Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857–1927)

Vladimir Bekhterev was an incredibly versatile and successful Russian scientist in the 19th and early 20th centuries, whose contributions to his various fields of expertise made him a highly renowned scientist during his lifetime. Bekhterev was proficient in numerous scientific fields, namely neurophysiology, psychiatry, and experimental psychology.

Bekhterev was born in a small Russian village, to a clerk father and mother who encouraged schooling (Bekhterev, 1928, as cited in Lerner et al., 2005). He studied at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, receiving his medical doctorate in 1881, and working there as an associate professor until 1884, when he travelled to France and Germany to study neurology (Lerner et al., 2005). While in Germany, Bekhterev went to Leipzig to study neuroanatomy with Paul Flechsig and experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt (Lerner et al., 2005). When he returned to Russia in 1885, Bekhterev was appointed Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Kazan, where he established the first experimental psychology laboratory in Russia. In 1893, he returned to the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg as a Professor of Psychiatry and Chair of Mental and Neurological Diseases. In the same year, he published his book Conduction Paths in the Spinal Cord and Brain, which gained him international recognition for his unparalleled knowledge of the brain. Bekhterev was remarkably influential in the field of neurology due to his discoveries of novel brain structures (e.g., the superior vestibular nucleus) and being the first to describe certain diseases (e.g., Ankylosing spondylitis).

One of Bekhterev’s most significant contributions to experimental psychology was his “objective psychology”, which he later renamed “psychoreflexology”. This new psychological program situated the study of mental processes within a biological perspective. Bekhterev argued that the objective observation of neuropsychological processes, or “reflexes”, should be the focus of psychology (de Freitas Araujo, 2014). This definition of psychology shifted the focus away from the study of subjective or conscious processes (the subject matter and aim of Wundt’s experimental psychology) and toward an objective, experimental psychology. Over time, he extended the scope of his psychological program to encompass several domains, including genetics, education, pathology, and social psychology. Two prominent books written by Bekhterev on this subject were Objective Psychology, published in 1907, and General Principles of Human Reflexology, published in 1917. In addition to his previously mentioned accomplishments, Bekhterev founded the Society of Neurologists and Psychiatrists in 1892, the first Russian journal on nervous disease, the Neurology Bulletin, in 1892, the journal Review of Psychiatry Neurology and Experimental Psychology in 1896, and the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg in 1907 (Lerner et al., 2005).

Bekhterev’s influence in the fields of neurology, psychiatry, and experimental psychology is ever-lasting, despite the suppression of his work following his death in 1927. Bekhterev died under mysterious circumstances while attending the First Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists of Soviet Russia in Moscow (Lerner et al., 2005). The suspicious circumstances of Bekhterev’s death lead to speculation that he was poisoned by Russian authorities after examining Joseph Stalin and making an undesirable comment about Stalin’s mental state to his colleagues. Following Bekhterev’s untimely death, his works were removed from Soviet literature until Stalin’s death almost 30 years later. Nevertheless, Vladimir Bekhterev’s legacy has survived by way of his many neurological accomplishments and contributions to the establishment of experimental psychology in Russia.

References

Cavanaugh, R.  (2019, January). A brilliant career. A fatal error. Russian Life, 62, 58–61.

de Freitas Araujo, S. (2014). The emergence and development of Bekhterev’s psychoreflexology in relation to Wundt’s experimental psychology. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 50, 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.21653

Lerner, V., Margolin, J., & Witztum, E. (2005). Vladimir Bekhterev: His life, his work and the mystery of his death. History of Psychiatry, 16, 217–227. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154×05049611

Vladimir Mikhaylovich Bekhterev (1857-1927). (2020, January 6). ACNR | Paper & Online Neurology Journal. https://www.acnr.co.uk/2020/01/vladimir-mikhaylovich-bekhterev-1857-1927/’

John Wallace Baird (1869–1919)

John Wallace Baird was a notable Canadian experimental psychologist and journal editor, as well as the first Canadian psychologist to serve as the president of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Born in Motherwell, Ontario, Baird was impaired with poor eyesight, hindering the rate of his progression through elementary and secondary school (Lahham & Green, 2012). Nevertheless, in 1893, Baird attended the University of Toronto, which had r(less than five years prior been equipped with an experimental psychology laboratory by James Mark Baldwin (Lahham & Green, 2012). Interestingly, it has been noted that Baird was a relatively average student throughout his undergraduate studies when considering his professional prominence in North American psychology during his career (Lahham & Green, 2012). Despite this, Baird earned his bachelor’s degree in 1897, with his thesis on abnormal colour vision, and remained at the University of Toronto as a laboratory assistant (Lahham & Green, 2012). Baird then left to study under Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany. He studied under Wundt for just under a year before relocating to the United States and eventually beginning a fellowship position under E.B Titchener at Cornell University (Lahham & Green, 2012). There, he completed his Ph.D. in 1902 with a dissertation on depth perception (Lahham & Green, 2012). Baird remained at Cornell as a research assistant, during which he devoted his time solely to his vision research, culminating in the publication of The color sensitivity of the peripheral retina in 1905 (Lahham & Green, 2012). After leaving Cornell, Baird was appointed as an instructor at John Hopkins University (1904–1906), instructor and then Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (1907–1909), and finally, director of the experimental psychology laboratory at Clark University (1910) (Lahham & Green, 2012).

The remaining nine years of Baird’s career saw a decline in research output, but his influence on experimental psychology during this period was far from inappreciable. In addition to the administrative responsibilities of running the psychological laboratory at Clark, Baird also taught a variety of introductory and advanced psychology courses, served editorial positions for two academic journals, and began publishing a yearly review of research on “memory, imagination, learning, and higher mental processes” (Lahham & Green, 2012). Moreover, in 1913, he translated Ernst Meumann’s Psychology of Learning from German and co-founded the Journal of Applied Psychology with G. Stanley Hall and Ludwig R. Geissler in 1917 (Lahham & Green, 2012). The following year, he was appointed President of the APA, during which time he also served as Vice-Chair of the National Research Council’s Psychological Committee (Lahham & Green, 2012). The purpose of this committee was to develop a rehabilitation program for disabled soldiers returning from WWI. Additionally, Baird had been selected many years earlier to become President of Clark University and Clark College in 1920 (Lahham & Green, 2012). However, as a result of his ongoing medical condition, Baird was hospitalized and passed away in February of 1919.

Despite his untimely passing, it is clear that Baird was held in high regard in the field of psychology in the United States. Throughout his career, he served editorial positions for the American Journal of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Educational Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Psychology, which he co-founded (Lahham & Green, 2012). Moreover, he attained membership in Titchener’s group of “Experimentalists”, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Unfortunately, Baird’s impact on the field of psychology was shortly overshadowed by the rise of behaviourism, given his alignment with Titchener and the method of introspection (Lahham & Green, 2012). Nonetheless, Baird achieved immense success in American psychology, especially for a Canadian psychologist, and is thus a prominent figure in the history of Canadian psychology.

References

Lahham, D., & Green, C. D. (2013). John Wallace Baird: The First Canadian president of the American Psychological Association. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 54, 124–132. doi:10.1037/a0026286

Titchener, E. B. (1919). John Wallace Baird. Science, 49, 393–394. doi:10.1126/science.49.1269.393

Contributors

• Vraj Shah
• Kristen Arnold

Joseph Wolpe (1915-1997)

Joseph Wolpe was a South African psychologist and founder of the famous therapeutic technique, systematic desensitization.

Joseph Wolpe was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, into a family that valued education (O’Donohue et al., 2001). He grew up a studious child and became interested in the sciences as he entered high school (O’Donohue et al., 2001). Wolpe began his formal education by studying medicine at the University of Witwatersrand (Berger, 2005). Wolpe’s experiences volunteering as a military doctor during WWII moved him towards research in “war neurosis”, or what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)(O’Donohue et al., 2001). He found the previous treatments for PTSD to be unsatisfactory and set out to find a treatment rooted in behaviourism that could help with anxiety and phobia-based disorders. Finally, Wolfe founded the first form of behaviour therapy, systematic desensitization, in which the individual is exposed to the thing they fear at various levels of intensity, however, the fear is not paired with negative consequences. For example, an individual who fears snakes may at first be shown a photo of a snake, then presented a snake in a terrarium, and lastly, the individual may be asked to touch a snake. Over time, the individual is able to build confidence against their fear and eventually overcome it. Systematic desensitization had high success rates for treating individuals, and this method is still used today.

In 1956, Berger went to Stanford to work at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioural Sciences, eventually moving permanently to the United States in 1960 (Salkovskis, 1998). In 1965, he began working in the department of behavioural sciences at Temple University, establishing a behavioural therapy unit (Salkovskis, 1989). Moreover, he was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Behaviour Therapy in the 1960s and the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry in 1970. One of Wolpe’s students, Arnold Lazarus (1932–2013), published his dissertation on the application of systematic desensitization in groups in 1961 and was the first to use the term “behaviour therapy” in the literature.

Wolfe proved to the field that empirical methods can be used to develop therapeutic treatments, and established himself as a leading psychological innovator (Berger, 2005). His work on systematic desensitization, which he developed through combining knowledge from several branches of psychology, such as psychotherapy and behaviourism, demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration for the progress of psychology.

References

Salkovskis, P. (1998). Changing the face of psychotherapy and common sense: Joseph Wolpe, 20 April 1915 – 4 December 1997. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 26, 189–191. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1352465898000216

Contributors

• Anmol Thind