Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind

297 Pages·2005·9.55 MB·English

by  Michael Cole

The Autobiography
of
Alexander Luria
A Dialogue with
The Making of Mind
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The Autobiography
of
Alexander Luria
A Dialogue with
The Making ofM ind
Michael Cole
Karl Levitin
and
Alexander Luria
Psychology Press
Taylor & Francis Croup
New York london
Reprinted 2010 by Psychology Press
Originally published 1979 as The Making of Mind.
Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430
www.erlbaum.com
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cole, Michael, 1938-
The autobiography of Alexander Luria : a dialogue with the
making of mind / Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, Alexander Luria.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-5499-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lurieila, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich), 1902-1977. 2. Psychologist
-Soviet Union-Biography. 3. Psychology-Soviet Union. I.
Levitin, Karl, 1936- II. Lurieiia, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich),
1902-Making of mind. III. Title.
BF109.L87C65 2005
1S0'.92-dc22 2004061929
CIP
Contents
Preface: Putting a Scientific Autobiography
into its historical and personal contexts
The Making of Mind in Its Original Form
Introduction: The Historical Context 1
1. Apprenticeship 17
2. Moscow 28
3. Vygotsky 38
4. Cultural Differences in Thinking 58
5. Mental Development in Twins 81
6. Verbal Regulation of Behavior 104
7. Disturbance of Brain Functions 120
8. Neuropsychology in World War II 138
9. Mechanism of the Brain 157
10. Romantic Science 174
Epilogue: A Portrait of Luria 189
Bibliography 229
Index 232
Luria in Retrospect:
Luria in Social context 235
Luria in Personal Context 255
Supplementary Bibliography 275
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Preface
PUTTING A SCIENTIFIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY
INTO ITS SOCIAL AND PERSONAL CONTEXTS
So far as we are aware, the origins and contents of this book have
no analogues, either in historical writings on science, or in the
genres of biography and autobiography. Consequently, we feel
we owe the reader some explanation for the texts that follow.
Alexander Romanovich Luria was born in Kazan, Russia, in
1902 and died 75 years later in Moscow, USSR. He was one of
the leading psychologists of the 20th century. Among his ac
complishments, which are described at length in this book, he
1. Founded the discipline of neuropsychology on the basis of
a theory of brain functioning in relation to the environment
that remains the cornerstone of basic research on the brain
and behavior to this day.
2. Conducted the first, and still one of the most influential,
studies of changes in human thinking associated with rapid
cultural/historical change. This work is considered a clas
sic of cross-cultural psychology.
3. Conducted the first large scale study comparing identical
and fraternal twins designed to tease apart the role of nature
and nurture in development.
4. Invented a psycho-diagnostic procedure that allows valid
inferences about other people's mental states which he
vii . ..
... Preface
called "the combined motor method." This method is
widely used in such fields as the study of infant cognition
and forensic psychology, where it serves as the basis for
polygraph tests.
5. Invented an overarching approach to psychology that en
ables reconciliation of laws based on studies of large
groups and the idiosyncracies of individual human natures.
His earliest article in English appeared in 1928 and over the
following 50 years he published more than two dozen books and
hundreds of articles in many of the world's languages as well as
his native Russian-A prodigious outpouring of scientific work
which remains influential to this day.
In the quarter century that has passed since Alexander Luria's
death, the Soviet Union, which came into being when he was a
schoolboy, has passed into history. The scientific discipline of
psychology to which he made so many contributions has also
undergone enormous changes owing in part to changing tech
nologies unavailable to Luria and unimagined by his contempo
raries. Nevertheless, several of his books are still in print, and
his publications are still widely cited by scientists from all over
the world.
Perhaps most remarkable is evidence that the theoretical
framework that he and his colleagues began to formulate late in
the 1920s, when Russia was undergoing cataclysmic changes,
are finding (sometimes unwitting) resonance in contemporary
sciences. Central to their theorizing was the idea that human
psychological process are unique in that the biological function
ing of the human brain depends crucially upon immersion in hu
man culture-the circuits of the human brain develop through
their interaction with a culturally organized environment, with
out which the brain can neither develop nor function normally.
In recent years this idea has been taken up by a variety of schol
ars in many fields. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz declared
that if it were biologically possible, a human being growing
apart from culture would not be a potentially talented ape, but a
... viii
Preface ..
monstrosity (Geertz, 1973). Gerald Edelman (1992), Nobel
Prize winning neuroscientist, has pointed to "re-entrant" brain
processes, that is, circuits completed through the culturally or
ganized environment, as the key to human consciousness. Com
putational neurobiologists Stephen Quartz and Terrence
Sejnowksi (2002) argue that development of the prefrontal cor
tex depends crucially on inhabiting a cultural environment. All
of these scholars discovered independently what Luria and his
colleagues had asserted many decades earlier, a discovery neatly
described in the title of a recent book by Matt Ridley (2003),
Nature via Nurture. Clearly, Luria is a scientist worth
remembering.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES
OF A. R. LURIA
For a variety of reasons which we explore in detail in the later
sections of this book, Luria's life and work have never been ade
quately described, although there have been several attempts,
for some of which we have ourselves have been responsible.
The earliest attempt at eliciting an autobiographical account
of Alexander Romanovich's life that we know of occurred in the
early 1960's when he received a letter from Edwin. G. Boring, a
professor of psychology at Harvard University. Boring, who had
written the then-canonical history of psychology, had also been
editing a series of autobiographical essays by prominent psy
chologists since 1930. As Alexander Romanovich later
described matters:
In 1963 Professor E. Boring proposed that I participate in the
preparation of the voJume,A History ofP sychology ill Autobiog
raphy ... and submit written material to be held until 1970.
If you live to 1970, wrote Profcssor Bori ng, the material you
have written will go in the next volume of A History of Psychol
ogy ill Autobiography. If you die before then, it will be pub
lished as an autonecrology.
lX ••.