Psychological society and social change in Russia

“Psychological society” is a term found in a number of analyses of what is characteristically modern, or perhaps postmodern, in the contemporary world. It is assumed that it is a feature of “western” ways of life, and this assumption immediately poses the question, how widely to employ it as a term of analysis. To what extent do, or will, countries which are not “western,” not least the Russian Federation, follow the “western” pattern of social change and thus, too, develop a psychological society, albeit their own version of it?

We should remember that the term “psychological society,” like other terms of social analysis such as “modernity,” “postmodernity,” “democracy,” and “globalization,” signals a contribution to debate about the course cultural, social, economic, and political life is taking rather than denoting one discrete, concrete process. It is not the point to impose precise definitions. We shall use the term to raise questions about the place psychology has as a field, an almost unimaginably diverse field, of thought, research, social institutions, and practical interventions in the world around us. These questions are extremely relevant in Russia, though psychologists and social scientists, as well as less formal observers of the changing Russian scene, have so far given them little attention. Our intention is to provide a handy guide to the notion of psychological society, while keeping our wish to know more about what is going on in Russia constantly in view. (The current paper is a completely rewritten and much enlarged version of a conference discussion paper, published as Sirotkina and Smith, 2006.) The aim is not conceptual or analytic originality but the application of a discursive tool. It is a tool that, we think, Russian psychologists themselves, as well as social scientists, might find useful when they reflect on the changes to which they, whether self-consciously or not, contribute. Moreover, we presume, Russia, whatever its particular characteristics and circumstances, is not a unique case; elements of our analysis may apply to other countries.

The coming into being of a psychological society has a double character. Its most tangible manifestation is the sheer rise in numbers of those calling themselves psychologists and having psychology as an occupation, that is, earning a living from doing something called psychology. As everyone is well aware, substantial numbers of psychologists have been active in countless ways in western countries – in medicine, the military, factories, business corporations, education, and so – especially since the 1940s. The numbers of people involved are large; for example, in the 1980s there were over 100,000 members of the American Psychological Association – the numbers have risen since, and there were about 20,000 registered psychologists in the Netherlands (the country which then probably had the highest density of psychologists per head of population in the world) (Gilgen and Gilgen, 1987). There were nothing like this number of psychologists in the Soviet Union; but yet there were notable numbers both academic (in teaching universities and in the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences) and in applied areas like sport and space research. Then, since the end of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, there has been a conspicuous increase in psychology’s visibility in the public arena. We are here self-conscious about the absence of numbers in describing the contemporary Russian situation. But providing reliable numbers is a complex matter, for two simple reasons: there is no central organization which might assemble a record, and, more deeply, measurement depends on deciding who is or is not a psychologist, and about that there is no agreement. The Russian Psychological Society accepts those who “work as psychologists” on the basis of two recommendations of its members (Ustav Obscherossiiskoi obschestvennoi organizatsii “Rossiiskoe Psikhologicheskoe Obschestvo”). Thus, according to some sources, by the new millenium in the Russian Federation, there were 64,000 in education (each school, at least in theory, has a position of psychologist), and there were about 700 centers of medical, social, and psychological help. (Nefedova, Pakhomov, and Rozin, 2001; quoted in Yurevich & Ushakov, 2007). It might well be that both the amount of academic research in psychology and a public interest in the field have expanded very rapidly. Empirical fieldwork would be needed to assess this. What we can now put forward within the limited confines of this paper is an analysis of a conceptual tool which, we think, should have a key place in such work.

The increase in the numbers of psychologists and amount of psychological activity is one side of the story. At the same time, it also is a feature of psychological society that people, people in all walks of life, become psychological subjects. The point is not the self-evident one that when there are lots of psychologists, lots of people become their clients, though they do. (The self-promoting character of psychotherapeutic research in the Russian context is discussed in Sosland, 1999.) The point is that there is what we call a psychological society when people come to take for granted that their identity, mode of life, social relations, relationship with life and death, character and behavior, and pleasures and pains are bound up with their psychological nature. In psychological society, “the self,” understood as an individual psychological subjectivity, as the locus of agency. Psychological society contrasts with other kinds of society – such as religious or communist ones – in which identity and purpose do not primarily depend on what we understand as the psychological dimension. In a psychological society, people, of course including psychologists themselves, acquire a psychological subjectivity, a way of representing themselves to themselves and to others, as psychological subjects. There is therefore a sense in which, in psychological society, each person becomes her or his own psychologist – and hence the difficulty of counting “psychologists.”

This double character of psychological society – the growth to a significant size of the numbers of psychologists and psychological activity, and the rise to dominance of representations of the human world in terms of psychological “selves” – has deep philosophical roots. This is visible even in the semantics of the word “psychology”: the word denotes a branch of knowledge and, at the same time, it denotes states which individual people have and which is the subject matter of that branch of knowledge. (This led the English psychologist and historian of psychology, Graham Richards, to refer to the former, the disciplinary field, as Psychology, big P, and the latter, psychological states, as psychology, little p [Richards, 2002, pp. 6-10].) That one word can have this double meaning reflects the existential condition in which the human being is both the subject and the object of knowledge in the human sciences, the knower and the known, that which reflects and that which is reflected on in conscious life.

Awareness of this double character of any discipline which has “the human” as its subject prompts, in turn, a very large claim: knowledge of what it is to be human changes what it is to be human. Indeed, this claim is at the heart of an argument that what distinguishes the human sciences (including psychology) from the natural sciences is that human subjects recreate themselves, by knowing themselves, and physical objects do not. For example, the Russian cultural critic Mikhail Epstein wrote: “The cultural sciences may be distinguished from the natural sciences in that the former play a key role in constituting their subject matter” (1995, p. 287). There is a literature about this argument, linked to the topic of “reflexivity” (Smith, 2007). Psychotherapy provides an elementary and uncontroversial illustration of the reflexive character of knowledge in the human sciences: the whole point of therapy is to give a client understanding, new knowledge, in order to help the client, at least to a degree, to be different. “As the knowledge that we may have of our own mental powers is reflexive knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knowing subject change and extend their range together” (Hampshire, 1960, p. 255). Taking an even wider view, reflexive knowledge could be said to be the founding principle of “the Enlightenment project” to make rational knowledge of being human the foundation of a better world. Certainly, the hopes invested in this project supported the large expansion of the psychological and social sciences in the twentieth century. The “enlightened” view that these sciences are needed for the better ordering of human affairs is precisely dependent on the reflexive character of knowledge. We can say that, from the beginning, psychology and the social sciences have been “applied” fields; we cannot know ourselves independently of that knowledge affecting how we live. If people understand thinking, acting, and hoping as psychological, as opposed to, say, religious or political acts, this will change social realities.

A psychological society, then, is a society in which the circle tying together the representation of human nature in psychological terms and the formation of human beings as psychological subjects becomes a major feature of social structure. Since such a society came into being in the twentieth century in many western countries, it is natural to ask the question whether at least elements of such a society are now coming into existence in Russia (and other countries). We will venture some responses to this question in this paper. The further question, whether this change, if it is indeed occurring, is for the better or for the worse, is a matter for ethical and political judgment. We think that matters are so complex that no black and white judgments meet the case.

It is very important, following also from the double character of psychology, that in psychological society there are “popular” forms of psychology as well as “scientific” forms. (We use the conventional language in drawing this distinction, and we will not continue to put the terms scare quotes, though the terms are themselves of great sociological interest.) If framing knowledge in psychological terms and being a person with a psychology go hand in hand, and if there is a sense in which each person is her or his own psychologist, then, naturally, there will be literature on psychology for general, public audiences, the audiences of ordinary people, as well as a literature for those who, in a specialist or narrowly scientific sense, call themselves psychologists. And, indeed, it is well known that in the twentieth century the genre of publication, and similar activities called popular psychology flourished, and this shows every sign of continuing in the present. This literature and activity, in particular, encompasses “self-help” and “therapy.” In Russia, since 1991, the genre, largely new, has expanded very rapidly, and its contemporary prominence is visible in any bookshop. Moreover, the growth of popular psychology is not just as a literary genre but evident in the media generally. Psychologically-oriented discussion is now a pre-eminent feature of Russian TV (which is entirely state controlled), in chat-shows, interviews, and soap opera alike.

It is this popular dimension of psychological society which makes any attempt to measure the numbers of psychologists or amount of psychological activity so problematic. If everybody is in some sense a psychologist … However, in western countries, and most especially in the United States, there is a long history of legislating and policing a social border between those who, by virtue of a training and hence a supposed expertise, can legitimately claim to be psychologists, in the sense of practising and earning money from a psychological occupation, and those who cannot. This institutionalization of a psychological profession is yet another feature of psychological society, and it is one to which a number of historians interested in the professions have contributed. Constructing a border and thus creating a well-defined psychology profession has proved a very difficult and complex matter indeed, especially in the area of psychotherapy – as the experience of France dramatically illustrates (Ohayon, 1999). Common English usage, it is true, distinguishes scientific from popular psychology, with the implication that the former is “real” psychology, that is, founded on knowledge, in a way that the latter is not. Psychologists who work in the academic setting have a particular interest in maintaining this distinction and policing the boundary. All the same, there are many problems in upholding the border, and these are very apparent in Russia. In Russia, we find little or no history of policing a border around psychology, for example by legislating to delimit occupational categories in the manner of western countries. In the Soviet Union, the borders were simply given by virtue of training; there was no popular psychology for the scientific psychologists to be in competition with. Expertise was, in general, a socially unquestioned fact of a rigid social system. Now, however, the situation has dramatically changed. A large number of people, some of whom make themselves very visible on TV and in the newspapers, claim to be psychologists, a claim which offends and troubles academic, scientific psychologists. An unknown number of self-styled psychotherapists advertise for clients. Thus, there is now in Russia some discussion about shaping and disciplining a legally recognized profession, yet another sign that there is a tendency towards the form of a psychological society.

We can envisage sociological, perhaps ethnographic, empirical research to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that Russia is acquiring the attributes of a psychological society. Standard qualitative methods, such as the questionnaire, participant observation and discourse analysis, ought to be adaptable to finding out whether people perceive themselves as adopting psychological approaches to everyday human problems and to the representation of their self-identity. But such work has not been done. Not the least of its problems would be the extraordinary width and flexibility of what counts as psychological. For example, Russian television is packed with stories about family life, conflict between parents, violence against children, emotional shock, heavy drinking – stories which the perpetrators and the victims commonly enough tell in psychological terms. What impact does this have?

We are arguing that it may be constructive to shape questions and research on the changes taking place in Russia around the characterization of psychological society. These questions are most obviously about the growth and spread of psychology as an occupation; but they are more fundamentally about the growth and spread of psychology as a way of being in the world, a form of life, and of people’s understanding of their own nature and identity. What are the implications in Russia, and of course elsewhere, of people coming to believe that who they are, how they act, and what they may hope for are psychological questions?

We therefore now discuss some literature relevant to our theme and use this literature to provide a historical context for thinking further about the contemporary changes. For our purposes, we can group this literature under four headings (though, clearly, the four classes overlap and are not independent of each other):

1. Descriptions of the development of the different occupations of psychology, in different countries, in the twentieth century.
2. Studies of the social, historical character (or, more controversially, the social construction) of the subject matter of psychology.
3. Sociological accounts, linking the past and the present, which explore relations between individualism, modernity, and psychology. This literature includes work that takes the form of critique, the exposure to analysis of what are held to be problems and limitations of psychological society.
4. The literature on the influential thesis that psychological society is the characteristic form of liberal democracies, that is, of societies in which government has become distinctively a matter of self-government, self-government for which psychology provides the discursive expression and practical discipline.

We will illustrate this literature and ask about the ways it might be related to the Russian setting.

There is a large and growing literature on the history of psychology as a defined profession or more generally as an occupation. This is most obvious for the United States where the sheer size of what goes on under the heading of psychology creates resources and interest for research on this state of affairs. The scale of psychological activity enables the history psychology to exist as an occupation in its own right. Authors like John C. Burnham (1988), James Capshew (1999), Ellen Herman (1995), and Donald S. Napoli (1981), and a substantial number of contributors to two U.S. journals, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (f. 1965) and especially History of Psychology (a journal of the American Psychological Association, f. 1998), discuss the organization of U.S. psychology in the twentieth century. There are also significant studies of other countries, such as those on France and the Netherlands (Carroy, Ohayon, and Plas, 2006; Dehue, 1995). A number of pointers to the causes of the expansion of psychological society emerge. These include war (the mobilization of millions of soldiers, for example, created a huge resource for psychological testing and psychological therapy), or the threat of war, the creation of modern management and marketing organizations, and investment in child welfare and education as security for the future.

The literature centered on the profession or occupation of psychology merges with an older and more extensive genre, the history of psychological knowledge, theories and experiment, a literature which, by and large, has taken it for granted that the history of psychology is the history of scientific psychology (the long list starts with Boring, 1950). It might be said, if a little provocatively, that if this genre of history writing, by accumulating national and local studies, has demonstrated one thing, it is to show that there has been no psychology (in the singular) but a cluster of psychologies (in the plural). If we add in what has been written on the history of psychology as an occupation, and even more the history of popular psychology (see especially Thomson, 2006), we are even more struck by the utterly diverse nature of the field.

We prefer to refer to psychological occupations rather than to the psychological profession, for two reasons. First, the latter phrase gives a much too concrete idea that there is, and has been, a single profession, a single body of experts who, by virtue of training and knowledge, can be relied on to serve at one and the same time the purposes of science, specific clients, and the public good, and who, naturally, will expect to be rewarded with money and status for their contributions. The problem is that there has never been a settled agreement about who can be relied on, and for what purposes, in the psychological field, though it is true that the American Psychological Association, by taking an inclusive view, has achieved a united organizational structure. Many scientific psychologists, however, regard psychoanalysis and much of psychotherapy as irrelevant at best, and pernicious at worst, to their science. Second, the sheer diversity of psychology suggests the usefulness of referring to everything from modeling vision on computers to playing music to autistic children as psychological occupations. As our interest is psychological society, the whole range of occupations must be accorded its due.

We are discussing the twentieth century. In doing so, we imply that psychology, in all its forms, is indeed a feature of modernity. (Why and in what sense this might be thought to be true we return to later.) Thus we leave aside a large literature about “the origin” of psychology, or, as we think should be said, “the origins” of that multiplicity of activities called psychology. Any attempt to understand the historically “deep” sources of psychological society would have to go into this. While me may note that the large-scale expansion of the psychological occupations did indeed occur only in the twentieth century, and to a considerable extent only in the second half of the century, there are earlier precedents for some aspects of psychological society. For example, physiognomy and phrenology were interests long ago (the former from ancient times, the latter from the first decade of the nineteenth century) linking expert and popular psychological representations of individual nature and identity. (For our attempt to write this larger history, see Sirotkina, 2006; Smith, 1997, 2008.)

It is of course methodologically much more difficult to write the history of, let alone provide quantitative data for, the expression of ways of life in psychological terms than for the growth of the psychological occupations. Some of the literature referred to, particularly for the United States, does attempt to do this. This, however, is not the case with the Russian-language literature on the history of psychology in Russia and the Soviet Union. While there are secondary sources for the history of Russian psychology in the twentieth century, it overwhelmingly focuses on theory and the content of knowledge. (We attempt to summarize this in Sirotkina and Smith, forthcoming.) Moreover, the political history of the country (which itself has been a changing entity), which explicitly brought the political process to bear on the content as well as the activity of science, has naturally caused the historiography to concentrate on establishing what the history of scientific psychology has actually been rather than on seemingly secondary questions about psychology as an occupation or psychology as a popular form of understanding. All the same, it is beginning to be clear that the history of scientific psychology cannot be divorced from the history of the organization of psychology as a set of occupations. Notably, developments in science clearly turned around struggles for access to restricted and centrally controlled resources, resources for which the controlling power, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, had its own agenda.

There is no literature on the history of psychology in Russia since the changes of 1989-91. We and other observers take for granted, though on the basis of impressionistic evidence, like the range of books in bookshops, that there has been a remarkably rapid public turn to psychological forms of understanding. It is also the case that psychologists have found new possibilities for employment as private counselors, in business, in advising politicians, in education, in the health sector, and so on. By contrast, following the freezing of state salaries to scientists (like other professions) in the late 1980s, followed by the political decision very substantially to cut funding to science in the early Yeltsin years, academic or scientific psychology was seriously cut back. In psychology, as in other scientific occupations, there was a large-scale “brain-drain,” the economic emigration of trained scientific workers, or the emigration of workers seeking the professional development of their careers in the western manner. There is therefore a large question mark about exactly how much “cutting-edge” scientific psychological research of any kind continued in Russia, just at the same time as popular psychology burgeoned.

Two further developments somewhat mitigate this stark contrast between the state of scientific and of popular psychology. A large number of trained psychologists, that is people with at least a first degree in psychology, looked for and created openings in which they could earn a living and at the same time represent themselves as in a psychological occupation. There was, for example, a new interest in family therapy, in political psychology, and in organizational psychology. Secondly, interestingly, students flocked to psychology courses, creating new teaching possibilities, guaranteeing at least some income to established academic psychologists, and turning the teaching of low-level psychology into a major occupation. To our knowledge, there are several dozens institutions offering an equivalent of an MA in psychology in Moscow alone. The psychological research institutes of the Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, for example, began to teach for income. Their students, in turn, began to go on to open new occupational opportunities. This process would seem to be very significant part of what we perceive as the elements of a transition to a psychological society in Russia. Quite how many psychology students there are and what they in fact go on to do, nobody knows.