Refractions of a Soviet Psychologist

Reviews the book, Bytie i Soznanie (Being and Consciousness) by Sergeĭ Leonidovich Rubinshteĭn (1957). In the Soviet Union the situation is somewhat different While in practice most psychologists there ply their several courses without steady philosophical reference, in theory they are expected to map their way by a general Marxism- Leninism-a body of thought which not only lacks specific guide lines for the development of psychology as a science, but also reflects the vagaries of current fashions of concrete interpretation. Being and Consciousness-a book which, along with the inevitable specifics, deals with certain general problems that are more or less uniformly viewed as fundamental to a psychological science. To Rubinshtein's way of thinking, the problem of the ideal and the material is further clarified by considering the problem of the relation of the subjective and the objective. Rubinshtein's book has been acclaimed in the Soviet Union as a "great contribution to Soviet psychology" and a "great step forward." The reviewer hazards a confident guess that the new generation of Soviet psychologists will regard such writing as Rubinshtein's as among the fashionable relics of an era no longer theirs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)