Volume 21, Number 8 · May 16, 1974
A Great Soviet Psychologist
By David Joravsky
The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology
by A.R. Luria, translated by Basil Haigh
Basic Books, 398 pp., $12.50
The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound
by A.R. Luria, translated by Lynn Solotaroff
Basic Books, 166 pp., $6.95
The Nature of Human Conflicts: or Emotion, Conflict and Will
by A.R. Luria, translated by W. Horsley Gantt
Washington Square Press, 432 pp., $1.45 (paper)
Soviet Psychology: Philosophical, Theoretical, and Experimental Issues
by Levy Rahmani
International Universities Press, 440 pp., $17.50
What is distinctively Soviet in Soviet thought? The usual answer, Marxism-Leninism, creates more awkward problems than it resolves, especially when the influence of that parochial ideology is sought in a universally respected scholar such as the psychologist Alexander Luria. The Working Brain, his eleventh book in English, has no references to Marx or Lenin. His first, The Nature of Human Conflicts, originally published in 1932 and now reprinted for the fourth time, has a fragmentary quote from a Marx who may be Karl—it is too tiny to be identified. And quotations aside, no characteristic ideas of Marx or Lenin can be discovered in either book.
Review, 3067 words
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