The Humanistic Tradition in Russian Psychology

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There is a general consensus that the major inspirations of contemporary Russian psychology came from physiological models of Russian reflexologists and from the Marxist social sciences. The physiological paradigm found its best known realization in Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity and in numerous modifications of it. Roughly speaking, Pavlovians took an experimental formation of a salivary reflex in dogs as a research model and gradually developed it into a concept aimed at explaining the whole of animal and human behavior in terms of what they called "properties of the Central Nervous System." The social theory trend has its roots in the 1920's when psychologists struggled to formulate a "new psychology" which would correspond to the social formation of a "new man" of a socialist society. Professor Kozulin's goal in this research is to trace back a third inspiration for contemporary Russian psychology, a humanistic tradition which derives its theoretical models and receives its inspiration from the humanities and more specifically from philology, discourse analysis and literary scholarship. This tradition which is not well known in the West responds to the strong "literary" tradition of the Russian national culture and creates a case for a specifically "Russian" psychology. This humanistic tradition was resurrected because of the crisis which both modern Soviet neuroscience and socially grounded psychology experienced in the post-war period, especially in the 1960's. The humanistic tradition is best exemplified in the "life as authoring" concept of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and the study of the psychological relevance of literary form by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Their studies have been rediscovered by Feodor Vasiliuk and used in his work in the 1980's to offer an alternative approach to psychology from the physiological and the Marxist approaches then in crisis. Professor Kozulin's study of this third tradition of Russian psychology thus offers both psychologists and historians greater insights into current developments in Soviet science.