ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Revolutionary thinking : a theoretical history of Alexander Luria’s ’Romantic science’ https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40186/ Version: Full Version Citation: Proctor, Hannah (2016) Revolutionary thinking : a theoretical history of Alexander Luria’s ’Romantic science’. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Revolutionary Thinking: A Theoretical History of Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ Hannah Proctor PhD Birkbeck, University of London English and Humanities 2016 1 Declaration I, Hannah Proctor, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 In loving memory of Claire Walsh, my first friend at Birkbeck 3 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 5 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ 6 List of Illustrations ....................................................................................................... 7 Note on transliteration ................................................................................................ 10 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 11 Chapter 1 The Unconscious: Between Life and Death ............................................................... 43 Chapter 2 The ‘Primitive’: Between Emancipation and Domination………………………….90 Chapter 3 The Child: Between Transformation and Stabilisation ............................................ 141 Chapter 4 The Wounded Subject: Between Woundedness and Healing .................................. 195 Coda ......................................................................................................................... 245 Plates ........................................................................................................................ 265 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 289 4 Abstract The Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977) asserted that human consciousness is formed by and participates in forming history. His explicitly Marxist approach to psychology and neurology itself emerged from a particular time and place. This thesis seeks to restore Luria’s work to its history, situating his research in its Soviet context - from the October Revolution in 1917 through the collectivisation of agriculture and Stalinist Terror to the Second World War. This PhD follows the course of Luria’s career through Soviet history, and is also structured around the developmental trajectories that informed his research. Luria’s work was consistently concerned with tracing the emergence of the ‘culturally developed’ human being, defined as an educated person capable of exerting an influence on their environment. He argued that this figure was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolution of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilization’, and the maturation of the individual from baby to adult. Chapter 1 discusses Luria’s early engagement with psychoanalysis and his rejection of the Freudian death drive. Chapter 2 considers experiments Luria conducted in Soviet Central Asia during the period of the First Five Year Plan (1928-1932), exploring his engagement with Stalinism through an analysis of his attempt to trace a transition from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ thought. Chapter 3 focuses on the contradictory figure of the revolutionary child, who occupied a symbolic position in Soviet culture between change and continuity. Finally, Chapter 4 turns to consider Luria’s work with people who survived brain injuries inflicted during the Second World War. It concludes by arguing that the war violently interrupted the progressive developmental trajectories Luria’s work had hitherto been structured around (which broadly agreed with orthodox Marxist-Leninist accounts of historical progress). It is at that moment, I contend, that he finally developed the ‘real, not sham’ Marxist psychology he had always sought to create. 5 Acknowledgments Laura Salisbury is responsible for introducing me to Alexander Luria’s work. She has supported this project from the outset and encouraged me throughout. Esther Leslie gave me invaluable advice on the structure of the thesis and its theoretical framework. A doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) made this PhD possible. Thanks Mary Lou Reker and the staff at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for all their help during my fellowship there (also funded by the AHRC). Thanks to the archivists who helped me to locate materials at The Institute of Education (London), Wellcome Collection (London), The American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), Northwestern University Library Archives (Chicago), American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati) and Harvard University Archives (Cambridge, MA). Special thanks to Lizette Royer Barton at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron and Tatiana Anokhina at RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) (Moscow). I’m also enormously grateful to Jerome Bruner for taking time to talk to me whilst I was in New York, to Mike Cole for sharing his personal correspondence and to Anton Yasnitsky for making reading recommendations. As an undergraduate at UCL, I was inspired by Rebecca Spang’s formidable combination of humour, rigour and commitment to teaching. Her course Rousseau, Marx, Freud was a formative experience. Echoes of the conversations that took place in those seminars can be heard throughout this thesis. In Moscow I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t met Elena Khrianina who gave me somewhere to live, helped me figure out the Russian archives, deciphered Eisenstein’s handwriting and generally kept me company. Thanks to my parents Marilyn and Neil Proctor and to all the friends who made suggestions, read my work or talked to me about different aspects of it: Jacob Bard Rosenberg, Richard Braude, Christina Chalmers, Sam Dolbear, Koshka Duff, Sam Goff, Rose-Anne Gush, Owen Hatherley, Sophie Jones, Ed Luker, Agata Pyzik, Michael Runyan, Amy Tobin, Andrew Witt and many others I’ve probably failed to mention. The genre dictates that one thanks one’s family or partner last, but this thesis owes as much to collaborations, conversations and collective projects as it does to any particular individuals. Sharing ideas with politically committed friends and comrades in London, Newcastle, Berlin, New York, Washington DC, Oakland, St Petersburg and Moscow, however fleeting those encounters often were, made completing a PhD less of a solitary endeavour. 6 List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Plate 1.1 Gorky House Museum (former home to the Russian Psychoanalytic Society), http://s.inyourpocket.com/gallery/55442.jpg, accessed August 18 2015 Chapter 2 Plate 2.1 Postcard sent from Alexander Luria to Horace Kallen from Samarkand, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, May 15 1931. Horace Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio, MS-1, Box 19, Folder 18 Plate 2.2 Postcard sent from Alexander Luria to Horace Kallen from Andijan, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, August 12 1932. Horace Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio, MS-1, Box 19, Folder 18 Plate 2.3 Postcard sent from Alexander Luria to Kurt Lewin from Tbilisi, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, January 25 1936. Kurt Lewin Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, Ohio, Box M231, Folder 1 Plate 2.4 Postcard sent from Alexander Luria to Sergei Eisenstein from Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, August 28 1930, Sergei Eisenstein Papers, Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, 123-1-19321/2-7 Plate 2.5 Examples of tests used by Kurt Koffka in Central Asia, Kurt Koffka Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, Ohio, Box M377, Folder ‘Uzbekistan’ Plate 2.6 Example of test used by Alexander Luria in Central Asia, Alexander 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. 65 Plate 2.7 Uzbek woman in paranja with children, 1929 by Arkady Shaikhet, http://www.mamm-mdf.ru/exhibitions/continuation/, accessed August 29 2015 Chapter 3 Plate 3.1 Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, ed. by Esther Leslie (London; Verso, 2007), p. 90 Plate 3.2 Walter Benjamin’s Archive p. 85 7 Plate 3.3 Walter Benjamin’s Archive, p. 100 Plate 3.4 Toy assembly line, Ella Winter, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (New York, NY, Harcourt Brace and Co, 1933), p. 245 Plate 3.5 ‘Proletarian Toys’, N. Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka [Russian Peasant Toys] (Moscow; Akademia, 1933), p. 53 Plate 3.6 ‘Constructive’ toys, E. Molozhavaya, Siuzhetnaia Igrushka – Tematika i Oformlenie [Plotted Toys - Theme and Design] (Moscow/Leningrad; Vsesoyuznoe