psychoanalysis – History of The Human Sciences

Review: Disalienation

Review: Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Janina Klement (University College London)

In January 1940, the Catalan refugee psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles who had just arrived in France, was recruited to work with the French psychiatrist Paul Balvet. Since 1937, Balvet had been the director of a dilapidated and overcrowded asylum in the village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère which, situated 1000 metres above sea level in the mountains, counted itself among France’s most impoverished regions. In a giant communal effort that included the local villagers, they prepped the asylum for the war, piled food reserves and planted and harvested produce together with the patients, ultimately saving the asylum population from starvation. Next to its main function as a sanatorium, Saint-Alban became an assembly spot for persecuted intellectuals who began participating in the therapy of the mentally ill, and soon pushed for theorisation of their practice. In 1941, a manifesto with first principles emerged but only eleven years later, in 1952, the term “institutional psychotherapy” first appeared in a journal article.

With Disalienation, Camille Robcis delivers the first history of the French institutional psychotherapy movement for an anglophone readership. The book’s work is to position institutional psychotherapy as a set of ethics of everyday life and experience, and to read it as a political theory (with the ambition of contemporary applicability) of alienation, the unconscious and institutions, more so than to assess its therapeutic merits. Prior to its denomination and introduction to medical literature, institutional psychotherapy was a humanitarian and intuitive act of care during war-time. The bookcover blurb’s claim that Saint-Alban was the only asylum that ‘attempted to resist’ the Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” programme of the mentally ill through supply shortages conceals a dispute among historians (which remains unrectified by the book itself) whether many psychiatrists across France tried the same thing, but ultimately failed to rescue most of their patients. The clinic’s favourable geographical location in the mountains as well as Balvet’s good relationship with the Pétain administration arguably helped Saint-Alban to escape the occupiers and collaborators’ ruthless supervision.

After the war, institutional psychotherapy was carried forward as a practice, subjected to multiple reinventions while transgressing its original geopolitical context. By organising the chapters around four key institutional psychotherapists, Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, Robcis achieves to write a biography of a movement, tracing the intersecting yet distinctive practical and intellectual contributions that brought it into being, and that kept it in circulation for the better part of the second half of the twentieth century.

The first chapter knits together the story of how Francesc Tosquelles, a well-read experimental combat psychiatrist, anarchist, and co-founder of the Catalan federalist and anti-Stalinist activist group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), became François Tosquelles, inventor of institutional psychotherapy and inspirational figure for the French health reform, that implemented the Catalan inspired concept of “sector psychiatry” nationwide in the 1960s. Institutional psychotherapy is born when after the war, Tosquelles’ équipe tore down the walls surrounding Saint-Alban to create an “asylum-village” allowing for more contacts with the local population. Moreover, the German psychiatrist Hermann Simon’s idea of a “more active treatment in the asylum” inspired the creation of a “healing collective” that actively involved patients in the structuring of everyday life in the hospital to treat the institution more than the individual. According to Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis, which first received recognition and practical application in the context of Saint-Alban, psychosis had to be grasped in its ‘phenomenal totality…the entirety of its historical existence’ (p. 38). Thus, as Robcis argues, the idea that the social and the psychic were intimately connected and had to be transformed collectively to escape alienation was the fundamental lesson that Tosquelles and his équipe transmitted to future generations of institutional psychotherapists.

The second chapter uncovers the early steps of Frantz Fanon’s hitherto lesser examined medical career, as Robcis seeks to ‘restate the significance of Fanon in the genealogy of what is generally called “Western radical psychiatry”’ (p. 51). The institutional psychotherapists’ dogma to treat the social and the psychic at the same time resonated with Fanon’s understanding of subjectivity as structural and therefore ‘fundamentally shaped by the social and political context’ (p. 59). The chapter follows him from medical school in Lyon to his brief internship in Saint-Alban, where he was involved with various art and ergo therapies, wrote pieces for the hospital newsletter and advocated together with Tosquelles for a limited use of electroshock therapy, to facilitate personality reconstruction. Yet his subsequent arrival at the Algerian psychiatric clinic of Blida-Joinville was marked by an initial ‘total failure’ (p. 66) to apply Saint-Alban-style social therapy. Arabic staff and patients were equally repulsed by the innovations forced upon them, and only the European patients responded positively to Fanon’s reshuffling of social roles and expectations in the hospital. Fanon retreated for a journey through Algeria which prompted him to reflect on his own complicity with colonial regimes, discovering the necessity to “decolonise” institutional psychotherapy. Upon his return he restructured institutional psychotherapy to the effect that Muslim patients began to enjoy socialising in the hospital space, for example through performances of Muslim singers and professional storytellers, and popular Algerian table games at the hospital’s new “Café maure”.

In this chapter the book is at its most romantic. Robcis masterfully narrates Fanon’s intellectual and personal trajectory beyond cultural and language barriers which he successfully overcame through self-sacrifice and careful introspection. By its finale, he has shaken off the European grip on institutional psychotherapy to arrive at ‘a truly disalienated and disalienating psychiatry’ (p. 68). The absence of patient perspectives in the book is quite noticeable here, as despite Robcis’ initial insistence that her interest is not to write a hagiography (p. 9), her narration tends strongly in this direction throughout the book and is furthermore reflected in her decision to focus on the contributions of four celebrated male practitioners to the movement.

Chapter three is a remarkably condensed and accessible tour de force of French intellectual history surrounding the events of May ’68 and the arrival of institutional psychotherapy in Paris, through figures such as Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. Robcis shows how institutional psychotherapy was radicalised at Oury’s “Clinique de la Borde,” on the premise of an “anti-oedipal” politics that sought to disalienate ‘the unconscious, the familial, the social, and the political, all at once’ (p. 78). The chapter’s main contribution to existing historiography is its attentiveness to how Guattari pronounced institutional psychotherapy’s potential to transform and express group desire, pushing the discourse into nonmedical contexts, especially urban planning, left-wing organising and working groups, among others on feminism, health policies, pedagogy and theatre.

The book’s final and arguably strongest chapter circles around Michel Foucault’s role in the development of institutional psychotherapy. Anyone who thought Foucault’s contribution is best explained by starting with his analysis of power is offered a captivating new reading (as well as a picture of him with a full head of hair). Although he never actually practised institutional psychotherapy, Robcis reads Foucault as a ‘fellow traveller’ (p. 110) of the movement. She convincingly argues that the question of psychic causality figured as a centre of attention to Foucault in his student years at the École Normale and the hospital Saint-Anne, and is further developed in his first book Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954). Crucially, for Robcis, Foucault arrived at a similar conclusion to the institutional psychotherapists, proposing that cure requires the relationship between the individual and its milieu to be intact. The chapter also traces how Foucault mediated exchanges between British antipsychiatrists and the French institutional psychotherapists around Guattari, suggesting that Foucault’s engagement with R. D. Laing’s and David Cooper’s work marked a decisive moment of his intellectual development away from the question of the institution and into the realm of the “disciplinary”.

Despite this recognition of transnational influences and sympathies, Robcis’ book largely remains faithful to the institutional psychotherapists’ own version of history. This is particularly evident in her portraits of British anti-psychiatry, which are partly based on judgments of the “French side”, which deliberately wanted to distance itself quite clearly from its British counterparts, whose work somewhat anticipated institutional psychotherapy, and was in many ways more similar to theirs than they liked to admit.

While the book makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of a neglected movement, it leaves the question of alienation that its title provokes largely untouched. Sure, we learn that ‘… institutional psychotherapy insisted on the role of institutions in the process of alienation and disalienation of the political, the social, and the subjective’ (p. 73), but a historization or discussion of alienation outside of the protagonists’ framework would have been instructive. The question arises whether alienation, for example from fascism, which marked the birth of institutional psychotherapy as a resistance movement, cannot be thought of as a positive and generally desirable experience.

In many ways, the history of institutional psychotherapy is more convincingly communicated through visual materials than words. Readers in New York City can visit a major exhibition about Francesc Tosquelles that includes hours of film and outsider art produced in French institutional psychotherapeutic milieus at the American Folk Art Museum until 23 October 2023.

Janina Klement is a final year PhD student in history of psychiatry at University College London and an affiliated member at the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health.

Review: The Maternalists

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153

Katie Joice

During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, ‘the nanny state’ has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, ‘motherly’ politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim’s study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment.

Bar-Haim’s story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud’s yang, or as Jung, another of Freud’s rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was ‘progression in regression’. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before the oppressive norms of civilised society achieved their grip. Ferenczi surrounded himself with a group of gifted young intellectuals, including Michael Balint and Geza Roheim, the founder of psychoanalytic anthropology, and later had a profound influence on the Scottish analyst Ian Suttie, who also objected to the Freudian ‘taboo on tenderness’.

The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex, extending from the idealisation of matriarchal religion in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess to the development of a laboratory-based attachment theory. By Bar-Haim’s own admission, this book teases out one micro-history from an intricate tapestry, arguing that a set of Ferenczian legacies within inter-war psychoanalysis anticipated the specifically maternal disposition of the British welfare state.

The Maternalists’ central chapters explore the rehabilitation of the ‘primitive’ psyche and ‘primitive’ mothering, in the work of educationalist Susan Issacs, Roheim, and Suttie. Issacs challenged Piaget’s theory of developmentalism, in which the child’s psyche was equated with that of the ‘savage’. A follower of Melanie Klein, and a member of the anti-colonial movement in inter-war Bloomsbury, she proposed a synchronic model of mind, arguing that at all ages, and within all races, magical and animistic ideas exist alongside rational thought. Roheim’s work is placed in dialogue with that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who had ‘disproved’ the universalism of the Oedipus conflict in his study of the matrilineal society of the Trobiander Islands. Roheim undertook fieldwork in the Aboriginal communities of central Australia with the intention of refuting Malinowski’s claim, but changed course when he observed the psychological benefits of matriarchal culture. Aboriginal life, he concluded, was characterised by ‘indulgent mothering’, the development of a weak super-ego, and pacifism; a corrective to the ‘sadistic’ mothering of modern Europe. Similar arguments were advanced by Suttie in The Origins of Love and Hate (1935), which posited the existence of an archaic pagan community, in which the mother-child bond formed the basis of sociability. In Suttie’s account, monotheism, modernity, and the fixation with ‘progress’ were begot by the envious and destructive patriarch, embodied in Freud himself. The autocratic and bellicose paternalist state is never invoked in The Maternalists, although elisions are sometimes made between the maternal and the parental polity. It is worth noting that the psychology of the fascist patriarch was being excavated in works such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality well into the 1950s, and that reactionary forms of maternalism, including pro-natalist policies, were in turn associated with authoritarian governments. A post-war suspicion of toxic masculinity, as well as the exaltation of mother-love, perhaps explains the peripheral role of fathers in the case-studies of D.W.Winnicott, the theme of the book’s penultimate chapter.

The book’s argument hinges on its final section, a discussion of Michael Balint’s psychological training with British GPs in the second half of the 1950s. In this illuminating but little-known piece of post-war history, Ferenczian theory was translated into social practice. A significant number of family doctors (including many prominent figures in the Royal Society of General Practitioners) joined Balint groups in this period to deepen their understanding of the doctor-patient relationship. Balint believed that what many patients seek when they visit the GP is regression to a state of infant-like dependency. Anyone who has had the experience of their symptoms mysteriously disappearing after a visit to the local surgery will understand something of this notion, and of the concept of doctor ‘as drug.’ There is also something refreshingly queer about Bar-Haim’s description of middle-class, middle-aged, GPs shape-shifting into loving mothers. In radical contrast to the pressured, consumer-focused approach of twenty-first century medicine, Balint disputed the idea of a medically objective diagnosis, suggesting that both the description and treatment of illness should be an unhurried, inter-subjective process. This is akin to a phenomenological, rather than instrumentalist, account of disease, which blurs the boundaries between physical and psychological medicine. Bar-Haim goes on to suggest that as a section of male GPs began to display maternal capacities in the consulting room, real mothers took on greater responsibility for liaising with the state’s agents, including not only doctors, but social workers, psychiatrists, and teachers. In these various ways, the act of mothering became integrated into the smooth functioning of social democracy.

This brings us to the lived experience of mothers, which the author is careful to distinguish from the theoretical constructions of his book’s protagonists. One of his literary touchstones is historian Carolyn Steedman’s memoir of post-war childhood, Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she makes the striking claim: “I loved the state because it loved me.” For Steedman, the state compensated – with milk, orange juice, library books and free education – for what her mother could not provide. As well as underlining the huge redistribution of wealth and ensuing social mobility that took place in this period, we are reminded that a state with maternal capacities frees flesh-and-blood mothers to be imperfect, or even inadequate, which is precisely what makes welfarism a moral issue for the Right.

We return then to the broader issues raised by the book’s enfolding of inter-war psychoanalytic theory with post-war state interventions. Histories of maternalism inevitably leave political, sociological and philosophical questions in their train. Most obviously, where do we stand with regard to this aspect of our past, in an era when so many forms of ‘care’ have been shredded and privatised? What role, if any, remains for psychoanalysis, now marginalised within NHS practice? The example of Balint groups is compelling, but histories of the role played by analysts in the construction of the welfare state obscure the contribution of radical British socialists to Atlee’s sweeping post-war reforms. This latter tradition advanced an ethic of mutual care using theoretical sources quite alien to psychoanalysis. How should the state compensate for the reproductive labour of women, for the dependence engendered by dependants? Is there a future world in which mothering, and early childhood, could be a period of psychic liberation, a counterpoint to the constraints of industrial time? And finally, is the ‘maternal’ – and the forms of sustenance it offers – bound up with the messy biological and psychological experiences of womanhood, or is it a transferable, rational good?

Review: Psychologies in Revolution

Hannah Proctor, Psychologies in Revolution. Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History. Palgrave, 2020; 259 pages, Hardcover £59.99, eBook £47.99; Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-35027-7, eBook ISBN 978-3-030-35028-4

by Lizaveta Zeldzina

Psychologies in Revolution is dedicated to the work of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria: an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis in Russia, and ‘the father’ of Soviet neuropsychology, Luria was known internationally as a prolific writer and experimenter. He was an inspiration to a new generation of scientists in the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century, and managed to stay in touch with intellectual currents in the wider world. Together with Lev Vygotsky, Luria has become a figure of intense interest for many scholars of Soviet science, and especially for so-called ‘revisionists’. Unlike existing studies, however, Psychologies in Revolution examines Luria in his social and historical circumstances, ‘contending that analysing Luria’s research in isolation from the historical circumstances it emerged from and influenced would be like analysing someone’s personality by examining their brain on a glass table’ (p. 4). In this text, Proctor provides us with our first detailed history of Luria’s ideas and his work.

Psychologies in Revolution entails the discovery of a previously unknown Luria. The text is structured around his major scientific projects: studies of the criminal, the ‘primitive’ (Uzbek peasants with no formal education), the child, the aphasic (brain-injured Red Army soldiers) and the synaesthete. Eponymous chapters move the reader chronologically from the Revolution of 1917 to the late 1970s, opening out new dimensions for critical inquiry. Proctor shows how Luria, ‘developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating’ (p. 22). But she makes this claim by considering the inherent constraints on such an approach within Soviet Russia in the early and mid-twentieth century. As Proctor emphasizes, the contribution of her study is not to draw our attention to new primary sources or texts, but to offer a new reading of Luria’s existing texts, already published in English, and thereby rehabilitate Luria as a potentially important figure for contemporary scholarship.

In the Chapter ‘The Criminal’, based on experiments from Luria’s The Nature of the Human Conflicts, Proctor shows how Jungian theory was embedded in the criminology and associative techniques involved in the development of a predecessor of the polygraph machine. The devastation caused by the October Revolution had resulted in a wave of crime, and the details of criminal acts available to Luria often seemed senseless: “a baker accused of killing his wife; a man found in a pile of snow having been hit with a sledgehammer; a factory worker who broke a window at his workplace to steal a ventilator; a man who killed his fiancée and threw her dead body into water tied to a cast-iron wheel” etc. (p. 48). Luria’s ambition was to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into his work as a Soviet psychologist, even though it was to criminals rather than patients that he turned. Proctor notices, though, that Luria’s focus was on whether the people he observed had commited murder, rather than on why they had commited murder. Thus, Luria consequently failed to reflect on the role of the social order in fostering criminal behaviour, being focused instead only on the application of psychological theories, and in experimental proofs of his associative technique. The author also points out that his theoretical views expressed in the paper ‘Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology’ in 1924 are in conflict with his later clinical writings.

In Luria’s defence, this lack of social reflection may have derived from his own need to shield himself from the devastating loss and disruption which accompanied the post-Revolutionary years. Besides, between the 1920s, a period of active involvement in the psychoanalytic movement in Russia and the publication of The Nature of Human Conflicts in 1932, significant changes occurred. The experimental psychoanalytic project Detski Dom (or International Solidarity Laboratory) and the State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow was shut down in 1925 by decree of Narkom RSFSR. It was a time of growing attacks on psychoanalysis, and Luria resigned from the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 1927, the year of the exile of Trotsky, a political associate of psychoanalysis. Then, in 1930, Psychoanalytic Society was shut down. These socio-historical circumstances of Luria’s career are downplayed in the book.

To Proctor, Luria’s psychological approach was never primarily psychoanalytic. Luria’s ambition to engage psychoanalysis with Marxism and other psychological theories, such as Gestalt, resulted in an alternative model, which “paradoxically failed to retain the elements of Freud’s theory… praised for being dialectical in the first place (the ongoing tension between the life and death instincts)” (p. 43). The paper she refers to is Luria and Vygotsky’s introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1925. My reading of this paper is different. I’d argue that Luria and Vygotsky’s failure is not in their impossibility to retain to the dialectic of life and death drives, as there is no sign in this text that they deny this tension. The resulting ‘third’ in this dialectical tension for them – the belief in the possibility of sublimation of the death drive – is what constitutes their failure for Proctor. She contrasts this theoretical optimism with the apparent regression that has occurred in society as a result of the revolutionary movement. This illuminates further that their theoretical hopes for the ability of psychoanalysis to provide a basis for monistic psychology were dashed more by the growing reality of Stalinism than by their theoretical failure to remain faithful to psychoanalysis.

The chapter ‘The Primitive’ explores Luria’s failure to find his place under the Soviet political regime. Central Asian expeditions of 1931 and 1932, were, as Proctor writes, Luria’s most explicit political endeavour: an attempt to demonstrate the cognitive benefits of collectivisation. The results, however, did not satisfy the State and his work was denounced before he published his findings. While not being able to contribute to the First Five Year Plan, Luria’s findings in this expedition were for Vygotsky of the highest importance and deepened his understanding of the interrelations between language and thought. Proctor’s analysis of the interrelations between ‘primitive’ people and the Soviet idea of collectivisation in Luria’s work elaborates the nuances of the revolutionary movement in its oppressive rather than ‘progressive’ character.

The chapter ‘the Child’ illuminates the period of Luria’s experimental work with children and his published work with Vygotsky. Conducted between 1923 and 1936, a time of relative freedom of thought and the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis in Russia, as well as progress in pedology, these observations and experiments focused on the the future citizens of the Soviet state, and therefore with understanding the processes of child development. Proctor covers an extraordinary range of material, providing not only a clear picture of Luria and Vygotsky’s position on the role of language, play and historical context for mental development, but also vividly imagining the atmosphere in which Soviet children were raised, the toys they played with, the tales they read, and just how many of them survived without parents. We also learn how the Soviet state gradually abandoned its ‘kids’, as successive decrees constricted Luria’s and Vygotsky’s scientific activity.

By the late 1930s, a period when psychology as a discipline disappeared in Soviet Russia, and calling Freud by his name was equated with high treason, Luria lost both of his foundations – psychology and psychoanalysis, and also lost his dear colleague Vygotsky. He found shelter in medicine, and the patriotic appeal of World War II left him no choice but to discover a new object of research – the brain. However, some of Luria’s work on the brain kept its distance from dry neurological language and instead, as Proctor notes of his late case histories, ‘Luria composed the text in a self-consciously literary style.’ I would argue that this was possible due to the relative freedom of after-Stalin years, which allowed for more open expression of Luria’s long-standing beliefs.

The chapter ‘the Aphasic’ focuses on a rather unusual story of a brain-injured patient, Zasetsky. It shows how far Luria the neurologist was from studying the inanimate tissues of the brain, and how close he was instead to questions about the animate vicissitudes of the individual. It is no wonder, as Proctor writes, that Oliver Sacks in the introduction to The Man with a Shattered World, claims Luria’s work was ‘always and centrally concerned with identity’ and suffused with ‘warmth, feeling and moral beauty’. ” (p. 169) I would suggest that an optimistic belief in the ability of ‘monistic psychology’ to hold to the ‘dialectic of the whole organism’ was still alive for Luria, and resulted in his approach to brain injuries. At that time Luria was also in favour of the idea of functional systems. According to this theory, restoration of lost functions was possible through compensation and reorganisation of nervous connections. Luria’s texts Traumatic Aphasia and Restoration of Function after Brain Injury illustrate this approach and demonstrate successful results of restorations of functions after brain damage, including the restoration of a sense of self. Luria’s approach to aphasia departs from the localisation of damages and, I would argue, his understanding and classification of aphasia are based on the same principles as proposed by Freud in 1891. Luria’s later texts could be read fruitfully alongside Freud’s texts, despite Proctor’s suggestion that their theoretical grounds had moved apart. This fact is also noted in the article of Solms (2000), to whom Proctor refers in a previous chapter, but who is left unmentioned in this one.

The chapter ‘the Synaesthete’ continues to draw on the ‘brain’ period of Luria’s career and his synaesthetic patient Solomon Shereshevsky, going back and forth in time describing his friendship with Eisenstein and his engagement with Freud’s texts and the lost tradition of ‘romantic science’. In these case histories, Luria eventually succeeds as an exemplary scholar within the tradition of his own social-historical approach, as he is not concerned with describing symptoms in isolation from a person’s whole personality, but to ‘allow for the preservation of ‘the manifold richness of the subject’. In my view, the case histories discussed in these two chapters are an illustration of the historical continuity of theoretical views of Luria.

Psychologies in Revolution is indeed so much more than just a study of Luria’s heritage or a socio-historical analysis of the period in which he lived. Proctor’s main proposal is that Luria’s ‘romantic’ science offers a model for approaching human nature and can therefore contribute to the current rupture between the ‘brain’ and the ‘subject’, and the departure of the neurosciences from the social sciences. It is a pertinent study offering Luria’s ‘romantic science’ to scholars in the neurosciences and medical sciences searching to approach their subjects in a more humane way. However, the complexity of the Soviet years remain to be explored further, and it is still necessary to investigate archival resources and personal connections of Luria beyond those who are already well known, and to translate more of his theoretical heritage into English. It would also be interesting to bring his neuropsychological studies back into discussion within the psychoanalytic field. There is still much scope for incorporating Luria’s ideas into a contemporary theory of mind.

Lizaveta Zeldzina is a psychologist and a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is dedicated to the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia 1930-1980. It explores Soviet studies of the unconscious in psychology and physiology, and theoretical engagement with the psychoanalysis of Alexander Luria, Bluma Zeigarnik, Pyotr Anokhin, Filipp Bassin and Dmitry Uznadze in the socio-historical context of their times.