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, and it does its most consequential work in the entries it declines to write. A Concise Psychological Dictionary is the authoritative Soviet reference on the mind — several hundred alphabetical entries, from Abilities through to Will, each pronouncing in the flat, agentless voice of settled science. To read it critically is not to catch it lying about a date, as one catches the historical volumes in this series. It almost never does. It is to watch where the definitions bend, which foreign findings are admitted and which quarantined, and above all to notice the gaps on the shelf: the ordinary facts of the human interior for which the science of the psyche, in the last decade of the state that funded it, had built no entry.
Establish the date of the text first, because here the spine and the substance point to slightly different years and the gap is the interesting part. The English edition is 1987, issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow and co-imprinted in New York by International Publishers — the house of the American Communist Party — so that the volume reached Anglophone readers doubly certified, Soviet science under a Soviet-aligned jacket. The Library of Congress data record it as a translation of Kratkii psikhologicheskii slovar; the front matter of this edition credits Pyotr Shikhirev, a Candidate of Sciences in philosophy, as editor of the translation, and designer and translator besides. The compilers of the underlying Russian work are not named on the English title page, but their fingerprints are on nearly every page: the volume 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 — Petrovsky's "stratometric" account of the collective, his concept of personalisation, the doctrine of "collectivist self-determination" — are cited throughout not as one position among several but as the discipline's established results. This is not the work of an apparatus functionary padding a quota. It is the settled house style of a genuine and, in parts, first-rate scientific establishment, writing at the top of its authority.
That authority dates the book more precisely than the imprint does. Search the entries for the vocabulary of the moment they were printed in and you find nothing: no glasnost, no perestroika, no Gorbachev, no reference to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of February 1986. The intellectual furniture is entirely that of the years before the thaw in official language — the Russian compilation belongs to the middle 1980s, and reads as a document of the discipline as it stood at the close of the Brezhnev-Andropov period, translated into English just as the political surface above it began, at last, to crack. One entry alone shows the crack running down into the science, and we will come to it: the treatment of Freud is warmer than a reader of the older Soviet manuals would expect, and the warmth has a date — the Tbilisi symposium on the unconscious of 1979, after which the subject could no longer simply be dismissed. But the frame around that entry, and around all the others, is pre-thaw. What the book was for is plain from its form: it is the export reference, the object a Western student or sympathiser was meant to consult to learn what the largest psychological establishment on earth had decided a given term meant. International Publishers carried it to exactly that reader.
Begin, then, with the doctrine, because the dictionary states it more cleanly than any monograph could — a monograph has to persuade, a dictionary only has to define. The keystone is the category of activity, and the entry says so without embarrassment: "The category of A. is a distinctive feature of Soviet psychology based on the Marxist-Leninist methodology." This is the tradition of Sergei Rubinstein and Alexei N. Leontyev, named in the entry as the men who introduced action into Soviet psychology as its unit of analysis, and it is the genuine theoretical achievement of the school — the insistence that mind is not a thing sealed inside a skull to be inspected, but a process that forms in and through a subject's practical, object-directed, socially organised dealings with the world. Beneath it sits the still deeper category of reflection, and here the pedigree is made explicit and political in a single sentence: "Lenin made an exceptionally significant contribution to the teaching that cognition is R. of reality. Hence, the dialectical-materialist theory of R. is called the Leninist theory of R." The whole edifice of Soviet psychology is built on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism — mind as the reflection, in the reflecting matter of the brain, of a material world that exists independently of it. From this the entry on consciousness follows as a theorem: consciousness is "the supreme level of mental reflection of objective reality, inherent in man exclusively by virtue of his socio-historical essence."
It is worth pausing on how far down that reflection concept is made to reach, because the ambition is the doctrine's signature. The reflection entry does not begin with the human mind at all; it begins with matter as such, defining reflection as "a universal property of matter, essentially the ability of objects to represent with varying degree of adequacy the features, structural characteristics and relationships of other objects." From there it climbs a single continuous ladder — irritability in the simplest organism, then sensibility, then sensory and finally logical images in man — so that consciousness is presented not as a break with physical nature but as its highest rung, the point at which matter has organised itself densely enough to reflect itself. The move is elegant and it is metaphysical: it stakes the whole of psychology on Lenin's theory of knowledge and lets nothing fall outside it. That is intellectually serious. It is also why nothing in the resulting science can ever indict the arrangement that produced it, for the arrangement, too, is just matter reflecting matter, and the reflection is by definition adequate.
That last phrase carries the third pillar, the one this series encounters in volume after volume: personality as a social product, not a natural given. The dictionary's personality entry defines the term as "a systems quality which is acquired by an individual in object-oriented activity and communication," formed "in the process of social practice," and it closes on the note that betrays the whole enterprise's purpose: "The task of communist education is the all-round, harmonious development of an individual's P." A dictionary of an ostensibly neutral science has, at the entry for its central object, written down a Party slogan as the object's telos. The tell is not that the claim is false — that persons are socially formed is among the more durable insights the tradition holds — but that the definition of the term and the goal of the state's pedagogy have been fused, so that to define the human personality just is to name the task of communist education. This is what a reference work reveals that an argument conceals: the seam where science and directive have been welded shut.
None of which is to say the science is worthless. The opposite is the case, and honesty about the doctrine's political welding depends on saying so. Threaded through these entries is the transmission of a body of work that is, without qualification, among the twentieth century's permanent contributions to the study of the mind. Lev Vygotsky is named repeatedly and used seriously — his "unit" method of analysis is invoked in the activity entry; his concept of the "social situation of development" anchors the entry on age; the whole cultural-historical account of how the higher mental functions are built up socially and then turned inward is present, correctly, as the discipline's foundation. Alexander Luria, the founder of modern neuropsychology, stands behind the entries on the aphasias, the agnosias and the localisation of function; Sergei Korsakov is credited by name in the entry on amnesia for the syndrome that still bears his name. A reader who wants to know what Soviet psychology actually accomplished — and it accomplished a great deal that Western psychology spent the 1970s and 1980s catching up to — will find it here, defined crisply and, on the clinical and developmental material, without ideological freight. On the neurology, the psychophysics, the developmental science, the dictionary is simply a competent professional reference, and should be used as one.
The ideological freight gathers, predictably, at the border with foreign psychology, and it is at that border that the book's real subject — the boundary of the sayable — comes into view. Consider first the surprising case, the one where the boundary has recently moved. Freudianism receives a long, and by the standards of Soviet reference-writing a remarkably fair, entry. It grants that "Freud introduced several important problems into psychology" and enumerates them without sneering: unconscious motivation, the relation of the normal to the pathological, psychological defence, the effect of childhood trauma on the adult, the conflicted structure of the personality. Only after that concession does the verdict fall — that Freud built on "scientifically unacceptable biologistic tenets," that pansexualism and the war of conscious against unconscious are errors, and that by subordinating history and culture to the drives psychoanalysis "mystified both, having thus taken on a reactionary ideological purport." The separate entry on the unconscious is franker still: it accepts the phenomenon as real, expounds Freud's mechanism of "dynamic suppression" accurately, and rests its objection on a specifiable ground — that the foreign schools "ignore the fact that the U. is conditioned by sociohistorical factors." This is a criticism with content; one could argue with it. That such an entry could be printed at all is the glasnost opening showing through the science, and it should be credited: sixty-six mentions of Freud across the volume, and a reader is left knowing roughly what he actually said.
The opening, though, is calibrated rather than open, and the calibration is itself instructive. The dictionary carries full entries on neo-Freudianism, on psychoanalysis, on psychological defence and its mechanisms of repression, projection and rationalisation — Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and Harry Sullivan are named and their arguments summarised with reasonable accuracy. But each concession is fitted with the same closing clause. The neo-Freudians "try to overcome the biologism of classic Freudianism," the entry allows, only to fault them because their revised doctrine still "regards society as a source of 'general alienation' and as hostile to the fundamental tendencies of personality development." The objection, once again, is that the foreign school treats the individual and society as originally opposed — precisely the opposition that Soviet doctrine holds cannot obtain under socialism, where person and collective are supposed to develop in harmony. The permission to discuss Freud, in other words, is granted on the standing condition that his account of a self at war with its society be quarantined to the other side of the class line. The border has moved; it has not come down.
Now the entries where the border is sealed rather than negotiated, because they are the ones that map the limit of the sayable. The category of alienation — Marx's own category, the fulcrum of the 1844 manuscripts — is admitted to the dictionary only after being carefully defanged: the psychological entry warns that "the notion of A. should not be confused with the alienation of the personality in an antagonistic class society." Alienation as a felt psychological state may be discussed; alienation as a structural fact of a society is ring-fenced as something that happens under antagonistic — that is, capitalist — class relations, and therefore, by the silent logic of the sentence, not here. The most revealing entry of all is conformity. It is defined, studied and then disowned as a foreign finding: the investigation of conformity "was begun in the works of Solomon Asch," the entry notes, before delivering the correction — "Soviet social psychology rejects the theses of C.'s universality and generality as a form of an individual's reaction to the influence of a social community." Asch's conforming subject, the entry explains, was an artefact of the American laboratory's "diffuse groups," in which real values and goals had been "deliberately neutralised." Introduce genuine collective values and the phenomenon dissolves into its socialist antithesis, "collectivist self-determination," a "conscious solidarity of an individual with a collective." The matching entry on the collective completes the manoeuvre, defining it as "a group most characteristic of the system of socialist social relationships." The result is a psychology in which conformity is something that happens to Americans in a psychologist's cubicle, while the pressure to conform inside the actual Soviet collective — the meeting, the kollektiv, the unanimous show of hands — has, by definition, no name. The same figure recurs wherever a Western result touches the social order: the entry on achievement motivation reports McClelland's work and then notes that "Soviet psychology rejects the idea of A.M. being formed exclusively during early childhood," and dismisses his attempt to explain national economic development from it as "counter to the historical approach."
What is missing follows from what is quarantined, and the omissions are the sharpest finding the book offers, because the Publisher's Note tells us they are deliberate. That note announces the dictionary is "intended for a wide range of readers seeking information," and then draws its own boundary: it excludes terms that "actually belong to other branches of knowledge, such as philosophy, pedagogy, anatomy, and physiology." Fair enough as a principle of concision. But run down the alphabet for the psychological realities of late-Soviet life and the concision starts to look like something else. There is no entry for alcoholism, the era's great destroyer of the Soviet interior. There is none for suicide. There is no entry — there could not be one, in this vocabulary — for the psychology of the double life, the dvoemyslie of the person who recites one thing in the meeting and believes another on the way home, though it was the defining mental operation of the society the book was written in. The dictionary has an entry for abulia, the pathological absence of will, and for acalculia, the inability to do sums; it has fine entries on the neuroses considered as clinical objects. What it cannot constitute as an object of psychological science is the ordinary, structural, non-pathological adaptation of a self to a state that demanded assent. Conformity is Asch's problem, alienation is capitalism's, and the field of the sayable closes precisely where it would have had to turn its instruments on the conditions of its own production. This is the deepest sense in which a dictionary is a boundary: not the entries it gets wrong, but the shelf of entries it was not possible to write.
The tradition this series speaks from would locate that limit exactly. It is a commonplace of Marx that social being determines consciousness; the dictionary keeps the formula — consciousness as reflection of a socially conditioned reality, "conditioned by external factors independent of C.," "primarily by the structures of the social system in which the individual exists" — and cannot spend it. For to ask what the specific social being of the Soviet 1980s was doing to the consciousness formed in it would be to write the missing entries, and those entries would not have passed. The critical point is not that the dictionary's materialism is false but that it is applied in one direction only: unfailingly to the psyche under capitalism, never reflexively to the psyche under the system that commissioned the book. Readers who want to watch the same seam open in fuller works should turn to the sibling volumes in this series — to V. A. Lektorsky's Subject, Object, Cognition (1984), the research-frontier version of the identical reflection theory; to Anatoly Rakitov's The Principles of Philosophy (1989), the schoolroom catechism of it; and, best of all, to Karl Levitin's One Is Not Born a Personality (1982), a journalist's warm and genuinely admiring portrait of the very psychologists — Vygotsky's heirs, Leontyev, Luria — whose findings this dictionary distils, and which tells the truth about their science while keeping the same careful silence about what the state did to them and could not let them study.
That double character is the honest last word on the volume. A Concise Psychological Dictionary is two books bound as one. It is a competent, often excellent professional reference to a scientific tradition that earned its standing — the place to learn, accurately, what Vygotsky, Luria, Leontyev and their students established about development, activity, neurological function and the social formation of mind. And it is a map of a frontier, drawn by the discipline itself, showing exactly how far the science of the psyche was permitted to travel toward its own society before the entries had to stop. The first book is worth keeping. The second is worth reading as what it is: the outer wall of the thinkable, in the last years before the wall came down.