V M Bekhterev's Collective Reflexology Part 1

Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev was a pioneering Russian neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist. A highly esteemed rival of Ivan Pavlov, his achievements in the areas of personality, clinical psychology, and political and social psychology were recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Publication of the complete text of Collective Reflexology brings to the English-speaking world this brilliant scientist's final theoretical statements on how reflexological principles, which he had been developing over a quarter century, can be extended far beyond analysis of the individual personality. Bekhterev's work grows out of his interest in group psychology and suggestion. This concept of the reflex is much broader than Pavlov's. It is applicable to every variety of life. Bekhterev compared his own analyses to those of other European thinkers such as Comte, LeBon, and Sorokin. Such analyses strained against the official Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the era. Bekhterev died in 1927, allegedly of poisoning by Stalin's henchman. As with many scientists during the Soviet era, his legacy was suppressed. In the normal course of events his name would have been as well known as that of Freud, Pavlov or, more lately, B.F. Skinner. This first publication of Bekhterev's great work in English fills a void in the fields of psychology, sociology, and the history of science. V.M. Bekhterev was director of the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg and founded there its Psychoneurological Institute. Among his many books are Suggestion: Its Role in Social Life (available from Transaction) and The Subject Matter and Goals of Social Psychology. Lloyd H. Strickland is professor of psychology at Carleton University. He is the author of numerous journal articles and editor of Directions in Soviet Social Psychology and Soviet and Western Perspectives in Social Psychology. "Bekhterev (1857-1927) is a formidable figure, and his work continues to deserve careful study."-Canadian Psychology

Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev was a pioneering Russian neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist. A highly esteemed rival of Ivan Pavlov, his achievements in the areas of personality, clinical psychology, and political and social psychology were recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. However, when his version of reflexological doctrine ran afoul of official Soviet ideology in the 1920s his work was banned and his influence suppressed through the dispersal of his many colleagues and disciples. Bekhterev himself died in 1927 under mysterious circumstances. This translation of Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life is a significant instance of intellectual and cultural restoration. It marks a starting point of Bekhterev's lifelong endeavor to relate his clinical observations and philosophy of science to problems of the social world. Bekhterev's investigation reviews and explains the many conflicting positions in the social and scientific thought concerning the nature and power of suggestion. He takes pains to differentiate the process from persuasion and hypnosis, and discusses suggestion and autosuggestion in the waking state, examining their effectiveness on feeling, thought, and behavior. He then discusses the destructive consequences of the process—violent crime, suicide, witchcraft, and devil-possession hysteria— in a wide variety of contexts important in the Russia, Europe and North America of the period. Bekhterev presents a structural model of the mind, including both conscious and unconscious realms, and the phenomena of suggestion without awareness; in doing so he anticipated much present-day work on preconscious influence. Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life is a landmark study in collective psychological research that may lead to revisions in histories of social psychology. It will be read by psychologists, sociologists, and social historians.

From the 1880s to the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide. Science of the Child charts the rise and fall of the interdisciplinary field devoted to the study of children across the late Imperial and early Soviet eras.

The Lamaze method is virtually synonymous with natural childbirth in America. In the 1970s, taking Lamaze classes was a common rite of passage to parenthood. The conscious relaxation and patterned breathing techniques touted as a natural and empowering path to the alleviation of pain in childbirth resonated with the feminist and countercultural values of the era. In Lamaze, historian Paula A. Michaels tells the surprising story of the Lamaze method from its origins in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, to its popularization in France in the 1950s, and then to its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. Michaels shows how, for different reasons, in disparate national contexts, this technique for managing the pain of childbirth without resort to drugs found a following. The Soviet government embraced this method as a panacea to childbirth pain in the face of the material shortages that followed World War II. Heated and sometimes ideologically inflected debates surrounded the Lamaze method as it moved from East to West amid the Cold War. Physicians in France sympathetic to the communist cause helped to export it across the Iron Curtain, but politics alone fails to explain why French women embraced this approach. Arriving on American shores around 1960, the Lamaze method took on new meanings. Initially it offered a path to a safer and more satisfying birth experience, but overtly political considerations came to the fore once again as feminists appropriated it as a way to resist the patriarchal authority of male obstetricians. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Michaels pieces together this complex and fascinating story at the crossroads of the history of politics, medicine, and women. The story of Lamaze illuminates the many contentious issues that swirl around birthing practices in America and Europe. Brimming with insight, Michaels' engaging history offers an instructive intervention in the debate about how to achieve humane, empowering, and safe maternity care for all women.

Originally published in 1975, this title sets out to show us the differences between Soviet and other ways of thinking about nature, man, and society. The basic factor distinguishing Soviet psychology is that it views phenomena from the perspective of a highly articulated body of theoretical assumptions, and rejects the inductive ‘eclecticism’ of Western psychology. The theoretical framework within which Soviet psychology functions is the product of a distinctive socio-political and cultural development in Russia profoundly shaped by the institutions of autocracy and Orthodox religion, and the economic system of serfdom, and the radical revolt which grew up in opposition to this and advocated materialism, secularism, and atheism. This radical philosophic tradition in Russia, best represented by the writings of Chernishevski, fused with the doctrines of Marxism and the new science of behaviour developed by Sechenov and Pavlov to create the theoretical framework of Soviet psychology. The book also analyses the discussions, controversies, and decrees which are at the root of the contemporary science of behaviour in the Soviet Union, and points to the impressive body of empirical knowledge which has arisen. Soviet Psychology is unique in presenting Soviet psychology from an ‘inside’ point of view, and in making us appreciate the strongly theoretical stance of Soviet psychology which Professor McLeish claims is unlikely to be much influenced by the new atmosphere of détente.

Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev was a pioneering Russian neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist. A highly esteemed rival of Ivan Pavlov, his achievements in the areas of personality, clinical psychology, and political and social psychology were recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Publication of the complete text of Collective Reflexology brings to the English-speaking world this brilliant scientist's final theoretical statements on how reflexological principles, which he had been developing over a quarter century, can be extended far beyond analysis of the individual personality. Bekhterev's work grows out of his interest in group psychology and suggestion. This concept of the reflex is much broader than Pavlov's. It is applicable to every variety of life. Bekhterev compared his own analyses to those of other European thinkers such as Comte, LeBon, and Sorokin. Such analyses strained against the official Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the era. Bekhterev died in 1927, allegedly of poisoning by Stalin's henchman. As with many scientists during the Soviet era, his legacy was suppressed. In the normal course of events his name would have been as well known as that of Freud, Pavlov or, more lately, B.F. Skinner. This first publication of Bekhterev's great work in English fills a void in the fields of psychology, sociology, and the history of science. V.M. Bekhterev was director of the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg and founded there its Psychoneurological Institute. Among his many books are Suggestion: Its Role in Social Life (available from Transaction) and The Subject Matter and Goals of Social Psychology. Lloyd H. Strickland is professor of psychology at Carleton University. He is the author of numerous journal articles and editor of Directions in Soviet Social Psychology and Soviet and Western Perspectives in Social Psychology. "Bekhterev (1857-1927) is a formidable figure, and his work continues to deserve careful study."-Canadian Psychology