Sergei Rubinstein – 1889 1960

Biography

The history of psychological science in the twentieth century is largely defined by a continuous struggle to reconcile two antithetical paradigms: the inward-looking, mentalistic traditions of introspective phenomenology and the reductionist, mechanistic frameworks of classical behaviorism and reflexology. In the midst of this profound epistemological crisis, the Soviet philosopher and psychologist Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein (1889–1960) developed one of the most rigorously synthesized, comprehensive, and dialectically sophisticated theoretical systems in modern behavioral and cognitive science. Educated in the exacting traditions of German transcendental philosophy at the University of Marburg, Rubinstein executed a decisive intellectual turn toward dialectical materialism, formulating a unified science of the human mind that treated consciousness not as an epiphenomenal shadow or an insulated spiritual substance, but as an active, socio-historically determined reality dynamically embedded within human material activity.

Rubinstein’s theoretical enterprise unfolded across decades of intense geopolitical upheaval, ideological dogmatism, and scientific restructuring within the Soviet Union. As the intellectual architect of the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity (printsip edinstva soznaniya i deyatel’nosti) and the foundational doctrine that external causes act exclusively through internal conditions, he sought to rescue psychology from both mechanical determinism and teleological idealism. His work was never a mere ideological acquiescence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; rather, it represented a profound philosophical integration that drew upon Spinozan monism, Hegelian dialectics, and Marxian praxis to establish the ontogenetic and phylogenetic foundations of human agency. Rubinstein demonstrated that human subjects do not passively record environmental impressions, nor do they generate meaning in transcendental isolation; rather, by actively transforming objective reality through labor, cognition, and communication, human beings simultaneously forge and transform their own psychological architectures.

Despite being awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1942 for his monumental compendium Foundations of General Psychology, Rubinstein’s life was marked by sharp institutional reversals, political marginalization during the state-sponsored anti-cosmopolitan purges of the late 1940s, and intense theoretical polemics with contemporary Soviet schools, most notably the cultural-historical school of Lev Vygotsky and the activity-theory group of Aleksei Leontiev. Nevertheless, his post-war treatises—culminating in works such as Being and Consciousness and the posthumously published philosophical masterpiece Man and the World—consolidated a humanistic, non-reductive ontology of human subjectivity. Today, as contemporary cognitive science gravitates toward enactive, embodied, extended, and embedded models of the mind, Rubinstein’s profound conceptual architecture experiences an overdue international renaissance, standing as a vital intellectual bridge between classical European philosophy and empirical psychological inquiry.

1. Introduction to Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein (1889–1960)

1.1 Biographical Orientation and Intellectual Stature

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein occupies a singular, towering position in the historiography of twentieth-century Soviet psychology and European philosophy. Born into an educated Jewish family in Odessa on June 18, 1889 (Old Style: June 6), his lifespan encompassed the twilight of the Tsarist Russian Empire, the seismic cataclysms of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the brutal structural and ideological transformations of Stalinism, the devastation of the Second World War, and the tentative intellectual thaws of the post-Stalinist era until his death in Moscow on January 11, 1960. Unlike many of his contemporaries who emerged primarily from medical, pedagogical, or biological disciplines, Rubinstein was first and foremost a philosopher of exceptional depth, trained at the epicenters of Western European philosophy before turning his attention to empirical and theoretical psychology.

Rubinstein’s significance within the Soviet academy rests upon his foundational role as the foremost systemic theoretician of dialectical materialist psychology. While figures such as Lev Vygotsky brought poetic intuition and semiotic brilliance, and Alexander Luria pioneered neuropsychological clinical practice, it was Rubinstein who provided the overarching epistemological, methodological, and categorical apparatus that unified Soviet psychological inquiry. He achieved this through a unique dual mastery: on the one hand, an intimate, razor-sharp understanding of the continental philosophical tradition—spanning Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism—and, on the other, an unyielding commitment to rigorous, empirically validated psychological research. Through this integration, Rubinstein elevated Soviet psychology from a patchwork of competing ideological polemics into an integrated, internationally recognized academic discipline.

1.2 The Epistemological Crisis in Early 20th-Century Psychology

To understand the magnitude of Rubinstein’s intellectual mission, one must situate his early work within the international “crisis in psychology” that crystallized during the first decades of the twentieth century. Psychology was torn between two mutually exclusive yet equally unsatisfactory paradigms. On one side stood classical introspectionist mentalism, inherited from the traditions of Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, and Franz Brentano. This paradigm conceived of consciousness as an enclosed, self-contained realm of subjective experiences, accessible solely via inner observation. This approach severed the psyche from objective material reality, divorcing the mind from the physical organism and practical socio-material life, thereby marooning psychology on the shoals of Cartesian dualism and solipsistic idealism.

On the opposing front stood various forms of mechanistic reductionism, epitomized by John B. Watson’s American behaviorism and Vladimir Bekhterev’s Russian reflexology. In their legitimate quest to transform psychology into an objective natural science, these schools discarded the category of consciousness altogether, reducing human behavior to a mechanical sequence of physiological reflexes, motor habits, and simple stimulus-response (S–R) linkages. Rubinstein recognized that both extremes shared the same underlying flaw: an uncritical acceptance of the Cartesian split between the mental and the physical. His life’s work was devoted to formulating an objective, non-reductive psychological paradigm. He insisted that psychology could not abandon its true subject matter—human consciousness, intentionality, and subjective experience—but that this subjective dimension must be grounded in an ontological realism where the mental is understood as an emergent, dynamically regulated property of a subject acting within an objective, material world.

1.3 Historiographical Position within Soviet Academic History

Within Soviet academic history, Rubinstein navigated an extraordinarily perilous path. He was tasked with constructing a scientific discipline anchored in the principles of dialectical materialism while fiercely resisting the crude ideological dogmas enforced by the state apparatus and party ideologues. Unlike opportunists who merely adorned conventional psychology with quotations from Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, Rubinstein undertook an authentic, deep-seated philosophical assimilation of the dialectical method. He sought to construct a psychology where dialectical materialism functioned not as an external regulatory catechism, but as an organic, immanent logic of scientific investigation.

This uncompromising integrity placed him alongside, but frequently in conceptual tension with, contemporaries such as Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev, and Pavel Blonsky. Rubinstein was unsparing in his critiques of any theoretical formulations that seemed to reintroduce dualism or vulgar materialism, even when those formulations were politically fashionable. His trajectory was punctuated by both the highest state honors—such as receiving the prestigious Stalin Prize in 1942 and becoming the first psychologist elected as a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1943—and severe political persecution during the anti-Semitic and anti-cosmopolitan purges of the late 1940s. Following his posthumous rehabilitation, his works have continued to exert a profound, subterranean influence, providing modern cognitive science, cultural psychology, and contemporary activity theory with an indispensable foundation of methodological rigor.

2. Early Life, Formative Education, and the Marburg Neo-Kantian Heritage

2.1 Odessa Upbringing and Gymnasium Education

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein grew up in the cosmopolitan, bustling port city of Odessa, a dynamic cultural crossroad situated on the Black Sea. At the end of the nineteenth century, Odessa was renowned for its polyglot environment, intense commercial life, and vibrant secular Jewish intellectual milieu. Raised in a cultured, middle-class family—his father was an educated lawyer—Rubinstein was immersed from childhood in an atmosphere of rigorous scholarly ambition. This urban environment fostered in the young Rubinstein a broad European outlook, insulating him from the narrow parochialism that characterized much of the Russian imperial provinces.

Rubinstein attended the prestigious Richelieu Gymnasium in Odessa, an elite institution renowned for its demanding classical humanist curriculum. There, he developed an exceptional command of Latin and Classical Greek, alongside native fluency in Russian and early mastery of German and French. His education was marked by an voracious appetite for classical literature, world history, and theoretical physics. More than simply excelling academically, Rubinstein developed an early, profound fascination with continental philosophy and the methodology of the natural sciences. By the time he completed his gymnasium studies with highest honors, he had determined that his life’s vocation lay in resolving the fundamental philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge, reality, and human existence.

2.2 Studies at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp

Because Tsarist quotas severely restricted the access of Jewish students to domestic imperial universities, and seeking the most rigorous philosophical training available in Europe, Rubinstein departed Russia in 1909 to enroll at the University of Marburg in Germany. At that time, Marburg was the epicenter of Neo-Kantian transcendental idealism, dominated by two of the most formidable philosophical minds of the era: Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. For four intensely formative years, from 1909 to 1913, Rubinstein was completely immersed in the Marburg School’s program of critical idealism, which sought to establish the logical foundations of scientific knowledge through a radical reinterpretation of Kantian epistemology.

Hermann Cohen’s philosophical methodology, crystallized in his “logic of pure cognition” (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis), rejected the concept of the Kantian “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich) as an unknowable metaphysical remnant. Instead, Cohen argued that being is not passively given to the mind; rather, being is produced and constructed within the progressive, autonomous movement of mathematical and scientific thought itself. Rubinstein absorbed the Marburg School’s profound methodological discipline, its rigorous conceptual analysis, and its fierce opposition to psychologism—the mistaken attempt to ground logical and philosophical truths in the empirical contingencies of individual psychological processing. However, even as he mastered the transcendental idealist dialectic, Rubinstein began to perceive the dangerous abstraction of this framework: by reducing all reality to the self-generation of pure thought, Marburg idealism severed the knowing subject from concrete, material, and historical reality.

2.3 The Doctoral Dissertation and Transcending Idealism

Rubinstein’s brilliant performance at Marburg culminated in his doctoral dissertation, defended in the winter of 1913/1914, entitled Eine Studie zum Problem der Methode (“A Study on the Problem of Method”). In this work, Rubinstein engaged in an exhaustive critique of the epistemological frameworks governing scientific methodology. Working from within the transcendental tradition, he examined the relationship between the categorical apparatus of thought and the objective structures of empirical phenomena. Cohen and Natorp praised the dissertation for its technical brilliance, and Rubinstein was formally awarded his doctorate in philosophy, marking him as an emerging scholar of immense promise within German philosophy.

Yet, an examination of the dissertation reveals the conceptual fractures that would soon lead Rubinstein to break definitively with Neo-Kantianism. Rubinstein was profoundly dissatisfied with the Marburg School’s inability to account for the concrete, resistant materiality of the objective world and the living, embodied nature of the human subject. He began to argue that knowledge could not be understood merely as an internal, self-referential logical progression of consciousness. Rather, knowledge presupposed a dynamic, real interaction between a genuine subject and an independently existing, objective world. This critique contained the fertile theoretical seeds of what would later become Rubinstein’s subject-activity approach: the realization that the dualisms of subject and object, thought and being, could not be reconciled in the ethereal realm of transcendental logic, but only through the concrete, practical reality of human activity.

3. Philosophical Transition: From Neo-Kantianism to Dialectical Materialism

3.1 The Post-Revolutionary Cultural Shift in Odessa

Upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Rubinstein returned to Odessa, cut off from his German academic prospects. The subsequent collapse of the Tsarist autocracy and the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 radically altered the social and intellectual landscape of the former Russian Empire. Odessa became a site of turbulent civil conflict, changing hands multiple times before Soviet power was consolidated. During these tumultuous years, Rubinstein immersed himself in educational and cultural work, eventually serving as the director of the Odessa Public Library from 1922 to 1930 and delivering lectures on philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at local higher educational institutions, including the Novorossiysk University (later reorganized as the Institute of People’s Education).

Encountering the transformative socio-political reality of the early Soviet state provoked a profound re-evaluation in Rubinstein’s theoretical worldview. He engaged in a close, critical reading of Karl Marx, paying particular attention not to dogmatic political treatises, but to Marx’s early philosophical reflections, specifically the Theses on Feuerbach. In Marx’s first thesis—where classical materialism was criticized for conceiving the object, reality, and sensuousness only under the form of the object or of contemplation, rather than as sensuous human activity, as praxis—Rubinstein found the philosophical breakthrough he had been seeking since his Marburg days. Here was a framework that overcame both the abstract, disembodied subject of Neo-Kantianism and the passive, mechanical object of traditional materialism.

3.2 The Seminal 1922 Article on Creative Self-Activity

The decisive turning point in Rubinstein’s transition from transcendental philosophy to a dynamic materialist psychology was marked by the publication of his monumental 1922 article, “The Principle of Creative Self-Activity” (Printsip tvorcheskoi samodeyatel’nosti), published in the journal Uchenye zapiski vysshei shkoly goroda Odessy. This article, written during a period of material deprivation and social rebirth, is widely regarded by contemporary scholars as the foundational text of the Soviet activity approach in psychology. In it, Rubinstein laid down the philosophical manifesto that would govern his entire subsequent scientific career.

The central thesis of the 1922 paper established a dialectical relationship between the acting subject and objective reality. Rubinstein formulated the core maxim: the subject acts upon the world, and through this act of transformation, the subject simultaneously creates, develops, and transforms their own self. Human subjectivity is neither an innate, static substance nor a passive tabula rasa waiting for environmental inscriptions. Rather, subjectivity is forged through “creative self-activity” (samodeyatel’nost’). In this profound formulation, Rubinstein built an intellectual bridge connecting the German classical philosophical heritage—specifically Hegel’s phenomenology of labor and Kant’s autonomous subject—with the dialectical materialist methodology of Marxian historical praxis, establishing human action as the generative ground of the human psyche.

3.3 Systematic Synthesis of Philosophy and Empirical Psychology

Having established this foundational philosophical paradigm, Rubinstein turned his attention toward constructing a scientific, empirical psychology that could instantiate these theoretical insights. In the early 1920s, the Soviet psychological landscape was intensely polarized. On the one hand, figures such as Konstantin Kornilov were attempting to construct “reactology,” a crude synthesis of Marxism and reflexology, while Vladimir Bekhterev promoted an entirely mechanistic doctrine of human reflexes. On the other hand, psychoanalysis, represented by early Soviet Freudianism, was gaining popularity, interpreting the psyche as a battlefield of biological, fatalistic drives.

Rubinstein rejected both orientations with severe philosophical rigor. Mechanistic behaviorism and reflexology, he argued, reduced the human person to an empty, reactive automaton, eradicating human agency, conscious purpose, and meaning. Freudian psychoanalysis, conversely, universalized historically specific, alienated psychological states and reduced the socialized human mind to immutable biological instincts. Rubinstein insisted that a genuine dialectical materialist psychology must preserve the reality of consciousness, intentionality, and qualitative mental phenomena, but it must study them through their objective manifestation and development in material activity. Philosophy was not to be an ideological ornament appended to empirical data; it was to serve as the rigorous epistemological foundation that dictated how psychological experiments were designed, interpreted, and understood.

4. The Principle of the Unity of Consciousness and Activity

4.1 Conceptual Architecture of the Principle

At the very heart of Rubinstein’s entire psychological system lies the Principle of the Unity of Consciousness and Activity (printsip edinstva soznaniya i deyatel’nosti). First outlined philosophically in 1922 and systematically articulated as a comprehensive psychological doctrine in the 1930s, this principle sought to eliminate the traditional dualism between the “internal” realm of mental phenomena and the “external” realm of objective behavior. Rubinstein asserted that consciousness and activity are neither identical—which would represent vulgar materialist reductionism—nor mutually external entities linked by arbitrary causation, which would preserve Cartesian dualism. Rather, they constitute an indissoluble, dialectical unity.

Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, an immaterial spirit, or a passive internal spectator viewing a private mental theater. Instead, consciousness is the active, subjective regulation and reflection of objective activity. Conversely, human activity is not a purely physiological discharge of muscular energy or a chain of mechanical reflexes; it is an intentionally organized, conscious process directed toward objective reality. Activity is the primary crucible within which consciousness is formed, developed, and transformed, and activity is simultaneously the domain within which consciousness reveals its causal efficacy and manifests its objective presence in the world.

4.2 The Triadic Relation: Subject, Activity, and Object

To articulate the internal mechanics of this unity, Rubinstein developed a sophisticated triadic framework: the dynamic, mediated relationship between the Subject, Activity, and the Object. Within this triadic relation, the subject is an active agent endowed with specific needs, orientations, and capacities. The object is not an inert stimulus; it is a rich, multifaceted entity existing independently in the world, carrying both physical properties and socio-historical meanings. Activity serves as the dynamic, mediating process that binds the subject and the object into a continuous, reciprocal transaction.

In this process, human labor and goal-directed engagement play the decisive mediating role. When a human subject acts upon an object—whether using a mechanical tool to carve stone or using a mathematical symbol to solve an equation—the objective, material properties of the object impose real constraints and structural demands upon the subject’s activity. To successfully transform the object, the subject’s cognitive processes must accurately reflect the object’s real, objective properties. Consequently, the cognitive structures of the subject are systematically formed and refined by the objective logic of the material world. This is not passive contemplation; it is the active, practical transformation of reality through which the objective world is continuously appropriated by human consciousness.

4.3 Implications for Psychological Research Methodology

The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity did not remain an abstract philosophical postulate; it carried revolutionary consequences for empirical psychological methodology. If consciousness is inextricably bound to objective activity, then it is impossible to study mental processes through isolated, inward-looking introspection. The introspective method, Rubinstein demonstrated, creates an artificial, distorted psychological reality because it attempts to observe mental states detached from the real-world activities that give them functional meaning, structure, and coherence.

Simultaneously, Rubinstein demonstrated that behaviorist observation of external movements was equally sterile, as it missed the conscious, intentional content that defines human action. The only valid, objective methodology for psychological science is to investigate mental processes in the very process of their unfolding within meaningful, structured, goal-directed activities. Researchers must examine how a subject’s perception, memory, or thinking operates while solving real, concrete tasks. By systematically manipulating the objective conditions of an activity, altering its tools, or introducing new obstacles, the psychologist can objectively track the structural transformations, regulatory operations, and qualitative dynamics of consciousness as they express themselves in the materialization of practical and intellectual products.

5. Methodological Foundations: The Dialectical Approach to Psychological Science

5.1 Internal Conditions and External Causes

As Rubinstein deepened his psychological paradigm, he formulated what became known as the classic formula of dialectical determinism in psychology: “External causes act through internal conditions” (Vneshnie prichiny deistvuyut cherez vnutrennie usloviya). This principle represented a direct, uncompromising rebuttal to both vulgar environmentalism (which assumed that external stimuli mechanistically dictate human thought and behavior) and biological nativism (which assumed that mental development is merely the unfolding of innate, predetermined genetic programs).

Rubinstein argued that no external physical, cultural, or educational influence ever impacts the human mind in a direct, unmediated manner. Instead, any external influence is dynamically refracted, filtered, and transformed through the preexisting system of internal conditions. These internal conditions comprise the subject’s current psychological architecture, their past developmental history, their biological neural substrate, their active cognitive schemas, their prevailing emotional states, and their hierarchy of personal motives. Thus, identical pedagogical interventions or environmental stressors produce vastly different developmental outcomes in different individuals precisely because the objective external cause is integrated and refracted through structurally distinct internal conditions.

5.2 The Historical Principle in Mental Development

A second foundational pillar of Rubinstein’s methodology was the rigorous application of the historical principle to psychological science. Mental structures and cognitive capacities, he insisted, are neither static, ahistorical essences nor immutable biological endowments. Instead, the human psyche is an emergent product of both phylogenetic biological evolution and socio-historical cultural development. To truly understand any psychological phenomenon—be it abstract reasoning, voluntary attention, or aesthetic emotion—the investigator must examine it historically, uncovering its ontogenetic emergence and its socio-cultural genesis.

Rubinstein rejected the concept of permanent, immutable psychological archetypes or universal faculties of the mind. As human society develops, as the material division of labor evolves, and as new scientific, linguistic, and cultural tools are invented, the very nature of human cognition changes. Human mental capacities are not fixed containers filled with diverse cultural content; rather, the functional structures of the mind themselves are historical formations. Ontogenesis (individual development) is an active process wherein the child, guided by adults within concrete socio-historical environments, appropriates historical cultural achievements, transforming biological potential into complex, socio-historically mediated psychological capabilities.

5.3 The Principle of Determinism in Psychology

Rubinstein’s comprehensive theoretical construction culminated in a profound philosophical rehabilitation of determinism within psychology. In European thought, determinism had long been synonymous with mechanical necessity, which inevitably reduced human volition, freedom, and agency to an illusion. Conversely, defenders of human free will frequently fled into teleological mysticism, existential arbitrariness, or spiritual indeterminism, claiming that the conscious mind was entirely exempt from the laws of natural causality.

Rubinstein shattered this false dichotomy by developing a dialectical, non-mechanical model of causality. Determinism, in Rubinstein’s formulation, is not a simple, linear chain of efficient causes ($S to R$). Rather, it is a multifaceted, systemic, and developmentally emergent network of causal interdependencies. In higher animals, and supremely in human beings, the development of consciousness introduces a qualitative leap into the universal causal web. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon floating above physical causality; it is a real, causally efficacious component of the material world. By reflecting the objective laws of reality, human consciousness enables conscious planning, voluntary self-regulation, and intentional action. Human agency and moral responsibility are therefore not violations of natural determinism, but its highest, most complex dialectical manifestation: a self-determining, conscious agent operating within and transforming the causal fabric of nature and society.

6. Major Opus: Foundations of General Psychology (1940)

6.1 Genesis and Structure of the Monograph

During the late 1930s, working in Leningrad, Rubinstein embarked upon an intellectual task of monumental proportions: the preparation of an encyclopedic, unified treatise that would establish the systematic foundations of psychology on dialectical materialist principles. The result was his major opus, Foundations of General Psychology (Osnovy obshchei psikhologii), published in 1940. Spanning hundreds of pages of extraordinarily dense, rigorous prose, the volume represented the first successful, comprehensive synthesis of general psychology in the Soviet Union that possessed genuine world-class theoretical coherence.

The structural composition of Foundations of General Psychology was deeply systematic. Rubinstein commenced with an exhaustive historical-critical review of world psychology and a meticulous formulation of the philosophical and methodological foundations of the discipline. From there, he systematically organized the vast field of psychological science into interrelated categorical tiers:

• The phylogenetic evolution of the psyche and the historical emergence of human consciousness through labor.
• The sensory-perceptual foundations of mental reflection, including sensation and perception.
• Mnemonic and intellectual processes, providing exhaustive analyses of memory, imagination, and dynamic thinking.
• The affective-volitional domain, unpacking the dialectical nature of human emotions, desires, and volitional self-regulation.
• A comprehensive theory of personality, analyzing the complex integration of abilities, temperament, character, and worldview.

Throughout this immense work, Rubinstein seamlessly synthesized the latest worldwide empirical data, neurophysiological research (including the contributions of Ivan Pavlov and Ivan Sechenov), clinical findings, and profound philosophical deduction.

6.2 The 1942 Stalin Prize and State Recognition

The academic impact of Foundations of General Psychology was immediate and profound. Its publication was recognized not merely as an outstanding scientific event, but as a monumental victory for Soviet science, proving that a non-reductive, dialectical materialist psychology was practically viable and theoretically superior to Western alternatives. In 1942, in the very depths of the Second World War (the Great Patriotic War), the Soviet state awarded Rubinstein the prestigious State Stalin Prize of the Second Degree for this monumental text. It was the first time in the history of the Soviet Union that the Stalin Prize had been awarded to a psychological work.

This award carried immense institutional and political significance. It elevated psychology, previously viewed by many hardline materialist ideologues as a suspect, semi-bourgeois discipline, to the pinnacle of state-recognized scientific legitimacy. For Rubinstein personally, the prize resulted in his rapid elevation to the absolute leadership of Soviet academic psychology. In 1943, he was elected as a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences—becoming the first Soviet psychologist to achieve this coveted academic status—and was tasked with establishing and directing the nation’s primary psychological research and educational departments.

6.3 Pedagogical Impact and Theoretical Codification

Following its official recognition, Foundations of General Psychology became the definitive, mandatory university textbook and methodological standard for psychological education across the Soviet Union. A second, revised and expanded edition was published in 1946, further solidifying its status. The monograph achieved what had hitherto eluded Soviet researchers: the rigorous standardization of psychological terminology, categories, and research protocols under dialectical materialist guidelines.

Generations of Soviet psychologists, educators, psychiatrists, and philosophers were trained on the conceptual scaffolding erected by Rubinstein in Foundations. The work established uniform curricula across pedagogical institutes and universities from Leningrad and Moscow to Kiev and Tbilisi. Its enduring power lay in its balanced, integrative character: Rubinstein did not simply castigate Western psychological findings, but critically rescued and assimilated genuine empirical discoveries from Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, French functionalism, and Anglo-American behavioral research, reinterpreting them through the lens of dialectical activity theory. It remains, to this day, one of the most comprehensive and encyclopedic reference manuals in the history of global psychological literature.

7. Rubinstein’s Theory of Thinking and Cognitive Processes

7.1 Thinking as a Dynamic Mental Process

Among Rubinstein’s most brilliant, original contributions to cognitive psychology was his sustained theoretical and empirical investigation of the nature of human thought. In stark opposition to classical associational psychology, formal logic, and the early static paradigms of cognitive science that treated thinking merely as an automated manipulation of pre-existing schemas or static concepts, Rubinstein advanced the thesis that thinking is an ongoing, dynamic mental process (myshlenie kak protsess). He drew a sharp, epistemological distinction between thought as an active, unfolding process and thought as a crystallized, static product (such as a finished concept, a codified judgment, or an algorithm).

The core psychological mechanism of this dynamic process, Rubinstein discovered, is “Analysis through Synthesis” (analiz cherez sintez). Thinking does not proceed by mechanically breaking an object into isolated pieces and then gluing them back together. Rather, in the process of solving a problem, the subject mentally incorporates the object into an ever-expanding series of new cognitive connections and relationships. As the object is included in a new context, it reveals previously unseen properties and facets; it is synthesized anew. This synthesis in turn allows for a deeper, more refined analysis. Thinking is therefore an ongoing, continuous re-problematization and creative restructuring of the task object, driven by the tension between the subject’s goals and the object’s real resistance.

7.2 Empirical Investigations of Problem Solving

To substantiate his theory of thinking, Rubinstein designed and oversaw an extensive series of innovative laboratory experiments throughout the 1940s and 1950s, later comprehensively synthesized in his 1958 monograph On Thinking and Ways of Its Investigation (O myshlenii i putyakh ego issledovaniya). These empirical investigations utilized complex mathematical, geometrical, and spatial reasoning problems to track the microscopic, step-by-step unfolding of cognitive activity in human subjects.

Rubinstein and his research team meticulously observed how human subjects isolate the latent properties of a problem under varying experimental conditions. He demonstrated that psychological blockages and cognitive fixations occur when a subject locks an object into a single, rigid conceptual relationship, viewing it exclusively through an unproductive functional fixation. The breakthrough of cognitive insight—the celebrated “aha!” moment—is not a mysterious, inexplicable mystical leap, nor is it random trial-and-error; it is the lawful result of analysis through synthesis. When an experimental prompt or a spontaneous shift in practical manipulation enables the subject to include the critical element into a fresh relational matrix, the hidden functional property is immediately illuminated, resolving the cognitive impasse.

7.3 The Relationship Between Language, Speech, and Thought

Rubinstein also formulated a dialectical resolution to the perennial problem of the relationship between language, speech, and human thought. He subjected two widespread, erroneous theories to devastating critique: on the one hand, the radical linguistic determinism that completely equated thought with overt or covert speech (as seen in early American behaviorism and certain nominalist philosophies), and, on the other hand, the mystical intuitionism (exemplified by Henri Bergson and certain schools of introspective psychology) that postulated pure, ineffable thought operating completely independent of language.

Rubinstein demonstrated that thought and language constitute an indissoluble dialectical unity, but are not identical. Thought is the cognitive reflection of objective reality, while language is the material, semiotic medium in which thought is embodied, crystallized, and communicated. Speech is not simply an external garment draped over a fully pre-formed thought; rather, thought is formed and realized in speech. Rubinstein analyzed the functional role of inner speech as a specialized, condensed psychological organ of intellectual reflection, operational planning, and conscious self-regulation. Through language, concepts are detached from the immediacy of sensory perception and embedded within a socially shared, historical matrix of human knowledge, enabling the human mind to engage in boundless abstract, theoretical, and counterfactual cognition.

8. Personality, Determinism, and the Internal-External Dynamic

8.1 The Structural Conception of Personality

For Rubinstein, psychology could never achieve scientific maturity if it treated psychological processes—such as perception, memory, and thinking—as autonomous, detached mechanisms operating in an abstract void. In the third section of Foundations of General Psychology, and in his subsequent philosophical treatises, he insisted that all psychological processes belong to a concrete, living, historical individual. He thus advanced an integrated, structural conception of Personality (lichnost’) as a dynamic, systemic whole.

Rubinstein rejected the trait-theory approaches of Western psychology that treated personality as a mere additive aggregate of static traits or behavioral factors. Instead, he conceptualized personality through three interconnected, dynamic axes:

1. Orientation (Napravlennost’): The dynamic hierarchy of needs, interests, ideals, and worldviews that determines what is significant to the individual and dictates their life trajectory.
2. Capacities (Sposobnosti): The flexible, structurally organized system of psychological and physiological abilities that determine how successfully an individual can realize their activities.
3. Character and Temperament (Kharakter i temperament): The enduring, individualized manner in which a person’s motives, volitional patterns, and neurodynamic traits express themselves in practical action and interpersonal relations.

Above all, Rubinstein stressed that a fully developed personality is anchored in a coherent worldview and a mature moral consciousness, which provides structural unity, resilience, and conscious direction to human life.

8.2 The Affective-Volitional Sphere

Rubinstein was deeply critical of traditional intellectualism, which treated the human mind as a cold, dispassionate calculating machine, while simultaneously rejecting irrationalism, which severed human emotions from cognitive understanding. In his structural model of personality, he postulated the unity of the affective and the cognitive. Emotions, Rubinstein demonstrated, are not blind, animalistic disturbances that disrupt rational thought; rather, they are the subjective, experiential reflection of the relationship between the subject’s objective needs and the progress or frustration of their real-world activity.

Every emotional experience contains an implicit cognitive evaluation of reality, and every conscious thought carries an affective charge that reflects its personal meaning for the subject. Building upon this unity, Rubinstein developed a sophisticated theory of the volitional sphere. Volition (will) is not an arbitrary, mysterious impulse springing from nowhere; it is the highest form of conscious, self-regulated motivation. In a volitional act, the subject does not simply submit to the immediate, visceral pressure of a biological drive. Instead, the subject consciously evaluates their competing motives in light of their broader social obligations, ethical ideals, and long-term goals, subordinating immediate impulses to conscious purpose. The will is thus the structural capacity of the personality for conscious self-regulation and intentional mobilization in the face of external and internal resistance.

8.3 Ontology of Human Subjectivity: ‘Being and Consciousness’

In 1957, Rubinstein published what is widely regarded as his most profound epistemological and ontological monograph, Being and Consciousness (Bytie i soznanie). In this work, he tackled the classical psycho-physical and psycho-social problems from a radically unified, dialectical materialist perspective. Rubinstein sought to overcome the subtle dualisms that still lingered in Soviet philosophy and psychological science by embedding human consciousness squarely within the universal material order of the cosmos.

Rubinstein formulated a non-reductive, ontological monism. There is only one material universe, but this universe is structurally differentiated, dynamic, and evolving. Within this universal material ontology, the psychic is neither an independent spiritual substance (Cartesian dualism) nor an illusion reducible to molecular physics or neurophysiology (eliminative materialism). Rather, the psychic is an emergent, qualitatively distinct property of highly organized organic matter (the brain)—a property whose very nature consists in the ideal reflection of the objective world. Consciousness is being that has become aware of itself through the practical, sensory-objective activity of the social human being. By defining consciousness as an active reflection that participates directly in the material transformation of the world, Rubinstein resolved the psycho-physical problem without falling into either the idealist trap of spiritual autonomy or the mechanist trap of treating the mind as an inert biological excretion.

9. Institutional Leadership and Academic Governance

9.1 Chair of Psychology at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad

Rubinstein’s practical influence on Soviet psychology was deeply tied to his energetic academic governance and institutional leadership. In 1930, he moved from Odessa to Leningrad, where he assumed the Chair of Psychology at the prestigious Herzen State Pedagogical Institute. Over the course of twelve intensely productive years (1930–1942), Rubinstein transformed the Herzen department into one of the most formidable centers of empirical research and pedagogical innovation in the entire Soviet Union.

In Leningrad, Rubinstein gathered an extraordinary constellation of talented young scholars, cultivating the famous “Leningrad Psychological School.” He directed extensive laboratory infrastructure and organized nationwide field studies in educational psychology, child development, and cognitive processes. Among his students and close collaborators was Boris G. Ananiev, who would himself go on to become one of the towering titans of Soviet psychology. Under Rubinstein’s visionary leadership, the Herzen Institute became the crucible where his philosophical activity approach was tested, refined, and converted into concrete pedagogical methodologies and developmental research programs.

9.2 Leadership at Moscow State University and the Institute of Philosophy

In 1942, following his evacuation from besieged Leningrad and his receipt of the Stalin Prize, Rubinstein was called to Moscow to assume the undisputed institutional leadership of Soviet psychological science. His administrative accomplishments during this period reshaped the landscape of Soviet higher education. Foremost among these was his founding of the Department of Psychology at Moscow State University (MSU) in 1942 within the Faculty of Philosophy—an institutional organ that eventually developed into the world-renowned MSU Faculty of Psychology.

Simultaneously, from 1942 to 1945, Rubinstein served as the Director of the State Institute of Psychology (now the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, IP RAS). In addition, he was appointed head of the psychology sector at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Holding these strategic academic offices concurrently, Rubinstein was the primary governmental and scientific authority directing psychological research, doctoral certification, and institutional funding throughout the USSR. He used this immense authority to shield psychological science from ideological charlatans, insisting upon the highest standards of philosophical literacy, experimental precision, and scholarly erudition across all Soviet scientific institutions.

9.3 Organizational Challenges During the Great Patriotic War

Rubinstein’s assumption of high administrative office occurred during the existential crisis of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). The war presented catastrophic organizational challenges: universities were physically dislocated, laboratories evacuated to Central Asia and the Urals, and a severe shortage of material resources threatened to halt all scientific research. Rubinstein personally experienced the brutal hardships of the Siege of Leningrad before his evacuation, an experience that deepened his profound commitment to the practical, social utility of psychological science.

Under Rubinstein’s direct administrative oversight, the entire Soviet psychological apparatus was mobilized for the war effort. He organized and coordinated nationwide clinical rehabilitation research programs for wounded soldiers suffering from severe neurotrauma, craniocerebral wounds, and traumatic speech deficits (aphasia). Working in tandem with clinical luminaries such as Alexander Luria, Rubinstein applied the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity directly to clinical rehabilitation. Instead of treating brain-damaged patients as passive clinical subjects, rehabilitation protocols were structured around active, meaningful labor tasks, artistic creation, and social communication. This activity-based clinical approach demonstrated that damaged neural functional systems could be restructured and compensated by actively engaging the patient in conscious, goal-directed objective activity.

10. Ideological Clashes, the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, and Rehabilitation

10.1 The Purges of the Late 1940s and the Charge of Cosmopolitanism

The immediate post-war period in the Soviet Union was characterized by a sharp, suffocating ideological retrenchment initiated by Andrei Zhdanov, known historically as the Zhdanovshchina. This campaign rapidly metastasized into the vicious state-sponsored “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of 1947–1953, which was heavily tinged with state anti-Semitism. The campaign demanded ideological isolationism, the absolute vilification of Western science, and the aggressive glorification of Russian national priority in all scientific discoveries. Academic intellectuals who maintained broad cosmopolitan horizons or cited Western scholars were publicly targeted as “rootless cosmopolitans” and class enemies.

Rubinstein, with his impeccable German doctoral training, his Jewish heritage, his profound encyclopedic references to Western European philosophy, and his insistence on objective scientific truth over parochial chauvinism, became the prime target of this ideological offensive within psychological science. Party hacks, ideological competitors, and opportunistic colleagues launched vicious polemics against his 1940/1946 masterpiece Foundations of General Psychology. Rubinstein was accused of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism,” of “slavish subservience to foreign, Western bourgeois psychology,” and of failing to sufficiently celebrate Russian and Soviet priority in scientific discoveries. His theoretical citations of Immanuel Kant, Hermann Cohen, William James, and Ernst Mach were denounced as ideological treason.

10.2 Removal from Academic Posts and Political Marginalization

The political assaults against Rubinstein culminated in catastrophic institutional purges between 1947 and 1949. Organized denunciation sessions were convened at Moscow State University, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Academic figures whom Rubinstein had mentored or sheltered joined the chorus of orchestrated condemnation to save their own careers. In March 1949, Rubinstein was systematically stripped of all his administrative chairs, directorships, and official pedagogical appointments. He was fired from his position as Head of the Department of Psychology at Moscow State University, ousted from the directorship of the Institute of Psychology, and expelled from the leadership of the psychology sector at the Institute of Philosophy.

His monographs, including the Stalin Prize-winning Foundations of General Psychology, were purged from university libraries and effectively banned from pedagogical circulation. Rubinstein was subjected to humiliating public “self-criticism” rituals, yet even under immense political pressure, he refused to engage in the wholesale intellectual capitulation or dishonest denunciation of others demanded by the party apparatus. Deprived of his departments, his laboratories, and his students, Rubinstein entered a period of extreme personal and academic isolation. Yet, with extraordinary stoic fortitude, he converted his forced domestic confinement into a period of intense, solitary philosophical writing, working tirelessly in private on the deep ontological problems of human existence.

10.3 De-Stalinization, Rehabilitation, and Final Publications

The death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and the subsequent “Thaw” initiated by Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies brought a gradual, profound reversal of Rubinstein’s tragic fortunes. As the hysterical atmosphere of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign dissolved, leading figures within the Soviet Academy of Sciences recognized the catastrophic damage that Rubinstein’s purge had inflicted upon Soviet psychology. In the mid-1950s, Rubinstein was politically rehabilitated and gradually restored to scientific leadership.

In 1956, Rubinstein was reinstated as the head of the psychology sector at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a position he retained until his death. This late-stage return to public academic life inaugurated an astonishingly fertile creative renaissance. Between 1957 and 1960, Rubinstein published three transformative masterworks: Being and Consciousness (1957), On Thinking and Ways of Its Investigation (1958), and Principles and Paths of the Development of Psychology (1959). These final publications reaffirmed his absolute scientific authority, providing Soviet psychology with a non-dogmatic, philosophically profound methodological framework that withstood the ideological tides of the Cold War.

11. Rubinstein versus Vygotsky and Leontiev: Debates in Activity Theory

11.1 Divergent Lineages of the Activity Approach

Within the broader landscape of Soviet psychology, the concept of “activity” (deyatel’nost’) became the dominant theoretical category. However, beneath this shared terminology raged profound, long-standing conceptual debates. The two primary, competing orientations were Rubinstein’s philosophical-epistemological activity approach (often termed the Moscow-Leningrad school) and the structural-psychological activity approach developed by Aleksei N. Leontiev and the Kharkov Psychological School, which trace their roots back to the cultural-historical circle of Lev Vygotsky.

While both Rubinstein and Leontiev agreed that human psychology is social, historical, and rooted in objective activity, their fundamental theoretical architectures were markedly divergent. Leontiev developed a structural-hierarchical model of activity, famously parsing it into distinct structural units: Activity (driven by motives), Actions (directed toward conscious goals), and Operations (conditioned by objective environmental circumstances). Rubinstein, conversely, approached activity from an epistemological, subject-oriented perspective. Rubinstein was less concerned with categorizing external behavioral structures and far more focused on the dialectical relationship between the acting Subject, the conscious Process of mental activity, and the objective Reality being transformed. This divergence led to fierce, high-stakes academic polemics over the foundational mechanisms of human mental life.

11.2 The Debate Over Interiorization and Exteriorization

The sharpest, most contentious theoretical battlefield between Rubinstein and the school of Leontiev revolved around the concept of Interiorization (interiorizatsiya)—the process whereby external, material actions are transformed into internal, mental processes. Leontiev, building upon formulations inherited from Vygotsky and French sociologist Pierre Janet, argued that internal mental activity is structurally identical to external material activity, having been formed directly through the inward translation (“interiorization”) of external social actions with physical objects.

Rubinstein subjected this concept of interiorization to a devastating, relentless philosophical critique. He argued that Leontiev’s model was an insidious, refined form of mechanistic reductionism. If the internal mind is merely the inward copy or imprint of external activity, then the subject’s internal reality is reduced to a passive receptacle devoid of its own immanent laws and structures. Rubinstein asserted: “Mental activity is not the interiorization of external activity; it is the internal activity of the subject.” Rubinstein insisted that interiorization cannot create mental life out of nothing; rather, external practical acts are always assimilated, filtered, and reconstructed by pre-existing internal mental structures and biological substrates. External actions act exclusively through internal conditions. By defending this position, Rubinstein protected psychology from a new form of vulgar materialism that threatened to erase the specific, irreducible reality of internal subjective processes.

11.3 Rubinstein’s Critique of Vygotskian Sign Mediation

Rubinstein’s critical eye was equally engaged with the foundational premises of Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology. While acknowledging Vygotsky’s undeniable genius in emphasizing the socio-cultural development of higher mental functions, Rubinstein raised serious epistemological concerns regarding Vygotsky’s heavy, almost exclusive reliance on semiotic (sign) mediation. Vygotsky had posited that human consciousness arises through the internalization of culturally constructed signs, psychological tools, and linguistic symbols.

Rubinstein argued that Vygotsky’s formulation risked sliding into a subtle, neo-Hegelian “semiotic idealism.” By prioritizing the semiotic sign over practical-material engagement, Vygotsky had placed the primary engine of psychological development within cultural symbols, language, and meaning systems, rather than within real, practical material labor and objective physical activity. Rubinstein insisted that signs and language do not invent or generate consciousness on their own; rather, signs are themselves tools that emerge out of, and remain subservient to, practical human labor directed at the physical transformation of the material world. For Rubinstein, the foundational unit of human psychological development was not the semiotic sign acting upon the psyche, but the conscious material act (postupok) of a subject actively transforming objective physical reality.

12. Philosophical Synthesis and Epistemological Legacy

12.1 The Humanistic Capstone: ‘Man and the World’ (Chelovek i mir)

In the final years of his life, fully aware of his failing health, Rubinstein embarked upon the ultimate philosophical synthesis of his career. Left unfinished at his death in 1960 and published posthumously in 1973 through the dedicated efforts of his loyal disciple Ksenia Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, the treatise Man and the World (Chelovek i mir) represents the humanistic, philosophical capstone of Rubinstein’s thought. In this extraordinary work, Rubinstein transcended the narrow, specialized boundaries of technical psychology to construct a comprehensive philosophical anthropology and an ontology of human existence.

Man and the World centers entirely upon the human subject as a conscious, moral, and historical agent situated within the totality of being. Rubinstein departed from the sterile, scientistic models of the human person to articulate an ontological humanism. The human being is not an isolated atom in an indifferent universe; the human being is the highest form of self-conscious existence within being itself. Human existence is defined by its intentional relationship to other human beings and to the world: to be human is to exist in an active, loving, and transformative relationship with reality. Rubinstein anticipated contemporary existential, dialogical, and phenomenological psychology, demonstrating that an authentic dialectical materialism must culminate in a profound ethical responsibility of the subject toward society, nature, and the historical future.

12.2 International Dissemination and Reception

The international dissemination of Rubinstein’s work has historically faced severe geopolitical and linguistic barriers. Throughout the Cold War, the intense ideological confrontation between East and West, coupled with the profound linguistic difficulty of Rubinstein’s dense, philosophical German-Russian prose, prevented his works from achieving the rapid, widespread international fame enjoyed by Vygotsky. While Vygotsky’s texts were translated into English in the late 1960s and 1970s—often in heavily edited, simplified formats that aligned with Western cognitive linguistics—Rubinstein’s extensive compendiums remained largely untranslated in the Anglo-American world.

Conversely, in Central and Eastern Europe—particularly in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—Rubinstein’s impact was profound and institutionalized. His Foundations of General Psychology was translated into German (as Grundlagen der allgemeinen Psychologie) and served for decades as the foundational standard across Central European university departments. In Latin America and parts of Western Europe, particularly Italy and France, progressive philosophers of science and critical psychologists engaged deeply with his writings. In recent decades, Western philosophers of mind and cultural-historical researchers, seeking to move beyond the oversimplified semiotic interpretations of Vygotsky and the structural rigidities of Leontiev, have increasingly turned to Rubinstein’s untranslated archives, discovering a treasure trove of sophisticated epistemological insights.

12.3 Contemporary Relevance in Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind

In the twenty-first century, Rubinstein’s theoretical framework is experiencing a striking, prophetic vindication across cognitive science and philosophy of mind. The contemporary emergence of 4E Cognitive Science—which conceptualizes the mind as Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Extended—mirrors the core principles that Rubinstein formulated nearly a century ago. The enactive approach championed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Alva Noë, which rejects the Cartesian view of the brain as a passive computational processor and asserts that cognition is an active “bringing forth of a world” through embodied interaction, is structurally identical to Rubinstein’s 1922 doctrine of creative self-activity.

Furthermore, his foundational methodological formula—external causes act through internal conditions—has become a cornerstone of modern systems biology, epigenetics, and advanced dynamic systems models of cognitive development. Modern neuroscience has completely dismantled the linear, stimulus-response models of the past, confirming Rubinstein’s insight that external inputs are invariably refracted through the dynamic, self-organizing internal neural and cognitive states of the organism. As contemporary philosophy of mind continues to struggle with the dual traps of physicalist reductionism and panpsychist idealism, Sergei Rubinstein’s non-reductive, dialectical ontology stands as a towering, highly relevant intellectual blueprint for a unified, humanistic science of the conscious mind.

Conclusion

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein’s life and work represent an enduring monument to theoretical rigor, philosophical depth, and intellectual courage. Operating at the tumultuous intersection of Russian imperial culture, German transcendental idealism, and Soviet dialectical materialism, he accomplished what few thinkers in the history of psychology have ever attempted: the construction of a comprehensive, epistemologically grounded, and empirically productive science of human consciousness and action. Rubinstein refused the false comfort of intellectual compromises. He resisted the lure of introspective mentalism, the dead end of mechanical behaviorism, and the dogmatic simplifications of ideological totalitarianism, maintaining throughout his life an unyielding commitment to the objective reality and transformative power of human agency.

From his 1922 manifesto on creative self-activity through his 1940 masterwork Foundations of General Psychology, to his posthumously published anthropological capstone Man and the World, Rubinstein established an indissoluble truth: that human beings are neither the passive puppets of environmental conditioning nor the disembodied carriers of transcendental forms. We are living, historical subjects who forge our minds, our personalities, and our humanity in the very act of transforming the objective world. As the behavioral, neural, and cognitive sciences of the twenty-first century continue to dismantle dualistic paradigms in search of an embodied, enactive, and socially embedded understanding of human subjectivity, Sergei Rubinstein’s monumental legacy provides an indispensable philosophical compass, ensuring that the study of the human mind remains forever anchored in the creative, transformative praxis of the human person.

References

• Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, K. A., & Brushlinsky, A. V. (1989). Filosofsko-psikhologicheskaya kontseptsiya S. L. Rubinshteina [The philosophical and psychological conception of S. L. Rubinstein]. Nauka.
• Bakhurst, D. (1991). Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511624797
• Brushlinsky, A. V. (1997). The “activity-approach” and “psychological science” in the Soviet period. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 35(2), 36–49.
• Leontiev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Prentice-Hall.
• Rubinstein, S. L. (1922). Printsip tvorcheskoi samodeyatel’nosti: K filosofskim osnovam sovremennoi pedagogiki [The principle of creative self-activity: Toward the philosophical foundations of modern pedagogy]. Uchenye zapiski vysshei shkoly goroda Odessy, 2, 148–154.
• Rubinstein, S. L. (1940). Osnovy obshchei psikhologii [Foundations of general psychology]. Uchpedgiz.
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• Rubinstein, S. L. (1958). O myshlenii i putyakh ego issledovaniya [On thinking and ways of its investigation]. Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR.
• Rubinstein, S. L. (1959). Printsipy i puti razvitiya psikhologii [Principles and paths of the development of psychology]. Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR.
• Rubinstein, S. L. (1973). Chelovek i mir [Man and the world]. Nauka.
• Valsiner, J., & van der Veer, R. (2000). The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea. Cambridge University Press.