Aron Zalkind


Aron Borissovich Zalkind was a Russian psychologist.

Life

He was born in Kharkiv, and became a student of Vladimir Serbsky. Before World War I he developed an interest in the theories of Alfred Adler.
Originally trained as a psychoanalyst, Zalkind was involved in an attempt to promote "Freudism" as an interpretation of psychoanalysis compatible with Marxism-Leninism. When this proved politically impossible, he became an advocate of paedology and when he took over as Director of the Psychological Institute of Moscow it was renamed the Institute of Psychology, Paedology and Industrial Psychology.

Works

His most famous text was The Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat. Here Zalkind argues for sexual abstinence.
In 1928 with Ernst Kolman he edited Life and Technology of the Future: Social and Scientific-Technical Utopias, an anthology of various historic utopian texts supplemented by six texts written by the contemporary Soviet intellectuals. Whereas the first five of these depict non-political technocratic utopias, the sixth, by Zalkind, entitled "The Psychology of the Future Man " was more critical: Zalkind criticised previous utopian writers for their inability to realise their utopias, something which could at that time be overcome, he claimed, thanks to the scientific nature of Marxism-Leninism. He then described a future where social environment would be transformed by a “mature Communist” ideology: human body function would alter, women would give birth to children less frequently and would experience easier pregnancies; sexuality would be less “spontaneous” both physically and emotionally. Personal physical instincts would become social instincts; people succumb less frequently to physical and mental exhaustion. However the bodies of future humanity would be smaller and finer, while their life expectancy would be almost infinite.
In 1930 Zalkind wrote a hostile preface to Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion, which was the last of Freud's works to be translated into Russian in the Soviet Era.