When did "scientific psychology" begin in Russia?

Abstract

The pattern of the institutionalisation of psychology in Russia was as complex as in other countries. The institutionalisation was more than a single event or even a series of events: it was a manifold process that involved various actors, groups, and political parties, and took at least several decades. Psychology was taught within the subject of philosophy, but as a separate course, at high schools, from the early nineteenth century. When, in mid-century, philosophy was banned from universities for political reasons, logic and psychology still remained in the curriculum. Psychology became a contested area in the 1860s, with the rise of the radical movement that accompanied the abolition of serfdom and other reforms. The young radicals, or nihilists, favoured positive science and gave clear preference to physiology; at medical schools, psychology gradually became part of physiology and psychiatry teaching. Psychiatric clinics provided a venue for the first psychological experiments; the first courses in experimental psychology were also taught to psychiatry students. At the turn of the century, humanities departments joined in by opening laboratories and adding courses in experimental psychology to the philosophical psychology traditionally taught. Yet by 1917, the year when the monarchy ended in Russia, only two universities, in Moscow and Odessa, had succeeded in founding laboratories. The institutionalisation of psychology on a mass scale followed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The new communist regime facilitated the country's modernisation, and psychology became one of its instruments.

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