From Radicalism to scientific convention : biological psychology in Russia from Sechenov to Pavlov

Abstract

The dissertation examines the social, political and intellectual history of biological psychology in Russia from the 1860's to the early twentieth century. In these years, bounded roughly by I. M. Schenov's "Reflexes of the Brain" (1863) and I. P. Pavlov's initial investigations of conditioned reflexes (1901), biological psychology passed from a peripheral scientific orientation associated with political radicalism to an accepted element of mainstream science and a forte of Russia's scientific community. Previous scholarship has established that, in the 1860's biological psychology was associated with political radicalism because it challenged a key tenet of Tsarist ideology--the existence of an immaterial "spiritual aspect of man". This poses a question to historians: How could a scientific orientation with such radical connotations have flourished within perhaps the most conservative state in Europe? The dissertation is an attempt to address this question through examination of changes in the ideological and social significance of biological psychology, and the evolution of the scientific community that developed it. The first four chapters of the dissertation examine the changing significance of biological psychology to different political groups in Russia as reflected in literary-political journals, the essays of representative political thinkers and state policy toward it. Among the essayists and journals analyzed are N. G. Chernyshevskii, N. A. Dobroliubov, K. D. Kavelin, P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovskii, D. I. Pisarev, N. V. Shelgunov, P. N. Tkachev, Delo, Oteschestvennye Zapiski, Russkoe Slovo, Sovremennik and Vestnik Evropy. The dilemma posed by biological psychology to the Tsarist state is analyzed largely through archival records of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee. The following four chapters examine the scientific work of relevant Russian physiologists, neuropathologists and psychiatrists, and analyze their changing attitudes regarding the ideological and political significance of biological psychology. I. M. Sechenov and I. R. Tarkhanov provide examples of scientists whose initial investigations were shaped by the radical ideology of the 1860's, but who subsequently linked their work to the political aspirations of the moderate-liberal community to which they belonged. The adaptation of biological psychology to the professional goals of the medical community, and its appeal to professionals with a broad range of political views, is examined through such key figures as V. M. Bekhterev, S. S. Korsakov, P. I. Kovalevskii and A. A. Tokarskii. The process by which biological psychology was institutionalized as "good science" and simultaneously stripped of its explicit ideological and political connotations is summarized by contrasting the careers and work of I. F. Tsion and his pupil, I. P. Pavlov. The dissertation ascribes the particular nature of biological psychology in Russia, and its increasing acceptability as the nineteenth century wore on, to three interconnected developments: Russia's transition from feudalism to capitalism, the emergence of a professional scientific community, and an increasing tendency to separate natural scientific investigations from explicitly philosophical and political questions.

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