On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:40:14 -0500 c b <cb31...@gmail.com> writes: > On his return to activity, the group began to work their way through > all the theories of psychology which were contesting the field on > the > world stage: Freud, Piaget, James, ... critiquing them and > appropriating the insights each had to offer. The group worked > collaboratively, discussing the problems in a group while one of > them > took notes. To this day it is not possible to be certain about the > authorship of much of what the group produced in this period. Even > graduate students were invited to experiment on their own > initiative > and sometimes made key breakthroughs. > > In a 1929 manuscript known as The Crisis in Psychology (1997a) > they > critically appropriated the insights of many contending schools of > psychology, just as Marx had laboriously worked his way through > everything that had been written about political economy. > >
Back in Janauary, I wrote a little a bit about the "crisis in psychology" as seen by Soviet psychologists back in the 1920s and 1930s. See: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2009-January/023554.h tml As I pointed the Soviet psychologists drew upon both American behaviorism, as represented by John B. Watson and the Gestalt school. Watson was seen as offering a materialist psychology, which suffered from the defect of being mechanistic and undialectical. The Gestalt school offered a dialectical psychology, but which was idealist. The Soviet psychologists were attempting to develop a psychology that was both materialist and dialectical. As Andy Blunden piece notes, the psychology of Lev Vygotsky was suppressed by Stalin's regime. In fact psychology as an independent discipline was suppressed in the Soviet Union for at least a couple of decades. This, in part at least, was a consequence of Stalin's regime opting to support the 'reflexology' of Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. While we in the West tend to think of Pavlov as having been a psychologist, he did not view himself as such. He was trained as a physiologist and he always saw himself as a physiologist. He described his famous work on conditioned reflexes as part of the physiology of the higher nervous system. He was generally dismissive of psychology which he tended to view as a kind of pseudo-science. Jim Farmelant ____________________________________________________________ Top Psychology Degrees Find schools offering psychology programs online. 3 easy steps! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=hH8quBryO3AsEJpOxV1lpgAAJ1AP8ttsZd_TbiVxkZxsC3mBAAQAAAAFAAAAADiYjT4AAAMlAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZmkwAAAAA= _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
