https://psy.1sept.ru/article.php?ID=200400107 Степанов Cергей | Заблудившийся революционер. А.Б.Залкинд (1888 - 1936) | Журнал «Школьный психолог» № 1/2004

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MEMBERS LOST REVOLUTIONARY A.B. ZALKIND (1888-1936)

At the dawn of the new millennium, in 2001, the publishing house Agraf, which specializes in the production of intellectual literature, published Aron Zalkind’s book Pedology: Utopia and Reality in the “Symbols of Time” series. Zalkind himself has never written a book under this title, as any utopian would be unlikely to admit that his ideas are utopian. This new book is a compilation, as if deliberately made up of Zalkind’s most odious works, which nowadays are perceived almost caricaturedly. Even the infrequent references to Zalkind in the press are reduced mainly to quoting the most flamboyant of his maxims for the amusement of the public. Contemporary psychologists know little about this interesting man, who can rightfully be called one of the key figures in the formation of national psychology in the first third of the twentieth century. His personal and scientific destiny is deeply controversial and dramatic, and instructive in its own way. A passionate revolutionary and innovator, Zalkind sensitively caught the wind of the times, but in their practical embodiment of clearly “overdid it”, leaving the posterity is not so much a heritage as a warning.

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We know the biography of Aron Borisovich Zalkind only in its major milestones, which even it is not always possible to reliably date. Our search for any portrait of him proved fruitless; it seems that none has survived. For example, there is no photograph in Zalkind’s handwritten questionnaire, which is on file in the Lenin State Pedagogical University (he worked for several years at that university, then called the 2nd Moscow State University). But accurately specified date of birth - June 5, 1889. We find the same date in the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, where a personal article is devoted to Zalkind. Subsequently, for some reason, another date was given - 1888. (In the recently published directory “Russian psychoanalysts” indicated 1886.) Specify it today is no longer possible. And the date of his death is not known at all. He died in July 1936 of a massive heart attack - according to one romantic version, on the street, returning from a party meeting, at which the decree “On Pedological Perversions…” was announced. We will never know on what day this happened, or if this was in fact the case. No testimony or recollections have survived about the personality of this man. One can only imagine the ambition of a Jewish boy from Kharkov, who in the early twentieth century conceived of a medical career. An ambition for those times almost utopian, but in exceptional cases feasible. Zalkind managed to enter the medical faculty of Moscow University, upon graduation from which in 1911 he began his own practice, specializing in psychoneurology. VIEWS AND INTENTIONS

As a student, Zalkind became interested in psychoanalysis, an innovative and exotic doctrine at the time, and took part in the “Malye Pyatnits” seminar led by V.P. Serbsky, where practical aspects of the Freudian approach to neurosis were actively discussed. It seems that Russian enthusiasts did not attach great importance to the row of schisms among Western psychoanalysts which began in the 1910s, continuing to venerate “dissenters” along with Freud. Thus, Zalkind in his views leaned more toward Adlerianism and tried to consider from these positions problems not quite usual for a psychoanalyst, such as somnambulism. This is the subject of his articles, published on the eve of World War I in the central organ of Russian psychoanalysts, the journal Psychotherapy. The articles were printed in a highly honorable environment, the handwriting of an enthusiastic and successful psychotherapist can be felt in them. One can form an idea of Zalkind’s views and probably intentions according to his definition of creativity given at the time: "Whatever field it concerns - it is a process of the maximum, the most profitable use of psychic powers for the achievement of the largest, within the limits of a given situation, goals. It is unlikely that the author foresaw at the time the situation in which life would place him and the kind of creativity it would require to achieve the largest, within these limits, goals. Having had the full measure of the hardships of war - Zalkind spent three years in the active army at the fronts of the First World War - he embraced the revolution with delight and devoted himself selflessly to its service. Today, the Austrian communist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich is referred to as its founder when Freudo-Marxism is mentioned. Zalkind, a Freudian with a pre-revolutionary record and a Bolshevik since 1921, could be called founder with no less justification. Like Reich (who incidentally only became well-known in Moscow during a short visit in 1929), Zalkind believed that a combination of the revolutionary approaches of Marx and Freud to man and society could produce a truly new man and a new society. Reality, however, was correcting these judgments. A PECULIAR CONTINGENT

Advising party members (“The List of Medical Doctors” 1925 qualifies his specialty as “psychopathology”), Zalkind becomes convinced of the ineffectiveness of the analytical approach to this contingent. Very quickly he develops a new, absurdly ideologized view of the problems of mental health and illness. “The Great French Revolution as a massive curative measure (mostly surgical?..-S.S.) was more useful for human health than millions of baths, plumbing, and thousands of new chemicals,” he now declares. However, in articles published in the mid-1920s and in his book Essays on the Culture of Revolutionary Time, Zalkind describes an interesting situation, seemingly unrecorded by anyone else. The partaker, on whom the burden of revolutionary construction rests, wears out quickly and sharply. The 30-year-old carries within him the diseases of the 45-year-old; the 40-year-old is almost an old man. Zalkind sees the causes in constant nervous excitement, overwork, poor hygiene, and - there were still delicate allusions to this at the time - in the cultural backwardness and even professional inadequacy of many workers. According to Zalkind, up to 90 percent of Bolshevik patients suffered from neurological symptoms, almost all had hypertension and sluggish metabolism. Zalkind called this symptom complex the “partriad.” In his article “On the ulcers of the RCP” (even if he had not had a heart attack, Zalkind would hardly have lived longer - for this name alone a firing squad was guaranteed) he accompanies the clinical picture with a skilful sociopolitical analysis, demonstrating an understanding of the internal party situation. Zalkind accuses the opposition of a particular prevalence of psychoneurosis. Its activists suffer from excessive emotionality, which is, as Zalkind argued at the time of his fascination with Adler, the essence of neurosis. The treatment in such cases, he recommends, is "an intensification of party re-education. Among Communist students (most of whom supported the Trotskyist opposition), Zalkind found at least half of them mentally unhealthy. Here are some of the cases he reviewed. Depression in a 22-year-old student, a former commissar of a regiment in the Civil War, who was "disgusted with life under the New Economic Policy. Hysterical somnambulism in a former red commander who has also been deprived of peace by the neopmans, “triumphant, fat and dressed up”; Zalkind interprets his hallucinosis as “a passage into another world, where his lusts are realized… he is again in battle, in command, serving the revolution in his own way.” (I wonder how the pioneer of Russian Freudianism would comment on the total neuroticization of our days.) PUTTING SEX IN ITS PLACE

Zalkind attached great importance to the issue of sex in party hygiene - psychoanalytic attitudes could not help but have an impact. In his opinion, modern man suffers from sexual fetishism, and putting sex in its proper place is the responsible task of the new science. “It is necessary for the collective to be more drawn to itself than the love partner.” To this end, Zalkind develops a detailed system, the Twelve Commandments of Sexual Behavior of the Revolutionary Proletariat. Their general meaning is that the energy of the proletariat must not be diverted to sexual relations useless to its historical mission. “The sexual must in everything be subordinated to the class, in nothing interfering with the latter, in everything serving it.” Therefore, until marriage, namely until the age of 20-25, sexual abstinence is necessary; the sexual act should not be repeated too often; there should be less sexual variety; sexual selection should be along the lines of class, revolutionary-proletarian expediency; there should be no jealousy. The last, 12th and most important commandment, stated: the class, in the interests of revolutionary expediency, has the right to interfere in the sexual life of its members. From today’s perspective, Zalkind’s commandments sound almost anecdotal. But we must admit that for all the twists and turns of official ideology that followed, its basic tendency in dealing with the sexual question was anticipated (or modeled?) by Zalkind with amazing foresight. Everyone remembers how, fifteen years ago, a participant in a Soviet-American television bridge pathetically declared to the amusement of millions of viewers, “We do not have sex!” What she meant by this is easy to understand if you reread the commandments, which Soviet society, while firmly forgetting about their author, has been steadily adhering to for over half a century. Moreover, the entire theory and practice of sex education in the family and in schools were built on these commandments, or, more precisely, on the idea of sublimated libido. This is, of course, an extreme, and its negative aspects are obvious. But is it much better than the other extreme, which modern society has fallen into according to the “opposite” principle? After all, liberated sexuality is fraught with no less problems than the impaired one! Examples abound. A SMALL BUT TOUGH PEDOLOGIST

At the 2nd Psychoneurological Congress held in Leningrad in early 1924, Zalkind’s reports attracted universal attention. Of the 906 delegates to the congress, only 429 were specialists in psychoneurology; many of those present considered themselves Marxist educators. The observer observed that among educators, "the shift toward revolutionary ideology is taking place at a much faster pace than among other strata of the intelligentsia, whose representatives are confined to a narrow circle of isolated practice. To this audience, which soon formed the backbone of the country’s pedological cadre, Zalkind offered an eclectic program that was enthusiastically received. The reviewer of “Krasnaya Novia” perceived Zalkind’s program as follows: "Sociogenetic biology combined with the teaching of reflexes, with careful use of Freudian concepts of great value and some of his experimental methods, will greatly enrich the bio-Marxist theory and practice. By a special resolution, the congress welcomed Zalkind’s reports as "a coherent sociological analysis of a number of neurological, psychopathological, and pedological problems in the light of revolutionary public opinion. It was pedology, the new science of the child, that the revolutionary enthusiasts intended to solve the urgent problems facing society in the shortest possible time. At that time, science was generally regarded as a powerful magical force, much as cavemen regarded witchcraft, which guaranteed radical changes for the better at the wave of a magic wand. (Admittedly, this prejudice is quite tenacious!) To build a new society in a country where 70 percent of the population could neither read, nor write, nor even understand what was being said from the rostrum, it was necessary to educate a new generation of cultivated people to replace the dislocated one. Or at least not to hinder those thousands of young enthusiasts who wanted to contribute immediately to the building of a utopia. The number of pedagogical colleges in the country increased one and a half times during the 1919/1920 school year alone; still they were overcrowded: in 1921 there were six times as many students as in 1914. The People’s Commissar of Education A. V. Lunacharski proclaimed: "Our school network may come close to a really normal school network when it will be penetrated by a network of sufficiently scientifically trained pedologists… It is also necessary that in every teacher, in the brain of every teacher there should live, perhaps, a small, but strong enough pedologist. Does this remind you of anything? The “old” sciences were to disappear, shrink under the onslaught of the new sciences, or at best move into their territory. Normal science (in Thomas Kuhn’s terminology) tells us what phenomena or people are like on their own, while power needs a description of what they can become through its intervention. At the 1st Congress of Pedology in late 1927, Lunacharski stated unequivocally in his report: "Pedology, having studied what a child is and according to what laws he develops, will thereby illuminate for us the most important process of producing a new man in parallel with the production of new equipment that goes along with the economic line. In his speech at the same congress, Zalkind attempted to present a platform on which two and a half thousand congress participants, representing several different scientific fields and a myriad of theoretical orientations, could consolidate. This was wishful thinking: the congress approved a “united platform” of Soviet pedologists. This course was henceforth to steer the ship of Soviet paedology. An enthusiastic Zalkind took the helm. IN THE ROLE OF IDEOLOGIST.

In April 1928 the Commission for Planning Research in Pedology in the RSFSR under the People’s Commissariat for Education began its work; Zalkind was appointed its chairman. By the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of August 17, 1928 its level was raised to the Interdepartmental Planning Pedological Commission. In the same year the journal Pedology, under his editorship, began to be published. In 1930 Zalkind initiated the convening of the Congress for the Study of Human Behavior. Thereby the country’s chief pedologist laid claim to the role of the ideologist of the totality of human sciences. His report to this Congress entitled “The Psychoneurological Sciences and Socialist Construction” deserves special attention. During the twelve years of Soviet power, Zalkind states, a new mass man grew up in the country. The revolutionary epoch created him in a bushcraft fashion, but he is winning amazingly. It is bad, however, that the psychoneurological sciences do not provide any assistance to the new masses. Mass psychoneurological literature, mass counseling, mass instruction need to be created. All of this is lacking, and only ominous warnings are heard from the augurs of human studies: our science is not yet mature enough to do mass work. The governing bodies of the Party are carrying out cadre and educational work, but science does not give positive instructions in this field. On the contrary, we even hear negative instructions, threats to the mass new man. It is quite obvious, concludes Zalkind, that the bulk of all psychoneurology does not do what the revolution needs. It is impossible not to admit that, once again, Zalkind was surprisingly sensitive to the trends of the times. His report was perhaps even ahead of its time in its aggressiveness. At the end of 1930. The Psychological Institute in Moscow was transformed into the Institute of Psychology, Pedology, and Psychotechnics. Zalkind replaced N.K. Kornilov as its director. But unlike the “new mass man,” Zalkind had a past that was becoming disreputable in front of his eyes and had to be repudiated. Several recent Freudian works explain Zalkind’s renunciation of psychoanalysis as a forced step dictated by the persecution that had begun. To be fair, such an assessment should be recognized as exaggerated - persecution was not yet in question, but psychoanalysis was rapidly going out of fashion. In the early thirties, Russian psychoanalysts continued to gather in a small circle to discuss their dreams, but it was not a dissident underground, but rather an exotic interest group. Publications became rare. Official encouragement has waned, but it has not yet been replaced by obstruction. At the same time, or in connection with it? - The enthusiasm of recent heroes cooled down, too (enthusiasm that stirs easily with support from on high, but vanishes with the loss of it). STUMBLING UPON FREUD

By the sincerity of Zalkind’s tone of self-criticism one can feel it well - when the wind changes, the weather vane feels it first. “I,” Zalkind wrote, "objectively contributed to the popularization of Freudism in the USSR in 1923-25, and by inertia even later. But I was putting into Freudism my own particular understanding, which was in fact a complete perversion of Freudism. However, I continued to call my views Freudism, and this seduced the "little ones. I have always, Zalkind recalled, tried to justify “the extreme sociogenic conditionality, the plasticity of man and human behavior,” to defend an understanding of personality as an "active, combative, creative element. But Zalkind did not find this in the old, “reactionary” psychology. "Having stumbled upon Freud in 1910-1911, I thought I had finally found a treasure trove. Indeed, the Freudian personality burns, struggles, is dynamic, culls, pursues a persistent strategy, switches its aspirations, its energy reserves, etc. In short, the emptied, flabby self of the old Freudian psychoneurology is finally being thrown out of science (so it seemed to me at the time). Zalkind can easily believe this: this is how Freud was perceived by romantically inclined youth in the years of his greatest popularity in Russia. However, as is well known, romanticism over the years is replaced by common sense. If we ponder on Zalkind’s judgement, it becomes clear that he was in fact quite far from Freudism, both before and now. Just think of his 12 Commandments, which if Freud had known about them he would have laughed at best. So, in a sense, Zalkind is subjectively honest in his repentance. But his extremist pathos is irredeemable. “The consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat drives - and forever - an aspen stake into the grave of Soviet Freudianism.” ANOTHER HORNET’S STAKE

Probably, Zalkind was too hasty with this vampire metaphor. Even N.K. Krupskaya unexpectedly sided with Freudism: one should not, they say, bend to the other side - the unconscious plays its role in life and in behavior. But a word is not a sparrow, and the aspen stake is, indeed, forever. Zalkind can no longer stop. His new methodology reads: "We become from slaves of scientific techniques their masters… The main (if not all) mass of scientific research today must be short-term, quickly producing definite conclusions for the immediate future. However, history teaches us: constant fluctuations shake the weather vane, and it is he who is the first to be swept away by a new gust of wind, which is stronger than the previous ones. In 1932, Zalkind ceases to be the director of the Institute of Psychology, Pedology and Psychotechnics (in the booklet that was recently issued for the Institute’s anniversary, in the portrait gallery of its directors there is not only a portrait of Zalkind, which is quite understandable, but also no mention of him, as if there were no such person). He was also removed from his post as editor-in-chief of the journal Pedology. The journal itself did not have much time to live. The days of pedology were numbered. The leader of Soviet paedology outlived it by a few days. Instead of mournfully paternal obituaries, he was followed by a biased article criticizing his personal “perversions of pedology”. Either by oversight, or by a wicked irony, it was included as an afterword in the current volume of his works. Another aspen stake in the necropolis of Russian psychology. Outside the window is the wind. A shifting… Sergey STEPANOV

The Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat

I. There must be no too early development of sexuality among the proletariat.
II. Sexual abstinence before marriage is necessary, and marriage only at full social and biological maturity (i.e., 20-25 years of age).
III. Sexual intercourse is only as the final consummation of deep comprehensive sympathy and attachment to the object of sexual love.
IV. Sexual intercourse must be only the final link in the chain of deep and complex experiences that bind the lovers at this moment.
V. The sexual act must not be repeated frequently.
VI. The sexual object shall not be changed frequently. Less sexual variety.
VII. Love must be monogamous, monoandrous (one wife, one husband).
VIII. With every intercourse one must always be mindful of the possibility of conceiving a child and generally mindful of offspring.
IX. Sexual selection must be along the lines of class, revolutionary-proletarian expediency. Elements of flirtation, courtship, coquetry and other methods of specifically sexual conquest must not be introduced into the love affair.
X. There must be no jealousy.
XI. There shall be no sexual perversion.
XII. The class, in the interests of revolutionary expediency, has the right to interfere in the sexual life of its fellow-members. The sexual must in all things be subordinate to the class, in no way interfering with the latter, in all things serving it.

Cited from http://www.a-z.ru/women/texts/zalkinr.htm with reference to Zalkind A.B. The Twelve Sexual Precepts of the Revolutionary Proletariat // The Philosophy of Love
In 2 vols. Т. 2. M.: Politizdat, 1990. С. 224-255.