The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with The Making of Mind PDF
Preview The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with The Making of Mind
The Autobiography of Alexander Luria A Dialogue with The Making of Mind The Autobiography of Alexander Luria A Dialogue with The Making of Mind Michael Cole Karl Levitin and Alexander Luria 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- Publicatlon Data Cole, Michael, 1938– The autobiography of Alexander Luria : a dialogue with the making of mind / Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, Alexander Luria. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-5499-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Luriëiìa, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich), 1902–1977. 2. Psychologist —Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Psychology—Soviet Union. I. Levitin, Karl, 1936– II. Luriëiìa, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich), 1902– Making of mind. III. Title. BF109.L87C65 2005 2004061929 150′.92—dc22 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. Apprenticeship 2. Moscow 3. Vygotsky 4. Cultural Differences in Thinking 5. Mental Development in Twins 6. Verbal Regulation of Behavior 7. Disturbance of Brain Functions 8. Neuropsychology in World War II 9. Mechanism of the Brain 10. Romantic Science Epilogue: A Portrait of Luria Bibliography Index Luria in Retrospect: Luria in Social context Luria in Personal Context Supplementary Bibliography 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 accomplishments, 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 classic 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 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 enables 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 technologies unavailable to Luria and unimagined by his contemporaries. 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 functioning of the human brain depends crucially upon immersion in human culture—the circuits of the human brain develop through their interaction with a culturally organized environment, without which the brain can neither develop nor function normally. In recent years this idea has been taken up by a variety of scholars 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 monstrosity (Geertz, 1973). Gerald Edelman (1992), Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist, has pointed to “re-entrant” brain processes, that is, circuits completed through the culturally organized environment, as the key to human consciousness. Computational neurobiologists Stephen Quartz and Terrence Sejnowksi (2002) argue that development of the prefrontal cortex 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 adequately 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 psychologists since 1930. As Alexander Romanovich later described matters: In 1963 Professor E. Boring proposed that I participate in the preparation of the volume, A History of Psychology in Autobiography … and submit written material to be held until 1970. If you live to 1970, wrote Professor Boring, the material you have written will go in the next volume of A History of Psychology in Autobiography. If you die before then, it will be published as an autonecrology. Professor Boring’s invitation seemed more than a superfluous diversion. In fact, retrospective analysis of the road one has traveled is always useful. Therefore, I have responded to the proposition with complete seriousness and I have prepared the present material in order that it might be useful in one or the other forms proposed by Professor Boring. (Luria, 1974, p. 253) This essay, which was written some time during the 1960s, was translated by Michael Cole and published in the 6th volume of the series in 1974 (Luria, 1974). Oddly, at the time Michael Cole edited the 1979 autobiography, the earlier publication had completely slipped his mind, which was a shame because a comparison of the two accounts is interesting in several respects. In that essay, Luria denied the relevance of personal information in this early biographical essay with even more determination than in the current volume. Autobiographical sketches, he asserted, “would not be likely to result in a true picture of the history of science” (p. 253). He drove home the point by writing a 10-paragraph account of various facts about his career, which were presented in small type and indented, to mark them off from the main text. He then moved resolutely into the history of psychology in Russia, with only two additional sentences devoted to social context. Alexander Romanovich returned to matters autobiographical in the 1970s when an academic film maker sought to make a film about his life and work, but this project never really got off the ground; when the film makers arrived in Moscow, Alexander Romanovich was suffering from heart insufficiency, an illness which would kill him a few years later. In 1979 his autobiography was published in English. It was edited by Michael Cole in collaboration with his wife, Sheila. They had succeeded in editing the early chapters of the book while in constant communication with Alexander Romanovich. When he died, they completed the editing in the pattern already established. The Russian title, Looking Backwards: A Scientific Autobiography was changed at the request of the English language publisher to The Making of Mind. Michael Cole wrote an introduction and an epilogue. A year later, the Russian version of the autobiography was published in the USSR. Nor have Russian biographers and non-Russian historians of psychology ignored Luria. As a science journalist, Karl Levitin spent a good deal of time with Luria while completing a monograph on the psychological ideas of Lev Vygotsky and his followers of whom Luria is the best known outside of Russia (One is Not Born a Personality, 1975/1982). He subsequently wrote the first biography of Luria, Mimoletny Uzor (A Dissolving Pattern), 1978/1990. Evgenia Khomsakaya, a close colleague of Luria’s, wrote a biography that appeared in English in 2001 (Homskaya, 2001) and his daughter, Elena contributed a biography, which appeared in Russian (E. Luria, 1994). In addition, aspects of his ideas and life have appeared in books devoted to the history of Soviet/Russian psychology (Joravsky, 1989; van de Veer & Valsiner, 1991). With all of this recent attention, the reader is justified in wondering—why take the trouble to publish yet another book about Luria? The answer is complex, because its subject was a complex man living at a complex time. First, and most obviously, the 1979 English language autobiography which provides the most complete information on the complex interconnectedness of social events and Luria’s scientific ideas has gone out of print, and is not readily available. But this is only part of the answer. After all, there are other biographies to draw upon. Second, and more importantly, the 1979 autobiography was written in the Soviet Union by a man who considered himself a Soviet scientist. All of the biographies of Luria were written by authors (including Michael Cole) whose publications had to be acceptable to Soviet literary bureaucrats, and most were themselves writing as Soviet citizens, or as people who had lived almost all of their lives under Soviet rule. Other accounts of Luria were written by non- Soviets, some of whom had met him, many of whom were writing from secondary sources. It is almost impossible to overstate the sometimes subtle, sometimes terrifyingly evident, problems of all kinds that faced Soviet citizens during Luria’s lifetime. It must be remembered that in the 1970s, when Luria wrote his
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