Reflexology

Origins and System

Reflexology (refleksologiya) was a psychological system advanced by Vladimir Bekhterev under the name 'objective psychology' in the 1900s and renamed 'reflexology' in the 1910s. It drew on Ivan Sechenov's reflex concept and Ivan Pavlov's work on conditioned reflexes, but Bekhterev sought to expand it into a unified science encompassing the human being and society as a whole. His major works include Objective Psychology (1907), Collective Reflexology (1921), and General Principles of Human Reflexology (1926).

Core Claims

Reflexology defined mental phenomena as 'the totality of reflexes formed under the influence of the external world.' Bekhterev regarded psychology as a pseudo-science reliant on subjective methods and insisted that only externally observable and measurable responses be taken as objects of study. He developed a motor-reflex measurement method using mild electrical stimulation rather than Pavlov's salivary method, giving it the advantage of applicability to human subjects. Reflexology did not confine itself to individual psychology but expanded into pedagogy, sociology, and art studies, harboring an imperial ambition to replace the entire complex of human sciences.

Rivalry with Pavlov

Bekhterev and Pavlov developed their theories of conditioned reflexes independently, but criticized each other sharply. What Bekhterev called the 'association reflex' Pavlov termed the 'conditioned reflex', essentially the same phenomenon. Though Pavlov's research became the public face of behaviorism through Watson, in methodological terms Watson's approach was closer to Bekhterev's.

The Fall

In 1929, two years after Bekhterev's death, a debate on 'Reflexology or Psychology' was held at the State Reflexological Institute for Brain Study in Leningrad. Intended to overcome reflexology's mechanistic limitations from the standpoint of dialectical materialism, the discussion soon gave way to charges by M. R. Mogendovich and others that reflexology's 'imperialism over psychology' was merely dressed in Marxist garb. Around 1930, reflexology was liquidated as an independent discipline by directive, and Soviet psychology subsequently shifted toward Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach and activity theory.

Legacy

Though extinguished as an independent discipline, reflexology provided an important theoretical foundation for the development of behaviorist psychology. The Psychoneurological Institute founded by Bekhterev in 1907, the world's first comprehensive brain-science research institution, continued to function as a center of Soviet neuroscience. Reflexology's mechanistic reductionism was a limitation to be overcome, but its scientistic ambition to demand an objective, experimental approach to all mental phenomena left a deep mark on 20th-century psychology as a whole.