To the 70th Anniversary of the 1953 Meeting on Psychology: The First Post-Stalinist Event

Abstract

The authors tried to take a new look at a little-known for Russian psychological science event — the II All-Union Meeting on Psychology, convened by the Presidium of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR and held in Moscow from July 3 to 8, 1953, the 70th anniversary of which was celebrated in 2023. The meeting was organized a year after the Meeting on psychology, convened on the initiative of the Presidium of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR and held from June 30 to July 5, 1952. Unlike the Meeting of 1952, where there were mainly theoretical speeches, in the reports at the 1953 Meeting psychologists presented concrete psychological research carried out experimentally, thus summarizing some preliminary results of the reorganization of psychological science on the basis of the teachings of I.P. Pavlov. There were three thematic groups of reports: language and thinking, sensation and perception, typological differences of human higher nervous activity, in which there was a desire to find concrete ways of genuine reorganization of the whole system of psychology on the basis of I.P. Pavlov’s doctrine of higher nervous activity. The disadvantages of the speeches were recognized as the weak connection of specific studies, carried out by the method of objective physiological analysis, with psychological problems, the loss of the specificity of psychological research, the dominance of questions of physiological analysis, the uncritical use of old psychological methods, and the formal use of I.P. Pavlov’s teaching. Another important issue discussed at the Meeting was the Prospectus of the textbook edited by professors S.L. Rubinstein, A.N. Leontiev, A.A. Smirnov, and B.M. Teplov, full members of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR.

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