Marxism, Psychology, and the Soviet Mind

Abstract

Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of the Russian psychologist Alex Kozulin’s call-to-arms, Psychology in Utopia (1984), which presents six case studies of famous Russian and Soviet psychologists in an effort to contextualize the development of Soviet psychology within Soviet social history. Kozulin examines the interactions among Marxist philosophy, the science of psychology, and social history, challenging other scholars to expand upon his work. While the text does not advance any overarching conclusions per se, Kozulin aimed for the book to represent “a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that [distinguishes] between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in an ideologically coherent form.”1 Designed to challenge both Soviet and Western scholars, who had long conceptualized psychology as either merely a single component of a broader history of Soviet science or as a theoretical issue entirely excluding historical analysis, 1 Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 2.