Contemporary Neuropsychology and the Legacy of Luria

Elkhonon Goldberg

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134745579
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Neurology
• Index: Psychology

Best known as a founding father of neuropsychology, Luria is remembered for his clinical approach, which in many ways foreshadowed and served as the basis for the currently popular "process approach" to neuropsychological diagnosis. Although he never completed the job of designing a general theory of brain- behavioral relations, he nonetheless contributed mightily to the ongoing effort to develop one, and to the emergence of neuropsychology as a mature science. Written by professionals who either knew Alexandr Romanovich Luria personally or experienced his scientific influence, the topics examined in this volume reflect the expanse of his interests and contributions.

1
Alexandr Romanovich Luria: Cultural Psychologist

Michael Cole
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition University of California, San Diego

For the current generation of psychologists, the title of this article may appear to be an anomaly. True, Alexandr Luria published one small volume recounting research he undertook in Central Asia in the early 1930s (Luria, 1976). However, this work is not the basis for characterizing him as a cultural psychologist. In fact, if this single venture into cross-cultural research were the sole basis for my thesis, it might appear at least an exaggeration of a minor tendency, if not an outright misrepresentation of the man who was known widely in the 1960s and 1970s for his work in neuropsychology and mental retardation.

I have chosen my theme quite deliberately and with full knowledge that during the last 35 years of his life, Alexandr Romanovich devoted most of his research energies to the study of the brain bases of behavior. I know this aspect of his work first hand; I spent the better part of the 1962-1963 academic year commuting daily to the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery, where I participated in the neuropsychologial research program that was occupying his attention at that time.

However, partly as a result of unforeseen events in my own career I came to know particularly well not only the research conducted in Central Asia, but the scientific projects that Alexandr Romanovich had undertaken as a young man in the heady decade following the Russian Revolution. Drawing on his writings from this early period (Luria, 1932, 1978) and his retrospective account of his intellectual journey (Luria, 1979), I want to argue that in the period between 1920 and 1930 Alexandr Romanovich formulated (in collaboration with Alexei Leontiev and Lev Vygotsky) a systematic approach to human psychological processes in which the human capacity to create and use culture was the central tenet of his psychological thought to the end of his life. I will argue further that all of his later research and theory can not be properly understood if his commitment to the idea of cultural psychology is ignored.

The Intellectual Context

To begin with, it is important to take seriously the fact that Alexandr Romanovich began his career at a time when modern psychology was just beginning to take shape. European psychology was then embroiled in a series of interlocking debates about what kind of science psychology could be. Should it be an experimental science, modeled on the natural sciences, or a descriptive science, modeled on history and the humane sciences? Were psychological laws restricted to "nomothetic" generalizations applying to populations or "idiographic" laws that could illuminate the causal dynamics of individual human minds? Was it necessary to choose between subjective and objective approaches to research? Was psychology to be restricted to a laboratory science, or could it be expanded to apply to people's everyday lives and serve as a basis for promoting social progress?

His earliest efforts, like those of many of his contemporaries, were to resolve the "crisis in psychology" engendered by the divisions that arose when several of its practitioners (Wundt in Germany, Bekhterev in Russia, and others) began to champion a "new psychology," which sought to be experimental, nomothetic, objective, and very much a laboratory science. He admired this line of work, but he was also attracted by those who argued that the new psychology was sterile and ultimately inhuman. He was especially attracted by Wilhelm Dilthey's arguments for a reale Psychologie, which would study human beings as unified, dynamic systems, conditioned by their historical circumstances, who could be studied as they live and behave in the real world. However, he was bothered by what he considered to be the shortcomings of Dilthey's approach, which did not accord with his ideas of what a scientific psychology should be.

Cultural Psychology: Wundt and Dilthey

Although it has not found its way into our textbooks on the history of psychology, the idea of a cultural psychology was very tightly bound up in the argument among turn of the century psychologists about the possible nature of psychology as a science. Somewhat ironically, in view of his canonization as the "father of experimental psychology," Wundt himself forcefully argued that the study of culture must be an integral part of psychology, in fact a full half of the enterprise (Wundt, 1916).

The first half of the new science, which Wundt called psysiological psychology, was assigned the task of analyzing the contents of individual consciousness into its constituent elements in order to come up with universal laws by which the elements combine. To this end, subjects were carefully trained in methods of self-observation (introspection). Experiments conducted with this goal in mind concentrated on the qualities of sensory experience and the decomposition of reactions into their components.

Volkerpsychologie, the other half of Wundt's psychology, was conceived of as an historical, descriptive science. To it was assigned the study of "higher psychological functions," including processes of reasoning and the products of human language because they extend beyond individual human consciousness. He argued that

A language can never be created by an individual. True, individuals have invented Esperanto and other artificial languages. Unless however, language had already existed, these inventions would have been impossible. Moreover, none of these has been able to maintain itself, and most of them owe their existence solely to elements borrowed from natural languages. (Wundt, 1921, p. 3)

Wundt believed that the two enterprises supplement each other; only through a synthesis of their respective insights could a full psychology be achieved. To those who would claim that Volkerpsychologie could be entirely subsumed under experimental psychology, Wundt replied that while attempts had frequently been made to study complex mental processes using "mere" introspection,

These attempts have always been unsuccessful. Individual consciousness is wholly incapable of giving us a history of the development of human thought, for it is conditioned by an earlier history concerning which it cannot of itself give us any knowledge. (Wundt, 1921, p. 3)

In this connection, Wundt makes an additional methodological claim which is central to the history and current practice of cultural psychology: "folk psychology is, in an important sense of the word, genetic psychology." Significantly, Wundt's approach to the study of development goes beyond the study of ontogeny (individual development) to investigate "the various stages of mental development still exhibited by mankind." He adds: "Volkerpsychologie reveals well-defined primitive conditions, with transitions leading through an almost continuous series of intermediate steps to the more developed and higher civilizations." (p. 4). A finer articulation of a close affinity between developmental and cultural psychology, and the need for cross-cultural research as one basic tool of cultural psychology, could hardly be asked for. Note too that Wundt assumes a developmental progression in history which interacts with individual development.

These ideas were by no means confined to Wundt. They represented a continuation of a line of German thought that reached back to the beginning of the 19th century, and earlier. Nor were they confined to the German intellectual tradition. Very similar ideas can be found in the writings of John Stuart Mill, who, like Wundt, conceived of psychology as a dual enterprise, one half of which studied elementary laws of mental life, the other half of which studied the "kinds of character produced in conformity to those general laws" (Mill, 1843/1948, p. 177).

A quite different program for psychology was developed by the philosopher of history, Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work influenced not only Wundt, but a vast range of scholarship in what came to be called the humanities and social sciences. Psychology, he believed, should be a special science of the mind which would serve as the foundation science (grundeswissenschaft) for all of the human sciences (philosophy, linguistics, history, law, art, literature, etc.). Without such a foundation science, he claimed, the human sciences, among which he included psychology, could not be a true system (Ermarth, 1978).

Early in his career, Dilthey considered the possibility that Wundt's experimental psychology might provide such a foundation science. However, he gradually came to reject this possibility because he felt that in attempting to satisfy the requirements of the natural sciences to formulate cause-effect laws between mental elements, psychologists had stripped mental processes of the real life relationships between people that gave the elements their meaning. He did not mince words in his attack on the academic psychology of the late 19th century:

Contemporary psychology is an expanded doctrine of sensation and assocation. The fundamental power of mental life falls outside the scope of psychology. Psychology has become only a doctrine of the forms of psychic processes; thus it grasps only a part of that which we actually experience as mental life (quoted in Ermarth, 1978, p. 148)

His solution was to propose a completely different approach to the study of psychology. Psychology, he wrote, "must be subordinated to a developmental-historical approach which grasps mental processes in their coherence" (quoted in Ermarth, 1978, p. 183). He called this approach descriptive psychology, which was to be based on an analysis of real life mental processes in real life situations that include the reciprocal processes between people as well as the thoughts within individuals. As methods for carrying out this kind of analysis, Dilthey suggested the close study of the writings of such "life philosophers" as Augustine, Montaigne, and Pascal because they contained a deep understanding of full, experienced reality and disciplined application of empathetic understanding (verstehen) in which analysts place themselves in the concrete life situation of the person being analyzed.

Although differing from Wundt in important respects, Dilthey's thinking about the relation of individual thought to its sociohistorical context was similar to the cultural, supraindividual half of Wundt's system. In terms that have a very modern ring he defined culture as "the distilled summation of component and mental contents and the mental activities to which these contents are related" (in Ermarth, 1978, p. 12). Like Wundt, he denied the possibility of explaining cultural phenomena on the basis of psychological laws of the individual mind.

The First Synthesis

Experimental Psychodynamics

Alexandr Romanovich's first attempt to forge a synthesis of the "two psychologies" drew its inspiration from the writings of Sigmund Freud and his followers. In emulation of the psychoanalytical writers, he conducted clinical research on free associations, but he mistrusted the results of such efforts, feeling that any conclusions he tried to reach about the flow of his subjects' thoughts were insufficiently grounded. In response to this dissatisfaction he created a methodology designed to embody a psychodynamic theory of mind in an objective set of laboratory practices. The centerpiece of this methodology was an experimental technique that he called the combined motor method, which, he hoped, would provide a way of rendering Freud's clinical methods accessible to experimental treatment. Simultaneously, he attempted to introduce the historical dimension by forging a synthesis between Marx and Freud, an attempt which he later judged a failure.

The fullest existing description of this work is contained in a monograph published in English in 1932 under the title The Nature of Human Conflicts: Or Emotion, Conflict and Will. In the first chapter he outlines his basic presuppositions and his experimental strategy. Following in the tradition shared by the psychoanalytical theorists, gestalt psychologists, and many others, Luria explicitly rejects mechanical determinism, declaring "The structure of the organism presupposes not an accidental mosaic, but a complex organization of separate systems . . . [that] unite as very definite parts into an integrated functional structure." (pp. 6-7)

Since this structure is the consequence of a long complicated development, and the parts are integrated into a whole functional system, how can it be possible to isolate elements in this system for purposes of psychological analysis? Phrased differently, how could one obtain valid evidence about the thought processes of another person? The answer that Luria provided was that other people's thoughts could not be observed directly; they could, however, be revealed indirectly in so far as they could be reflected in a publicly displayable, voluntary behavior. He phrased his strategy as follows:

We should on the one hand, produce the central process of the disorganization of behavior; on the other hand, we should try to reflect this process in some system accessible and suitable for examination. The motor function is such a systematic, objectively reflected structure of the neuro-dynamic processes concealed from immediate examination. And there lies before us the use of the motor function as a system of reflected structure of hidden psychological processes. Thus we proceed along the path we call the combined motor method, (p. 18)

The first phase in his technique was to induce a well-coordinated, publicly available behavior as the medium for the psychological analysis to come. He used various devices for this purpose. Often the subject was requested to hold the left hand steady in a device that could record its movements, while simultaneously being asked to press a button or squeeze a bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter. Once this behavior became stable, the analyst sought to disrupt it selectively in line with his hypothesis about particular internal psychological states.

The combined motor method was applied to psychodiagnosis in a wide variety of real life circumstances consistent with his goal of demonstrating the possibility of a methodology powerful enough to reach beyond the laboratory to engage the kinds of long-term emotions which typically organize human behavior. The book is full of examples. In one case students waiting to be examined during a purge of potentially "undeserving" students in Moscow in 1924 (the term "purge" had not yet come into common use; Gant translated the term as "cleansing") were studied in order to demonstrate their preoccupations with the upcoming interrogation and aspects of their family backgrounds. Subjects were first instructed to squeeze a small rubber bulb each time they heard a word, to hold their other hand (which also held a rubber bulb) completely still, and to respond with the first word that came to mind in response to each word presented. "Neutral" words (common words that bore no known relationship to the interrogation) were interspersed with "critical" words such as "examination," "formula," to determine if they produced distinguishable responses. On the basis of subjects' free associations alone, responses to the two classes of words were indistinguishable, but the critical words markedly disturbed the ongoing motor responses, while the neutral ones did not, thereby verifying his technique.

The same method was used to study suspected criminals awaiting examination by a criminal prosecutor to demonstrate that it could be used as a kind of lie detector. In this case, critical words were selected that related specifically to known aspects of the crime ("knife," "handkerchief." etc.). The analysis on the basis of the combined motor method was then compared with evidence gathered during later investigations and the trial. Again, Luria reported success...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Alexandr Romanovich Luria: Cultural Psychologist
• 2 The Frontal Lobes and Language
• 3 The Case of Carolyn Wilson—A 38-Year Follow-up of a Schizophrenic Patient with Two Prefrontal Lobotomies
• 4 The Frontal Cortex—A Luria/Pribram Rapprochement
• 5 Processes Underlying the Memory Impairments of Demented Patients
• 6 A Reinterpretation of Memorative Functions of the Limbic System
• 7 Hemispheric Interaction and Decisional Dominance
• 8 The Fate of Some Neuropsychological Concepts: An Historical Inquiry
• 9 Luria and "Romantic Science"
• 10 Preliminaries for a Theory of Mind
• 11 Chronotopic Localization of Cerebral Processes: The Temporal Dimension of Brain Organization
• 12 Higher Cortical Functions in Humans: The Gradiental Approach
• Author Index
• Subject Index