Transcript of a Presentation at the Reactology Discussion

A commentary On 2 March 1931, the final act of the “reactological discussion” took place within the walls of the State Institute of Psychology, Pedology and Psychotechnics. It was initiated by members of the Institute’s Party Committee, led by the Aleksander Talankin. Under the guise of a scientific discussion, they arranged a trial with a foregone conclusion and no chance of acquittal. Konstantin Kornilov, the director of the Institute, was the main accused, but the resolution also mentioned “Vygotsky’s and Luria’s ‘cultural’ psychology”, among the theories “not unmasked and passed off as Marxist”. Lev Vygotsky was one of the last to take the floor. Kornilov was present at the meeting, he objected vehemently, often throwing his remarks, but he listened to Vygotsky without interrupting him. Several other people spoke afterwards, including Aleksander Luria. The transcript of Vygotsky’s speech is kept in the RAE archive (fond 82, file 1, case 11, pages 5—15). The typewritten text is edited with an ink pen in Vygotsky’s neat small handwriting, right down to the punctuation marks and the division of the text into paragraphs. In the present publication, the author’s editing has been fully taken into account. It is noteworthy that Vygotsky speaks of Kornilov with respect, calling him by his first name and patronymic and describing him as a man who sincerely tried to create a new, Marxist psychology, but failed to properly implement “a great, revolutionary intention”. Critical of reactology, Vygotsky admits that he himself was initially fascinated by it and took part in the common endeavour. And even in the creation of the cultural-historical theory of “higher functions” a certain influence of reactology was still present. A number of historians of psychology distinguish in Vygotsky’s creative biography a “reactological period” during which he wrote Educational Psychology (published in 1926, with a delay of one or two years). As we can see from the transcript, Vygotsky himself testifies that “there was such a moment”, even if it “did not last long”. At the same time, even a superficial comparison of Kornilov’s and Vygotsky’s work of that period of time reveals that their teachings on psychological reactions are profoundly different (not to mention the direction of development of their theoretical programmes). Vygotsky explicitly pointed out this difference in his speech: reactology could not go beyond biology, because the idea of historical development was alien to it. Vygotsky himself never, at any stage of his work, lost sight of this idea. And in Educational Psychology he sees the specificity of human reaction in the fact that “it closes in some other person’s experience”, in the “experience accumulated by previous generations”, in the “historical experience” of humanity. So It would be more accurate to call this period “historical-reactological”. It is no coincidence that it was then, exactly one hundred years ago, that the idea of cultural-historical psychology was born in Vygotsky’s mind. A.D. Maidansky