Notes on Luria's Autobiography

The following are my notes on The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, authored by Michael Cole, Karl Levitin and Alexander Luria. This book also includes a DVD with video interviews of many people who knew Luria. This is a wonderful novel way to design a biography. The book is also associated with an author web site at UC-San Diego. This site has a number of photographs of Luria and an interview with Oliver Sachs and Jerome Bruner (?) (Since the person is not identified in the interview, I am not sure who it is.).

The Preface explains the history of biographical information written about Luria through the years, including material Luria wrote himself. The present volume is an attempt to elaborate and annotate Luria's The Making of the Mind, an account written by Luria of his scientific/professional history, with material that places this in social context and elaborates Luria's personality based on accounts of people who knew him well.

Ch1 The Historical Context. This chapter is one of the essays by Michael Cole. It describes the state of psychology at the time Luria started working and the concepts that were salient at the time. Of course, the Soviet system was a tremendous influence on psychology in Russia. It appears that Luria and other psychologists were either influenced by it in many implicit ways that they endorsed, or they spent a lot of time coping with it in attempt to publish ideas that were contrary to communism but they felt compeled to discuss.

p3: Pavlov and associationism was the undercurrent of almost all Soviet psychology. The contrast of idiographic and nomothetic were salient (see p23). Could Psychology really consist of an experimetal science? Freud was a strong influence on Luria and reiforced an idiographic approach.

p5: Wundt and introspection. Luria was born into a psychology world of experimental introspection. I think this may have influenced his studies of the people of Uzbekistan.

p6: Luria respected the rigor of the laboratory. The problem was the manner in which the laboratory restricted the phenomena under study. The psychologist's task is to integrate the specific derived from the laboratory into the general model that explains all valid phenomena.

p7: Word associations in psychoanalysis were attempts to examine how concepts are associated.

p7: Luria was influenced by Freud and Jung through reading them in the original German.

p8: Check Sechenov, Reflexes of the Brain.

p8: Neuroscience may explain specific and simple mental processes; the complex ones are not reducible.

p8: Introspection is the method to study complex phenomena, such as language and culture.

p9: Structuralism - Wundt, Tichener - Elemental Introspection
Behaviorism - Watson - Elemental Phenomenological
Functionalism - James - Idiographic Theoretical
Gestalt - Nonelemental- Psychology as a whole

Luria did not follow any one school. Luria and Vygotsky were interested in internal motivations, "hidden complexes", used experimental methods, "experimental Freudians".

p10-11: Brain function by analogy to a telephone switchboard, computers. Check Miller et al., Plans and the Structure of Behavior.

p22: Dilthey - reale psychologie - Man as a unified, dynamic system.

p23: idiographic vs nomothetic. Individual cases vs natural laws. Luria wanted a psychology that would overcome this conflict. One that would explain the concrete facts of the mental life of individuals, and generate explanatory laws.

p23: Psychoanalytic writings. Freud, Adler, Jung.

p24: Graduated Kazan Univ. 1921. Studied Medicine and Psychology at the same time.

p25: Hipp Chronoscope for reaction time. Jung - Studies of Diagnostic Association. James - Varieties of Religious Experience. Pavlov - Excitatory and inhibitory processes of the central nervous system.

p26: Using the Hipp Chronoscope he studied the effect of hard work on mental activity, the influence of verbal instruction on reaction time - the role of speech in regulation of reaction time.

p26: Founded a journal - Problems of the Psychophysiology of Labor. Tried to recruit Bekhterev onto the editorial board. He had to use yellow paper from a soap factory to print the journal.