Although many facets of Lev Vygotsky’s life have drawn considerable attention from historians of science, perhaps the most popular feature of his personal narrative was that his work was actively chastised by the Stalinist government. Almost all contemporary references to Vygotsky’s personal history emphasize that from 1936 to 1956, it was forbidden to either discuss or disseminate any of Vygotsky’s works within the Soviet Union. Although this ‘Vygotsky ban’ is both widely acknowledged and frequently cited by a variety of scholars, (...) the exact nature of this alleged Communist party censure has received far less historical attention. Through focusing on the logistics of Soviet ‘bans,’ this article attempts to shed light on this historical mystery and augment the growing body of revisionist literature that serves to deconstruct the mythologized persona of Lev Vygotsky. (shrink)

The article argues that Beckett's Trilogy stages the effects of a lobotomy operation on a potentially politically subversive writer, and that the consequences of the operation can be traced in both the retreat of the narrator of the Trilogy into the mind and into comatose mental states and in the detail of the operation itself, based on the 'icepick' lobotomies performed by neurologist Walter Freeman in the late 1940s and early 1950s. To write about extreme psychiatric situations in the post-war (...) period is necessarily to invoke the political uses of psychosurgery with which this article engages. The article goes on to consider the figure of the brain-damaged mind as a Cold War trope in the references to botulism and the motif of the penetrated skull in The Unnamable. (shrink)

This essay discusses the brief but extensive correspondence Soviet neuro-psychologist Alexander Luria exchanged with his younger American colleague Oliver Sacks between 1973 and 1977, the year Luria died. Sacks, whose case histories went on to become mainstream bestsellers, always expressed his indebtedness to Luria, whose warm and detailed approach to writing about his patients’ peculiar and sometimes distressing neurological conditions inspired Sacks. This essay explores this influence but also probes distinctions between the two scientists’ understandings of human consciousness tied to (...) the very different social and political contexts in which they conducted their clinical research. (shrink)