These files are maintained strictly for historical reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes,
and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
Content on this site may not meet current digital accessibility standards.
If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
please contact Bruce Jones, bjones@ucsd.edu to request an accommodation.
These files are maintained strictly for historical reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes,
and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
Content on this site may not meet current digital accessibility standards.
If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
please contact Bruce Jones, bjones@ucsd.edu to request an accommodation.
Yes Mike, sometimes I do have my moments. However fleeting!
Mike Cole
<lchcmike@gmail. To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
com> cc:
Sent by: Subject: Re: [xmca] A magic moment: swearing-in gaffe
xmca-bounces@web
er.ucsd.edu
01/22/2009 10:00
AM
Please respond
to mcole; Please
respond to
"eXtended Mind,
Culture,
Activity"
Interesting linkage, Eric.
Selective discoordination there certainly was.\
mike
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:08 AM, <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
>
> I believe that Luria's combined motor method provides a perfect snapshot
of
> what was seen January 20th! For your enjoyment please peruse Mike Cole's
> excellent summary:
>
> found at:
>
>
> http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/Localz/MCole/luria.html
>
>
>
>
>
> By the testimony of his autobiography and his early published writings,
> Alexander Romanovich was interested in the issues that made up the crisis
> in psychology for several years before he met Vygotsky. While still a
> student he read widely in German and American psychology. He was very
> sympathetic to German act-psychology and at the same time he was
fascinated
> by Freud and Jung. This combination may seem odd, but it reflected his
> search for a theory of motivation and some way to address questions of
> emotional conflicts and the method of free associations. As he summarized
> his notions about psychoanalysis:
>
>
> Here, I thought, was a scientific approach that combined a strongly
> deterministic explanation of concrete, individual behavior with an
> explanation of the origins of complex human needs in terms of natural
> science. Perhaps psychoanalysis could serve as the basis for a scientific
> reale Psichologie, one that could overcome the nomothetic-idiographic
> distinction (1979, p. 23)
>
>
> In emulation of the psychoanalytical writers, he conducted clinical
> research on free associations, but he mistrusted the results of such
> efforts, feeling that any conclusions he tried to reach about the flow of
> his subjects' thoughts were insufficiently grounded. As he wrote in his
> autobiography, " While I was able to fill notebooks with [a patient's]
free
> associations, I was in no position to carry out my plan to use such data
to
> capture `the concrete reality of the flow of ideas (1979, p.24").
>
>
> In response to this dissatisfaction he created a methodology designed to
> embody a psychodynamic theory of mind in an objective set of laboratory
> procedures. The centerpiece of this methodology was an experimental
> technique that he called the combined motor method, which, he hoped,
would
> provide a way of rendering Freud's clinical methods accessible to
> experimental treatment.
>
>
> The fullest existing description of this work is contained in a monograph
> published in English in 1932 under the title The Nature of Human
Conflicts:
> Or Emotion, Conflict and Will. Unfortunately, this fascinating book is
not
> yet available in Russian; rather Russian papers describing this
experiment
> provided only a partial glimpse of the overall project. The book also
> provides a window on how Luria's early work was taken up and transformed
> under the influence of Vygotsky, and why Vygotsky would find in Luria
such
> a useful colleague.
>
>
> In the first chapter Luria outlines his basic presuppositions and his
> experimental strategy. He explicitly rejects mechanical determinism,
> declaring "The structure of the organism presupposes not an accidental
> mosaic, but a complex organization of separate systems . . . [that] unite
> as very definite parts into an integrated functional structure." (pp.
6-7)
>
>
> Since this structure is the consequence of a long complicated
development,
> both ontogenetically and cultural-historically, and because the parts are
> integrated into a whole functional system, how can it be possible to
> isolate elements in this system for purposes of psychological analysis?
> Phrased differently, since no two people are constructed alike, how could
> one possibly obtain valid evidence about the thought processes of another
> person?
>
>
> The answer that Luria provided was that other people's thoughts could not
> be observed directly. But they could be revealed indirectly in so far as
> they could be reflected in a publicly displayable, voluntary behavior. He
> phrased his strategy as follows:
>
>
> We should on the one hand, produce the central process of the
> disorganization of behavior; on the other hand, we should try to reflect
> this process in some [other] system accessible and suitable for
> examination. The motor function is such a systematic, objectively
reflected
> structure of the neuro-dynamic processes concealed from immediate
> examination. And there lies before us the use of the motor function as a
> system of reflected structure of hidden psychological processes. Thus we
> proceed along the path we call the combined motor method. (p. 18)
>
>
> The first phase in his technique was to induce a well-coordinated,
>
>
> publicly available behavior as the medium of coordination necessary for
the
> psychological analysis to be accurate. He used various devices for this
> purpose. Often the subject was requested to hold the left hand steady in
a
> device that could record its movements, while simultaneously being asked
to
> press a button or squeeze a bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented
by
> the experimenter. Once this behavior became stable, the analyst sought to
> disrupt it selectively in line with his hypothesis about particular
> internal psychological states.
>
>
> The combined motor method was applied to psychodiagnosis in a wide
variety
> of real life circumstances consistent with Luria's goal of demonstrating
> the possibility of a methodology powerful enough to reach beyond the
> laboratory to engage the kinds of long-term emotions which typically
> organize human behavior. It also combines general laws with specific
cases.
> The book is full of examples. When he spoke about this wrok in later
life,
> Luria ordinarily emphasized studies with suspected criminals because they
> were the basis for lie detector tests. But the book also contains a
variety
> of purely experimental, non-applied verifications of his methodology. For
> example, he conducted experiments with normal adults who were first told
> various stories, and then hypnotized to suppress knowledge of certain
> words, following which the analyst had to ferret out the "hidden" words
> from the ways in which their motor behavior was selectively disrupted. He
> also conducted experiments with people suffering various neuroses and
brain
> damage as a means of further verifying the effectiveness of his methods.
>
>
> Work on the combined motor method is concentrated in the first two
sections
> of The Nature of Human Conflicts which was published in 1932 in English,
> but contains a record of research from 1923-1930. I find the book
> fascinating reading in part because I know that at the start of this
> period, Alexander Romanovich was intent upon creating the combined motor
> method as a model system for the study of the psychodynamics of
individual
> thought. In doing so, he had achieved one model for resolving the crisis
in
> psychology. By the end of this period, he was engaged with Vygotsky and
> Leontiev (who had participated in some of the early experiments on The
> combined motor method) in creating a new school of psychology founded on
> The principle that the mind is mediated through culture. From this
> perspective, the combined motor method sets up a mini "cultural system"
and
> it is within the confines of this microcosm that one can study how
culture
> serves as the medium of propagating ideas from one person to another. As
> Luria expressed this relationship at The end of The Nature of Human
> Conflicts, " The analysis of complex cultural mechanisms is the key to
the
> understanding of the simple neurodynamical processes 1932, p. 428).
>
>
> One sees many variations on this method in Luria's later work such as his
> studies on the development of self control in normal and abnormal
children;
> unfortunately, this work was carried out at a time when it was required
to
> communicate in terms that sounded like Pavlovian theory, so the
continuity
> between the early and later work is difficult to notice, or at least, it
> was for me.
>
>
>
> <cconnery@ithaca
> .edu> To: "eXtended Mind,
> Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent by: cc:
> xmca-bounces@web Subject: Re: [xmca] A magic
> moment: swearing-in gaffe
> er.ucsd.edu
>
>
> 01/21/2009 03:27
> PM
> Please respond
> to "eXtended
> Mind, Culture,
> Activity"
>
>
>
>
>
>
> FYI--- Obama was one of the few who did not endorse the Chief Justice's
> nomination to the Supreme Court.
> Cathrene
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca