Sergei Rubinstein

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein (1889–1960) was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and the actual founder of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. Stalin Prize (1941) recipient of 1942. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein Сергей Леонидович Рубинштейн
Born	1889, June 18th Odessa
Died	January 11, 1960(1960-01-11) (aged 70) Moscow
Nationality	Jewish
Other names	Rubinshtein, Rubinštejn
Known for	activity theory, Stalin Prize
Scientific career
Influences	Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Influenced	Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei N. Leontiev

Life

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was born on June 18, 1889, in Odessa to a Jewish family of a wealthy local lawyer. Rubinstein studied in Germany from 1909 to 1913 at the universities of Freiburg and Marburg and received his education in philosophy under the guidance of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, the intellectual leaders of the well known Neo-Kantianism in Marburg University. In 1914 he defended his doctorate in philosophy Eine Studie zum Problem der Methode on the methodological problems, applied specifically to Hegelian philosophy. Additionally he studied natural history, sociology, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. Many of his works dating back to the 1910s and 1920s remain unpublished.[1]

In 1921 he became the professor of the department of philosophy and psychology in Novorossiysk university in Odessa. From 1922 to 1930, he was the director of the Odessa Scientific Library, then he worked at the Hertzen Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute (1930-1942). Rubinstein was awarded the Stalin Prize of 1941 (awarded in 1942) for his monumental “Principles of Psychology” (1940). From 1948 and up until somewhat after the death of Stalin, in the course of the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Rubinstein was persecuted as an anti-patriot and "rootless cosmopolitan", and was forcibly removed from all positions in academia. It was only after the death of Stalin was he able to regain some of his former status. In 1956, Rubinstein was reappointed chairman of the Sector of Psychology at the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Psychology

Rubinstein laid the foundations of Soviet Marxist psychology with his debut psychological publication of a journal article “Problems of Psychology in Karl Marx’s Works” on the terminological and methodological issues in psychology based on the works and intellectual legacy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This visionary and programmatic paper came out in 1934 and established a few ground principles of psychological research such as:

• The focus on personality as the priority of research in psychological science
• The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity that overcomes the deficiencies of the three dominant philosophies in psychology, namely, introspectionism, behaviorism and the "psychology of spirit" (geisteswissenschaftliche/verstehende Psychologie, in the original German; perhaps, better known as a range of variations of the so-called existential and humanistic psychology)
• The inseparable unity of the subject and the object (in the philosophical meaning of the terms}.

Rubinstein was also in effect the originator of the entire tradition of psychological research on human activity that ultimately resulted in the proliferation of the so-called activity theory. Unlike this intellectual movement and explicitly in contrast with behaviorism, Rubinstein always insisted on regarding activity as inseparable from consciousness, which is also in a clear opposition to Freudian tradition with its emphasis on the depths of the human psyche and unconscious psychological processes. Thus, Rubinstein is de facto the founder of activity approach in psychology and pedagogy, although the term “activity approach” would not appear until after Rubinstein's death in January, 1960.

Selected publications

• Sergej L. Rubinštejn. Problems of psychology in the works of Karl Marx (pdf). Studies in Soviet Thought (1987) 33: 111. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01151778 . (Originally published in Sovetskaja psichotechnika, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1934. Translated from Russian by T.J. Blakeley (Boston College) with the editorial help of Alex Kozulin (Boston University). On Rubinštejn's life and career, see Ted Payne, S.L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundation of Soviet Psychology, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1968.).

Rubinstein's Bibliography

• Books and articles by S.L. Rubinstein. In Payne, T.R. (1968). S.L. Rubinstein and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology. Dordrecht / New York: D. Reidel / Humanities Press, 1968

References

1. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, X.A. (1989). "To Sergei Rubinstein birth centenary: A profile of Sergei Rubinstein's life and work". The Soviet Journal of Psychology. 10 (5): 16–28.