Overcoming the crisis

Instead of one psychology as a unified scholarly discipline and an institutionalized system of knowledge, there are thus three “psychologies” — at least three, one would add keeping in mind the intellectual tradition originating in the legacy of Sigmund Freud and his followers, unmentioned in Rubisntein s paper as yet.

Rubinstein rejects the solution of “synthesis” of the three psychologies — incompatible as they are — that Karl Buhler (or Rubinstein’s compatriot Konstantin Kornilov) proposed in the 1920s. In order to unify psychology as a field of knowledge and scientific discipline, Rubinstein proposes to decisively resolve the crisis and radically sets the goal. For a yet unclear reason, this segment of the original text with its programmatic statement was considerably abbreviated in the available English translation of 1987 and has never been presented to the Anglophone reader. This is a real shame, given its importance. Therefore, it has been translated and first presented in full only here, in this very chapter.

First, Rubinstein produces an introductory, programmatic statement and positions the “new psychology” in relation to its predecessors:

The genuine task should obviously be not a “synthesis”, but the “struggle on the two fronts”, not in accepting everything that each of these conceptions establish, but in overcoming those general presumptions that these contesting conceptions come from and the controversy between them as such. We need not to merge the conception of consciousness (soznanie) of the introspec-tionism with the conception of human activity (chelovecheskaia deiatel’nost’) of the behaviorism, etc., but overcome these conceptions and transform our understanding of both consciousness and human activity as they are established in those psychological conceptions, which determined the crisis of contemporary psychology.

(Rubinshtein, 1973b, p. 24)

Then, he proceeds to the brief overview of the predecessors’ weaknesses and drawbacks, followed with the call for a radical revision and revaluation of their most fundamental notions and even the object of scientific psychology as such:

The mistake of introspective psychology was not in its aspiration to establish consciousness as an object of psychological investigation, but in how it interpreted consciousness and human psyche. Not in that was the mistake of behaviorism that it aspired to explore people in their activity, but first of all in how it interpreted such activity. And the confusion of psychology of spirit is not in the acknowledging the essence of consciousness as mediated by its relation to culture, to ideology, but in how it interprets this relation. Therefore, the way to overcoming the crisis cannot be in rejecting consciousness altogether on the basis of the erroneous introspectionist interpretation of consciousness and - like behaviorism — attempting to build psychology without psyche or trying — like subjectivist psychology' of consciousness — to build psychology without taking into account human activity' or, finally, making an effort to correct the mistake of erroneous interpretation of consciousness by' merging it with another mistake — the erroneous interpretation of human activity; etc. There can be only' one way of overcoming the crisis as demonstrated by' the struggle between these conceptions: only the radical revision of the interpretation as such of both consciousness and human activity, which is inseparably' connected with the new interpretation of their interrelations. Only' such radical revision can lead to the correct revealing of the object of psychology. It is exactly this way — and this is our foundational principle — that with absolute definitiveness is indicated in the psychological claims of Marx. They clearly suggest an alternative interpretation of both consciousness and human activity', which overcomes the split in its roots and establishes the basis for the development of Marxist-Leninist psychology as a “a genuine, comprehensive and real” [in the original German, “zur wirklichen inhaltvollen und reellen Wissenschaft werden”, the author’s emphasis] science.

(Rubinshtein, 1973b, p. 24)

Nothing can be added to these beautiful words, it seems.