A Concise Psychological Dictionary

The authoritative Soviet reference on the mind: several hundred alphabetical entries, from abilities through to will, each pronouncing in the flat voice of settled science.

A dictionary does not argue; it rules. Where an ordinary book advances a case a reader may weigh and reject, a reference work sets down what the words mean and expects to be believed - which makes this the most efficient way to see what Soviet psychology took itself to have established.

It is the collective product of the school of A. V. Petrovsky and M. G. Yaroshevsky, the dominant figures of academic Soviet psychology, whose particular theories are cited throughout not as one position among several but as the discipline's results: Petrovsky's stratometric account of the collective, his concept of personalisation, and the doctrine of collectivist self-determination. Behind those stand the older tradition the volume treats as foundational - Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev - and the activity-theoretic vocabulary that came from it.

This is not an apparatus functionary padding a quota. It is the settled house style of a real discipline, and for a reader who wants to know how that discipline carved up the mind, and which Western findings it admitted and which it quarantined, the entries are the fastest route in.

Issued jointly in Moscow and New York, so that it reached English readers doubly certified. Edited for translation by Pyotr Shikhirev.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the entries the shelf does not carry.