This issue of the journal Cultural and Historical Psychology contains correspondence between Aleksander Romanovich Luria and Jean Piaget, which is being published here for the first time. René van der Veer (Leiden University, Netherlands) kindly provided photocopies of the letters, for which the editorial board would like to express its sincere gratitude. The originals are held in the Luria family archive (custodian: E.G. Radkovskaya), the UNESCO archives, and the archives of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva.
Luria wrote his letters in German, while Piaget wrote in French. The letters were translated into Russian by A.D. Maidansky.
We learned of the existence of this correspondence from a recent article by M.J. Ratcliff and R. van der Veer, which attempts to partially reconstruct the collaboration between Luria and Piaget (Ratcliff, van der Veer, 2025).
The correspondence is divided into two periods linked to major international congresses at which Piaget and Luria met in person.
They first met at the 9th International Congress of Psychology, which was held at Yale University (New Haven, September 1929)1. With over a thousand delegates in attendance, including a veritable constellation of eminent psychologists2, this congress is considered one of the most prestigious in the history of psychology. Soviet Russia was represented by a delegation comprising V.M. Borovsky, S.G. Gellerstein, I.N. Shpilrein and A.R. Luria. Once they had arrived in America, they were joined by Academician I.P. Pavlov, who delivered a lecture that was met with a standing ovation3.
Unlike Piaget, who had published four books and numerous articles and had visited universities and research centres across Europe, Luria was virtually unknown in the West at that time.
At the congress, Luria presented two papers: one on the combined motor method, and another co-authored with Vygotsky (who was not present at the congress) summarising their joint research into the function and fate of egocentric speech (Vygotsky, Luria, 1930)4. This study used a modified version of Piaget’s method and provided compelling arguments against his hypothesis that egocentric speech disappears during child development. Vygotsky and Luria demonstrated that egocentric speech constitutes an intermediate developmental stage between social external speech and individual internal speech. During cultural development, egocentric speech transforms into inner speech, becoming the primary means of organising the child’s behaviour.
Luria’s second paper and Piaget’s paper were presented on 4 September during the morning session in different lecture theatres, so it is unlikely that they could have heard each other’s presentations. Luria may have had to repeat his paper during a walk. Piaget was interested in Vygotsky and Luria’s research; however, judging by his subsequent publications, he regarded their objections as merely an amendment to his own position, requiring no major changes to his theory.
In his paper, Piaget argued that morality, like logical thinking, emerges and develops through cooperation. Logic and morality replace the “spontaneous” egocentric mindset and behaviour, in which there is as yet no distinction between the social and the individual (Piaget, 1930).
Vygotsky and Luria regarded a child’s cooperation with adults as the source of all higher psychological functions and cultural forms of behaviour. They found brilliant experimental evidence for this idea in Piaget’s works.
Following their meeting in America, Luria and Piaget struck up a friendship that had the potential to develop into a fruitful international collaboration. In 1932, Luria arranged for two of Piaget’s books, Language and Thought in the Child (1923) and Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (1924), to be published together in a single volume.
Vygotsky and Piaget himself wrote two forewords to the Russian edition. Piaget’s original handwritten preface, dated 18 September 1930, has been preserved. In the opening lines, he expresses his gratitude to “my friend Alexander Luria” for preparing the Russian translation and, in particular, for the research that supplemented and corrected the work carried out in Geneva. The editor of the printed edition replaced Luria’s name with the anonymous “Soviet psychologists”5. As for Vygotsky’s preface, it was soon cut out of library copies (at least three copies held at the Russian State Library have suffered this fate).
As planned, Luria and Vygotsky were to join the editorial board of the new journal L’Enfance (Childhood). Luria repeatedly invited Piaget to join him on expeditions to “Russian Turkestan”, and in a letter dated 11 April 1932, Piaget accepted the invitation. However, these plans never came to fruition6.
Vygotsky died suddenly in June 1934. Then, Luria began work on a commemorative volume entitled Problems of Development and Dissolution of Mind, enlisting the help of a wide circle of leading international researchers, including Piaget. Unfortunately, the book was never published, and the fate of the submitted manuscripts remains unknown. Following the 4 July 1936 decree “On Pedological Deviations in the People’s Commissariat for Education System”, Luria switched his focus to neuropsychological research and ceased correspondence with his foreign colleagues, only resuming it with the onset of the Thaw.
By that time, many links between Soviet and foreign psychology had been lost. Luria and Piaget played a significant role in rebuilding these links.
In April 1955, Luria and Piaget met in Moscow. A delegation comprising Piaget (in his capacity as president of the International Union of Psychological Science), Paul Fraisse, and René Zazzo visited Moscow and the Pavlov Institute near Leningrad. At an “epistemological discussion” at the Academy of Sciences, following a heated debate that switched to Russian, those present agreed that “Piaget is not an idealist”. Piaget mentioned this with a touch of humour, taking a dig at “certain Russian colleagues” who were well acquainted with foreign sources but rarely cited them (Piaget, 1956, p. 344).
In the summer of 1957, Piaget and Luria met again at the 15th International Congress of Psychology in Brussels. According to Luria’s letters home, he agreed there to the “translation and publication of Vygotsky” (Luria, 1994, p. 163). Among the participants at the congress was Eugenia Hanfmann, a close acquaintance of his who had been developing some of Vygotsky’s ideas in the field of pathopsychology7. Five years later, her and Gertrude Vakar’s translation of Thinking and Speech was published. The preface mentions that Professor Luria had requested the translation (Vygotsky, 1962, pp. XI—XII).
Despite Luria’s praise, the English translation of Thinking and Speech contained numerous simplifications and omissions (see Mecacci, Yasnitsky, 2011). Even the title was changed to Thought and Language. The translators were apparently unaware that, for Vygotsky, language is merely a form of speech development, and one that is linked to thinking.
Hanfmann sent the book to Piaget for review. “What an intelligent idea to send him the translation and receive his critical comments”, Luria marvelled in a letter to Hanfmann. “I know of no other instance in the history of science where two eminent scholars, one of whom is still alive, have exchanged their views, separated by thirty years!” (quoted in Vygodskaya, Lifanova, 1996, p. 138).
Vygotsky was an unseen participant in the dialogues between Luria and Piaget from their very first meeting. However, Piaget admitted that he had not read Vygotsky’s works before opening Thinking and Speech. It is unclear why, given that half a dozen translations (including one into French) had been published in European journals even before the war.
There is also no certainty that he studied the second chapter of Thinking and Speech closely. In his “Commentaries”, Piaget explains the concepts of egocentrism and the decentration of thought in detail and with great conviction, but Vygotsky contested something quite different — the view of the “main pathway of child development”. He believed that this is not the socialisation of the egocentric child’s psyche, as Piaget thinks, but “individualisation based on the child’s internal sociality” (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 282).
Vygotsky urges us to view the child, from the very first seconds of his life, as one of the parties in an “interpsychological” system of relationships with the people around him. In contrast, Piaget supposes that “the social lies at the end of development” (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 44). Piaget’s point of reference is the individual, with his innate ego and sensorimotor functions. Marx termed such a theoretical stance a “Robinsonade”.
By shifting the point of reference from the ego to society, Vygotsky decentered traditional psychology in general and Piaget’s theory in particular. In the beginning was “We”! “I” is nothing other than an internalised “We”.
Piaget’s “Comments” overlooked this Copernican revolution in psychological science. Written in English, they were published as a brochure (Piaget, 1962) and included with every copy of Vygotsky’s book, undoubtedly boosting sales.
Luria and Piaget met again at the 18th International Congress of Psychology, held in Moscow from 4 to 11 August 1966. Luria chaired the programme committee, and Aleksei Leontiev was president of the congress.
It was a significant event, with 5000 participants and guests from 44 countries in attendance. Luria delivered a paper on the localisation of cortical functions, and Piaget, fulfilling a UNESCO assignment, gave an evening lecture on the interrelationships between psychologyand other sciences. This lecture was published separately as a 40-page booklet (Piaget, 1966).
Approximately one and a half years prior to the Moscow Congress, M.P. Kashin, the editor-in-chief of the journal Narodnoe Obrazovanie, approached Piaget with a proposal to write an article on the connection between thinking and activity (this topic choice reveals Kashin to be an adherent of the “activity approach”). Piaget complied with the request, but the content of the article was too complex for a journal intended for a mass audience. This is probably why Kashin submitted the article to Voprosy Psikhologii, where it was published at the end of the year (see Piaget, 1965). A lengthy article on the Moscow Congress was published in the Supplement to Narodnoe Obrazovanie, containing a synopsis of Piaget’s presentation, “The Place of Psychology in the System of Sciences” (Bernstein, 1966, pp. 7—9).
Three of Piaget’s books were published in the Soviet Union, alongside the aforementioned booklet and a substantial monograph on his “genetic psychology” (see Flavell, 1963). The first volume of Experimental Psychology, edited by P. Fraisse and J. Piaget, was published in the year of the Congress; the final, fourth volume appeared in 1973. A.N. Leontiev wrote three prefaces and oversaw the editing of the translations. Luria did not participate in any of these publications.
The last surviving letter from Piaget to Luria was written three months after the Moscow Congress. Although there is no documentary evidence of this, the letter suggests that their joint scientific work continued thereafter.
The published correspondence allows us to conclude that, despite all the political and ideological conflicts of their era, Piaget and Luria succeeded in strengthening ties between the scientific communities of psychologists in the Western and Eastern blocs.
1 See Luria’s review article on the New Haven Congress (Luria, 1930) and the account of his journey to the Congress (Yasnitsky, 2012).
2 W. Köhler, K. Koffka, K. Lewin, O. Lipmann, W. Stern, K. Bühler and Ch. Bühler, E. Claparède, A. Piéron, J. Piaget, C. Spearman, E. Thorndike, and others. J.M. Cattell chaired the organising committee. The congress proceedings were published a year later (Ninth International Congress, 1930).
3 “Pavlov spoke in Russian... with great enthusiasm, and the empathizing audience broke into enthusiastic applause without waiting for the translation. When the translation came, the applauded passage proved to be a description of some apparatus used in Pavlov’s laboratory!” (Duncan, 1980, p. 3).
4 See the publication of this report with commentary: Vygotsky, Luria, 2019; Zavernsheva, van der Veer, 2019.
5 In addition to Vygotsky and Luria, Aleksei Leontiev and Rosa Levina also played an active role in research into egocentric speech. The latter left behind memoirs describing the course of the experiments (Levina, 1968). She kept records and protocols of a series of experiments conducted in 1931. Although Levina was still a student at the time, her name appears alongside the “big three” in Thinking and Speech.
6 Luria was forced to leave the Psychological Institute after a commission of the Rabkrin (the Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection) deemed his expeditions of 1931—1932 to be “colonialist research based on racial theory and attempting to demonstrate the inferiority of the thinking of our peripheral ethnic groups” (Luria, 1994, p. 67).
7 E.M. Hanfmann (1905—1983) spent her childhood in Saint Petersburg and went on to study in Jena. She then moved to the United States, where she became an assistant to Kurt Koffka. She is renowned for her method of diagnosing schizophrenia (the Hanfmann—Kasanin test), which is based on the methodology of Vygotsky and Sakharov. Her husband, Jacob Kasanin (1897—1946), knew Vygotsky personally, corresponded with him and translated some of his works into English.