NOTE: This was written to accompany reading material provided to the staff at Berkeley Mental Health in conjunction with the internship of Sasha Zinchenko in 1991-92.

Introduction to Soviet Psychology

Andrew Phelps

The first thing people think about when you say, "Soviet psychology," is the use of psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union to repress dissidents. The first thing you must think is that Soviet psychology has nothing to do with the repression of dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Specifically, a 1936 decree of Stalin mandates that theoretical psychology has to be kept separate from practice, especially, from such applications as pedagogy or clinical work. Perhaps, you might say, it was too threatening to the essential conservatism of Stalin! Until recently, psychology has been confined to a research activity in Soviet universities and only marginally related to any kind of social practice.

During the time of glasnost', there has been some opening up in psychology. Today there are 150 or so people practicing psychotherapy in Moscow. Parallel to the introduction of the free market, there is a chaotic, undefined situation in the marketplace of Soviet psychology. Since 1980, Esalen has worked on introducing a strain of humanistic psychology. Esalen is collaborating with Berkeley Mental Health to introduce a community mental health perspective to the Soviet Union.

Soviet psychology is most strikingly represented by the theory of activity, which is a kind of anti-behaviorism, that is, a radical behaviorism which challenges the so-called "radical behaviorism" of Skinner, et al. In this theory, the traditional S-R model of cognitive process is seen as a "passive" model of cognition. The alternative view is that of the human being as an active process, as a kind of worker whose "inputs" and "outputs" are to be made sense of only in terms of the activity of being. People familiar with Heidegger will discover a major convergence in the view of human nature implied.

Soviet psychology is, first of all, identified with the name of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Mozart-like genius who played a leading role in Soviet psychology in the decade from 1924 to 1934. Many of the major figures in Soviet psychology, such as A.R. Luria and A.N. Leont'ev, were students of Vygotsky.

The Georgian psychologist D. Uznadze extended the paradigm of Soviet psychology with the category of set (i.e., mindset). This has been recognized as an alternative, positive way of understanding that cognitive process called the "unconscious" in Western psychology.

The main point here is that Soviet psychology categorizes the cognitive process in a very different way from that of American psychology. For instance, consider the idea of responsibility. In our usual way of understanding behavior, we tend to think of responsibility as an isolated construct that is attached to the behavioral input/output system, so that guilt, relative to fulfillment of social obligation, is its chief motivator. From the perspective of an active organism, however, responsibility is a central parameter of the process itself, so that responsibility is the business of the organism.

Esalen's Soviet-American Exchange Center sponsors a Psychology Project whose activity includes not only the Berkeley- Esalen Soviet Internship Program but also a major project to create an encyclopedia of Soviet psychology. The hope is to build a bridge between Soviet psychology and American psychology.

The Contents of this Reader

There is substantial interest in Vygotsky in (U.S.) developmental psychology, with the name of J.S. Bruner being especially associated. I have found a major application of the work of Soviet physiologist N.A. Bernshtein, a leading activity theorist, in the neurobiology of G.M. Edelman. But, on the whole, Soviet psychology, and Vygotsky's work in particular, has not yet received the attention it deserves. This is likely due to a kind of intellectual anti-communism in U.S. psychology.

There is a substantial body of English language material on Soviet psychology available locally. Most of it can be found, in any case, at the Education-Psychology Library at U.C. There's a quarterly translation journal, Soviet Psychology, and many books. Available work of Vygotsky includes Mind in Society (Harvard U.P., usually available at University Press Bookstore) and Thought and Language (available used). James Wertsch of Clark U. (Worcester, MA) has edited a number of compendia and critical works of importance, including The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, Culture, Communication & Cognition, and Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Also recommended is a new book by Carl Ratner of Humboldt State U. (Arcata, CA), Vygotsky's Sociohistorical Psychology and Its Contemporary Applications.

This reader is divided into three parts, (I) practice, (II) theory and (III) history. NOTE: If you want to study this in a cursory fashion only, try, especially, the first article.

One final caution. When I say, "practice," I am referring to something that is just "testing the waters." There is no such thing as extensive Soviet experience with a variety of individual helping approaches or modes of service delivery, let alone community program design.

Practice
1. Madness, from chapter 6 of Ratner's book (above), 1991. An American vision of how to understand abnormal psychology from a Vygotskian framework, and its relation to community psychology.
2. Cultural-Historical Determination of Experiencing, chapter 3 of The Psychology of Experiencing, by F. Vasilyuk, 1984. Current Soviet study on individual psychology.
Theory
1. The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, J.V. Wertsch, 1981. Editorial introduction to the compendium of the same name.
2. Tool and Symbol in Child Development, L.S. Vygotsky, chapter 1 of Mind in Society, edited by M. Cole, et al., 1978. Example of Vygotsky's own writing.
3. Problems of Method, chapter 5 of Mind in Society.
4. Classification of Unconscious Phenomena and the Category of Activity, A.G. Asmolov, original 1980. Contemporary view on the theory of the set as explanation of the phenomenology of the unconscious.
History
1. The Problem of Activity in the History of Soviet Psychology, A.N. Leont'ev, original 1986. Transcription of a talk by one of the founding figures of the theory of activity, which describes how he experienced the events of the 20s and early 30s.
2. Vygotsky's Contribution to the Development of Psychology, V.D. Davidov and V.P. Zinchenko, original 1986. Retrospective by two leading activity theorists.