To the seventieth anniversary of the Pavlovian session:  american historiography of soviet psychology

Occupation: Professor, chair of social, extreme, and penitential psychology
Affiliation: Irkutsk State University
Address: Irkutsk, Irkutsk, Karl Marx str., 1, Russia

Journal name

Psikhologicheskii zhurnal

Edition

Volume 42 Issue 1

Pages

122-131

Abstract

A landmark session for psychology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, devoted to the problems of physiological teaching of academician I.P. Pavlov, was held in 1950. The contradictory nature and incompleteness of concepts of the session in the historical-and-psychological works of domestic researchers, with the importance it had for Soviet psychology, make the development of its historiography relevant. The article presents the results of a comparative-diachronical study of the historiographic representations of American authors about the place of the session in the history of Soviet psychology. An analysis of the content of the monographs by R.A. Bauer (1952), L.R. Graham (1972), L. Rahmani (1973), A. Kozulin (1984), and D. Joravsky (1989), published in the United States during the years of the Soviet Union is carried out. Peculiarities of the description of the session as events of scientific-and-social life and of a stage in the development of Soviet psychologists’ scientific insights are defined. More positive evaluations are found in the analysis of intellectual history and more negative when referring to the social history of Soviet psychology. American researchers present the Pavlovian session as an event externally defined and out of the unified logic of the development of Soviet psychology as a science about human and his psyche. At the same time, they reveal the contradiction between the ideological demand to build both Marxist (sociological) and monistic (materialistic) psychology at once. The data of the conducted study allow enriching the historiography of Soviet psychology with alternative research interpretations and showing the prospect of developing of a new direction of historical-and-psychological research − American historiography of Soviet psychology.

Keywords

history of psychology, Soviet psychology, the Pavlovian session, historiography of Soviet psychology, ideological discussions, scientific policy, scientific community

Acknowledgment

The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-013-00675

Received

10.01.2021

Publication date

20.01.2021

Number of characters

31778

Cite

GOST	Artem’evа O. To the seventieth anniversary of the Pavlovian session: american historiography of soviet psychology // Psikhologicheskii zhurnal – 2021. – V. 42. – Issue 1 C. 122-131 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://psy.jes.su/S020595920013342-2-1 (circulation date: 07.05.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S020595920013342-2
MLA	Artem’evа, O. "To the seventieth anniversary of the Pavlovian session: american historiography of soviet psychology." Psikhologicheskii zhurnal 42.1 (2021):122-131. DOI: 10.31857/S020595920013342-2
APA	Artem’evа O. (2021). To the seventieth anniversary of the Pavlovian session: american historiography of soviet psychology. Psikhologicheskii zhurnal 42(1), pp.122-131 DOI: 10.31857/S020595920013342-2

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