When Langston Hughes toured Soviet Central Asia in the early 1930s, he noted parallels between the Jim Crow–era American South and the Tsarist Uzbek ‘South’: both were cotton-producing regions and both were home to racially oppressed populations who laboured unfreely for their white masters. But this similarity, he claimed, lay in the past. The transformations in social life that had occurred in the region since it had become Soviet suggested to Hughes that socialism was capable of eradicating racism, segregation, and exploitation, changing people in the process: ‘New times demand new people…. [I]n Soviet Asia … new people are coming into being.’

In 1931 and 1932, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria (1902–77) led two expeditions to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Staying in many of the places Hughes visited in the same period, Luria and his research team shared Hughes’ conviction that social and psychological change went hand in hand, and they set out to demonstrate it scientifically. The American anthropologist Melville Herskovits wrote to Luria in 1932 to see whether these experiments might shed light on his own research into how black communities in the US ‘adjusted’ to the dominant society. But Luria responded that the psychological processes occurring in Soviet Central Asia should not be viewed in terms of cultural assimilation: they were tied to economic and political shifts. ‘The socialistic reconstruction of life … involve[s] real changes in the mind.’

There is currently something of a resurgent interest in therapy, psychoanalysis, and radical psychiatry on the Left, an introspective turn perhaps symptomatic of the broader context of retreat, defeat, and demobilisation. Theories of psychic life developed under ‘actually existing socialism’ are rarely included in such counter-canons, but there was far more to them than salivating dogs and the abuse of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

Luria described psychology as ‘the science of social history’ and his research was in turn shaped by Soviet history. Over the course of his long and varied career, Luria shifted between disciplines, fields, and institutions in response to the shifting priorities and demands of the state, and his publications encompass a wide range of topics as a result. Despite their differences, his essays on the compatibility of Marxism with psychoanalysis (published in the 1920s) share with the technical textbooks on the localisation of functions in the cerebral cortex (published four decades later) a conviction that people cannot be understood in isolation from the social contexts in which they have grown up and live.

The assertion that mental health cannot be divorced from social conditions is a familiar refrain in left-wing theories of the psyche, and Luria’s clinical work strove to prove it. As with his experiments in Central Asia, Luria’s research brought him into contact with a diverse range of people whose social environments, tied to the specific convulsions of Soviet social history, were often dramatic and traumatic. In the 1920s he collaborated with the police to conduct word-association tests with convicted murderers; he conducted similar experiments with homeless street children (besprizorniki) whom he compared to school children from cities and the countryside. During the Second World War, he worked in a sanatorium in the Urals treating soldiers with brain injuries in rehabilitative workshops.

While Luria emphasised in theory the impact of material conditions on psychology, his conclusions were complicated in practice by his understanding of individual and historical development. Luria was concerned with encouraging the emergence of what he called the ‘culturally developed’ human being, defined as an educated person capable of abstract thinking. Informed by a teleological Marxist–Leninist understanding of historical development, he argued that this ‘advanced’ figure was the result of three developmental trajectories: the biological evolution of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilisation’, and the maturation of the individual from baby to adult.

Luria claimed that differences in perception between people from different social groups were contingent rather than innate, arguing they could be attributed to differences in experience rather than intellect — he perceived the circumstantial reasons a street child found it difficult to define the word ‘home’, for example. But Luria’s adherence to progressive frameworks resulted in him characterising some groups he encountered as ‘backward’. He dismissed both illiterate Uzbek women and street children with no formal education as ‘primitive’ in their thought processes.

Towards the end of his long career, when the tumultuous early decades of the Soviet Union had given way to the relative stability of the Brezhnev era, Luria published two case histories: The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968) and The Man with a Shattered World (1971). These ‘neurological novels’ discussed two patients with whom he worked over many years: Zasetsky, a Red Army soldier who suffered from aphasia after surviving a bullet wound to the head during the Second World War, and Solomon Shereshevsky or ‘S’, a man whose synaesthesia enabled him to recall long passages of text and lists of numbers in precise detail after many years. Luria saw these books as belonging to a lost tradition of ‘romantic science’, which unlike ‘classical science’ attended to specificities rather than generalities. Descriptive rather than prescriptive, these books were more concerned with recording idiosyncratic modes of perception and attendant struggles with daily life, in particular historical circumstances, than with judging people according to a normative developmental trajectory: the romantic science of social history.