luria accepted this and they remained on friendly terms, but lost touch. After her parents’ deaths Luria’s daughter (by his second wife) found Vera and wrote about her (cf. E. Luria 1994). After their divorce Luria moved in briefly with his parents, who had recently moved to Moscow.
Over the course of the next three years Luria continued working in the overlapping areas of psychoanalysis and psychology. The period was marked by his efforts to reconcile the two, and contains his major psychoanalytic writings. He also began the long series of experiments that was to lead to his doktorat. The arrival of Vygotsky in Moscow in 1924 made a substantial impact, and this busy period also marks the beginning of their collaboration. The 1920s as a whole may be viewed as a long period of fermentation that led to the major theoretical advances of the late 1920s, but there were also notable events and decisions made, not simply in Russia at large, but in the theoretical development of both Luria and Vygotsky.
In 1924 Luria reported that in the autumn o f 1923 several new members had joined the Russian Psychoanalytical Society in Moscow, including Averbukh,
Fridmann and himself from Kazan, and Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), the well- known analyst recently returned after many years in Western Europe. Luria described himself as currently assistant at the Institute of Psychology. The first meeting of the Society took place on 18 October 1923, so we may assume that Luria had already settled in Moscow by then.
As secretary o f the Society, Luria reported on both it and the State Psychoanalytical Institute with which it was closely associated. A committee conducted the business of both Society and Institute. This comprised the president, vice-president, secretary and two committee members, respectively: Ermakov, O. lu. Schmidt, Luria, Spielrein and Wulff. (Schmidt, Spielrein and Wulff preferred the transliteration of their names back into their original German as opposed to the conventional Shmidt, Shpilrein and Vulfi). The Institute was founded in Moscow in 1921. Until the autumn of 1923 its primary role was as a children’s home and laboratory on psychoanalytic lines, but in the autumn o f 1923 its work was greatly extended (Luria 1924a, 258).
Thanks in particular to Alexander Etkind’s findings we now know a great deal more about the Institute. There was a close connection between leaders on the left of the Revolution and the Institute. In his published writings Luria never touched on this, but in the manuscript of the 1974 lecture he mentions that “Radek and a slew of others” supported it (cited in Etkind 1997, 197, though not in Levitin 1982). Karl Radek, second husband of Larissa Reusner, and son-in-law o f M. A. Reusner, was a leading supporter of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition to Stalin and his associates in the mid-1920s. It seems to be unarguable that Trotsky and his colleagues played a key role in obtaining state support and financing for the Institute from 1923-5 (Etkind 1997, chapter 6). Viktor Kopp, as ambassador to Germany and a member of the Society (ibid. 250-1), probably solicited and obtained financial support from Germany, including food shipments for the children’s home, known as the International Solidarity Children’s Home. In addition to such luminaries of the Revolution, Luria probably met other members of the government. It is thought that several left their children at the home, when they were abroad or away from Moscow on government business. Luria later informed M.G. laroshevskii that Stalin sent his son there (laroshevskii 1994, 36).
Luria reminisced about the luxurious Riabushinskii mansion, where Gorky subsequently lived, that housed the Institute. “I had a splendid office with silk- lined walls in which I sat with an air of great solemnity and which was the scene of fortnightly psychoanalytic meetings. The first floor was occupied by our psychoanalytic society and the second floor by the psychoanalytic kindergarten”, i.e., the children’s home (cited in Levitin 1982, 160).
At the Institute of Psychology “the staff were young and inexperienced. None W61S older than twenty-four, [apart from Kornilov, the director,] and few had proper training, but everyone was extremely enthusiastic...” (Luria 1979a, 31). Kornilov sought to distinguish his school of “Reactology” and the work of the Institute from that of Pavlov and Bekhterev. By attempting the objective measurement of mental behaviour through reactology, he proposed to lay the basis of an objective and materialist psychology, which would overcome psychology’s separation from or reduction to physiology. In 1921 he wrote, “what we label psychical processes are little more than a particular kind of physical energy” (cited in Rahmani 1973, 25). The institute was supposed to reform the whole of psychological science by abandoning Chelpanov’s idealistic approach. Kornilov spoke in 1923 of the need to apply Marxist philosophy to psychology” (ibid.). Luria (1979a, 31) notes that the study o f reactions involved a wide range of work including rats and mazes, the motor reactions of adults, and problems of education. Naturally Kornilov’s dynamometer was to play a major role in the study o f motor movement. As regards the teaching programme Luria followed the experience o f many other new teachers by keeping a day ahead of his students. L.V. Zankov and 1. M. Soloviev were among his students.
Luria wrote (ibid. 31-2), “It is difficult to characterize my feelings at the start of my professional life except perhaps to say that they were highly ambivalent. 1 was in full sympathy with the Institute’s efforts to develop objective methods of research. 1 did not think much of the efforts to measure mental energy; Kornilov’s mechanistic scheme was clearly an oversimplification.” But he did regard it as a step forward. Kornilov published the work o f his staff including some of Luria’s subsequent work, and seems to have considered it significant (cf. Kornilov 1930, 277). Nevertheless Luria reported that “differences with Kornilov began almost
from the begiiming as we did not like his approach” (E. Luria 1994, 32, also cited in Levitin 1982, 155). Although Luria had theoretical and methodological differences with Kornilov, professionally he seems to have had a fairly free hand. He was put in charge of his own laboratory, titled the “Affective Reactions Laboratory”. He was also provided with staff for this, including a younger colleague, who was to work with him for much of the 1920s, and in later life. This lifelong friend, Alexei (A. N.) Leont’ev (1903-79) was also to prove as adept as Luria in improving his experimental apparatus (ibid. 156).
Over a short space of time, the Institute developed, and its departments were headed by major figures in Soviet psychology. Luria reported that his own department, that of General Experimental Psychology, was led by Kornilov whose co-workers were Pavel Blonskii (1884-1941), the educational psychologist, and N. A. Bemshtein (1896-1966), now recognized as one of the world’s leading scientists in the physiology o f movement. Professor M. A. Reusner headed the Social Psychology department, Isaak Shpilrein (1891-1937), brother of Sabina Spielrein, headed Applied Psychology, A. B. Zalkind (1888-1936), Psychopathology, Nikolai Rybnikov, Child Psychology, and V. M. Borovskii, Animal Behaviour. In his department, Luria was “scientific co-worker of the first rank”. His role in this key department was to prove pivotal for the experimental investigations of Vygotsky and his associates. (For further details of Luria’s 1926 report see Van der Veer & Valsiner 1991, 128-31).
Two of Vygotsky’s biographers make a plausible case that the methodological framework that Kornilov provided gave scope for Vygotsky to develop when he joined the Institute in 1924 (Van der Veer & Valsiner 1991, chapter 6). As a corollary of this they argue that Luria probably did not hold critical views o f Kornilov at the time, and from my comments this also seems plausible. On the other hand they do accept Vygotsky’s critique of Kornilov from 1926. He wrote that Kornilov’s “new system lays the concept of reaction - as distinct from the reflex and the mental phenomenon - at the basis o f a third way in psychology. The integral act of the reaction includes both the subjective and the objective aspect ”. That is, “the new theory accepts the doctrine o f psychophysical parallelism ”, and so forth (Vygotsky 1997b, 314). On the other hand “the works o f Kornilov are the
beginning of this methodology [to resolve the crisis in psychology], and anyone who wants to develop the idea of psychology and Marxism further will be forced to repeat him and continue his road. As a road it is unequalled in strength in European psychology. [It could]... lead to the creation of a theory of psychological materialism” (ibid. 332). This was because Kornilov’s ‘reactology’ advanced beyond Pavlov by admitting consciousness as a legitimate subject of study for psychology. Reactions could be studied in more fields than Pavlov was then prepared to admit. As laroshevskii puts it, “It was due to this theory that a decisive impetus was given to the movement of Soviet psychology towards Marxism” (Yaroshevsky 1989, 136).
The fact that Luria reported his criticisms o f Kornilov both in print and in the 1974 talk suggests to me that he was serious. Since, like Vygotsky, he also both praised the step forward Kornilov had made, it suggests that they were o f like mind on this. To suggest that Luria’s recollections are “armed with hindsight concerning Kornilov’s ‘fall into disrepute’ in the early 1930s” (Van der Veer & Valsiner 1991, 127) is unworthy, especially as Luria does not repeat the criticisms that accompanied this fall. That Vygotsky’s biographers do not impute the same motives to Vygotsky leads one to speculate on their impartiality.
Luria decided “to try and create an objective psychoanalysis, i.e., to devise a way to measure affective experiences and complexes in some objective way, for example, in reactions” (cited in Levitin 1982, 155). He also describes this approach as “experimental psychoanalysis” (1979, 32). Strictly speaking, this involved experimental situations that he saw at that time as both relevant and significant for psychoanalytic theory and practice, but were not exclusively confined within that framework. Indeed when he wrote The Nature o f Human Conflicts (1932a), based on his researches, he had moved beyond psychoanalysis and was still able to locate these experiments within his new framework.
Luria describes the development of his famous combined motor and verbal response method, a term usually and misleadingly abbreviated to the “combined motor method”. He describes how he found Kornilov’s dynamometer to be too crude for his purposes and replaced it with an approach based on Ermakov’s
apparatus. This was “a pneumatic table with an aluminium plate attached. It was used to study the dynamic components of writing: a person wrote on the plate and a pneumatic receiver reflected the pressure, all o f which was then recorded on a drum. It was a far more sensitive instrument, showing the character and form of reaction, the writer’s degree of confidence...” (cited in Levitin 1982, 155). The change introduced by Luria was substantial and its object different. Its aim was not simply the recording and timing of the verbal responses, but also the measurement of the motor responses that accompanied the verbal responses. This was achieved by replacing Ermakov’s pneumatic table with two pieces of equipment, each containing a rubber ball (or bulb), one for each hand. The subject was to press the ball with his right hand simultaneously with his response to the given word, while the left hand was to remain passive. In instances where the experimenter’s word provoked an emotional response in the subject, delays in responding, together with tremors manifested in the recording o f the movements of both hands, were evident. The active hand, usually the right, was assumed to convey the effects of the central nervous system. The passive hand was to monitor the effects on the peripheral nervous system, especially on occasions when disturbances spilled over into that area. [Photographs o f the apparatus can be found in Luria 1932a, 25-6, and E. Luria 1994, the eighth photo following page 96]. In some experiments he “also measured breathing, pulse rate and electro- physiological changes” (Luria in Cole & Cole 1971, 79; cf. also Luria 1932a, 27).
It was a major development of word association experiments. As we know, Luria was famihar with Jung’s Studies o f Diagnostic Associations (1907). Comments by Jung from this work and associated papers are quite revealing. “Galton, Kraepelin, Aschaffenburg, Sommer and others have introduced into psychology a very simple experiment in which a word is called out to the subject, who must respond as quickly as possible with the first word that occurs to him. The reaction time between the stimulus and the response can be measured...” (Jung 1973, 524). Jung accepted that these reaction times demonstrated affective phenomena (ibid. 546). From Jung’s account it is clear that such experiments were far from being the exclusive concern, let alone the invention o f psychoanalysis. In one study he refers to its use in criminal cases, and cites experiments by William Stem, Hans Groos, Max Wertheimer and Julius Klein (ibid. 318, 328-9). But naturally the
method was attractive to psychoanalysts. “No one can get out of his own skin. We act as our psychological past, i.e., as our cerebral organization dictates. For this reason we have to expose ourselves in the association experiment in exactly the same way as we do in our handwriting” (ibid. 420). Jung found that “by means of the association experiment, aided by Freud’s psychoanalytic method, I have succeeded in proving that all neuroses contain certain complexes, whose disturbing influences have a disease-producing effect”. But he also accepted “that more or less autonomous complexes occur everywhere, even in so-called normals” (ibid. 602). Thus even in psychoanalytic writings, the association experiment was not necessarily to be interpreted in terms associated exclusively with psychoanalysis.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Luria felt that psychoanalysis had much to leam from Russian physiology and reflexology. In many respects they appeared to speak the same language. In The Interpretation o f Dreams Freud wrote, “All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations”. As regards the psychical apparatus: “its first structure followed the plan of a reflex apparatus, so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharged along a motor path” (Freud 1976, 686, 719). Similarly Bekhterev, founder of the school of reflexology, wrote before his death in 1927, “It is true that [Freud] intends this comparison to be taken figuratively but, clearly, in discussing complex psychic phenomena, even he cannot dispense with the scheme of the reflex”. Indeed “we cannot help seeing the correlation of reflexology with Freud’s doctrine... first of all in so-called catharsis... which is equivalent to discharge of a ‘strangulated’ affect...” (Bekhterev 1932, 417,413). None of this should be surprising since the ‘father’ of Russian physiology, I. M. Sechenov (1829-1905), had written in 1866, “All psychical acts ... develop by way o f reflex. Hence all conscious movements resulting from these acts and usually described as voluntary, are reflex movements in the strict sense o f the term”. “There are [however] many [sequences of] psychological reflexes whose last member, i.e., movement, is inhibited” (Sechenov 1965, 80, 89; cf. Todes
Both Pavlov and Bekhterev were far from uncritical of Freud, but since all saw energy flow as the basis o f their systems, each had their own versions of inhibition, displacement, regression, neurosis, and so forth - each using similar or identical terminology. Thus it was to be expected that many Russians, both amateurs and professionals, would see these schools as compatible. M.G. laroshevskii quotes an American visitor reporting Pavlov as saying that reading Freud helped him arrive at the concept of inhibition (cited in Etkind 1997, 239). In view o f Sechenov’s comments above we may consider that, if true, Pavlov was being excessively diplomatic. By comparison, it is usual in the West to see psychoanalysis as relatively self-sufficient.
In 1923 Trotsky wrote, “it is clear to anyone, even the uninitiated, that the work of our physiologist Pavlov is entirely along materialist lines. But what is one to say about the psychoanalytical theory of Freud? Can it be reconciled with materialism as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks, and I also, or is it hostile to it” (Trotsky 1991, 247)? In exile in Vienna before the First World War, Trotsky and Kopp came to know psychoanalysis through their friend Adolf Ioffe, and actually attended meetings. Ioffe, a leading Bolshevik both before and after the Revolution was involved with psychoanalysis both as a patient and a writer. He apparently wrote for the psychoanalytic journal Imago (as Joffe), as did Sabina Spielrein and Vera Schmidt (cf. also Miller 1998, 186, n.40). He does not appear in the minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society as he spent much of the time as an ambassador. Although Trotsky famously said that the Revolution did more for Ioffe’s sanity than analysis, Etkind (1997, 234) states that in 1924 when ambassador to Vienna, he was accompanied by his psychiatrist, Kannabikh. In a letter to Pavlov in 1923 Trotsky acknowledged that as regards psychology he was something o f a dilettante. He seems to have been familiar with Freud’s work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), for he says to Pavlov. “Your studies of conditional reflexes often seem to involve the theories of Freud”. In the latter “psychological processes are presented as a complex superstructure”, but Freudians themselves “look into a deep and relatively dark well”, and “even make a series of witty and interesting, yet scientifically arbitrary guesses about the attributes of the bottom [of the well]” (Trotsky 1927). Here Trotsky’s metaphor echoes Pavlov’s own 1910 comparison o f physiologists building the base and psychologists the superstructure (Pavlov
1928, 113). Could Pavlov provide some scientific anchor for these “half-scientific, half-belletristic methods” (Trotsky 1927)? Trotsky persevered with his hopes for psychoanalysis until his death, as well as his criticisms of it (see Hames 1999, 49, n. 5 for the references).
In view o f the wealth o f contemporary testimony to the significance and relevance of psychoanalysis to psychology and physiology, it would be a mistake to treat Luria’s involvement with the former simply as a naïve youthful association as he later portrayed it. Luria was not ready to confront the more dramatic elements of