Vladimir Bekhterev

Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (20 January 1857 – 24 December 1927) was a Russian neurologist and psychologist who built the first reflex-based account of human behaviour, founded Russia's first experimental psychology laboratories, and gave his name to a string of anatomical structures and clinical signs. He developed his association reflex at the same time as Ivan Pavlov developed the conditioned reflex, and lost the argument for priority — partly on the evidence, partly on the politics.

Introduction

Bekhterev's project was to make psychology objective by rebuilding it on the reflex. Where introspective psychology asked people what they experienced, he measured what they did: a motor withdrawal from a mild electric shock, a hand pulled away, a pupillary response. Everything else — habit, language, personality, even the behaviour of crowds — was to be assembled out of these units and their associations. He called it reflexology, and later objective psychology.

In the English-speaking world his name is attached to a handful of eponyms and to a footnote in the prehistory of behaviourism. In Russia he is a founder: of experimental psychology as a laboratory discipline, of the journal that carried it, of the Psychoneurological Institute in St Petersburg, and of a clinical neurology that survived him.

Early Life and Education

Bekhterev was born on 20 January 1857 in the Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire, into the family of a police officer. He entered the Surgical Academy — later the Military Medical Academy — in St Petersburg in 1873 and graduated in 1878, going to work in the department of nervous and mental diseases under Jan Mierzejewski. He took his medical doctorate at St Petersburg in 1881.

He then spent several years abroad, the standard finishing for a Russian scientist of the period: neurology under Jean-Martin Charcot and electrophysiology under Emil du Bois-Reymond, and a year as a research student in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig. The combination is visible in everything he did afterwards — the anatomical precision of the French clinic, the measurement discipline of the German laboratory, and a determination that psychology should have both.

Academic and Professional Career

Bekhterev returned to Russia in 1885 and took a chair at Kazan University, where in 1886 he established one of the country's first psychology laboratories. He moved to St Petersburg in 1893 as professor of nervous and mental diseases at the Military Medical Academy, founded a second laboratory there in 1895, and in 1896 launched Review of Psychiatry, Neurology and Experimental Psychology, the first Russian journal devoted to experimental psychology.

In 1907 he founded the Psychoneurological Institute in St Petersburg, with departments for psychiatry, alcoholism, epilepsy and neurosurgery — an institution built on the premise that the brain's structure, its disorders and the education of children belonged under one roof. He was forced to resign his academy chair in 1913, was reinstated after the revolution, became head of the department of psychology and reflexology at the University of Petrograd, and founded the Institute for the Study of the Brain and Mental Activity.

The 1913 dismissal had two causes, and neither was scientific weakness. Bekhterev had supported protesting students against the academy's regulations, and he had served as an expert witness for the defence at the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial, testifying that nothing in the psychiatric literature supported the claim of a religious ritual murder and refusing to leave his professional framework under a hostile cross-examination. He had form as a critic of the state: at a psychiatric conference in Kyiv in 1905 he attacked official policy on education and alcoholism and was briefly arrested for it.

He married twice. With his first wife, Natalya Bazilevskaya, he had six children; after her death in 1926 he married Berta Gurdzhi at the age of seventy. He was said to need only five hours of sleep, and over fifty years produced more than six hundred scientific papers and around ten books.

The Rivalry with Pavlov

Bekhterev and Pavlov arrived at the same phenomenon independently, and neither thought much of the other's method. Pavlov worked on salivary secretion in dogs. Bekhterev worked on motor reflexes — a dog's paw, a human hand — elicited by mild electrical stimulation, which had the advantage of being demonstrable in people. He attacked the salivary method directly: using acid to provoke salivation contaminates the result, he argued, and the secretory reflex is unreliable because an animal that is not hungry will not respond to food.

Pavlov's counter was that Bekhterev's laboratory was poorly controlled, and on that point Pavlov was probably right. The priority question matters for the history of behaviourism: when John B. Watson gave his 1915 address as president of the American Psychological Association, he had Bekhterev's work available in German and French translation from 1913 and only a handful of translated Pavlov papers. The Russian parent of American behaviourism is, on the citations, closer to Bekhterev than to Pavlov.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Reflexology

The association reflex is Bekhterev's central idea: a reflex acquired in individual experience, linking a stimulus to a response that was not originally connected to it. Association reflexes are formed by repetition, can be inhibited, can be recovered after extinction, and generalise to similar stimuli — the standard properties later catalogued under conditioning. His claim was that these are the units out of which all behaviour is built, with language as a particularly complex reflex system.

The method was what he insisted on. Objective psychology, as he set it out in 1907, would study observable behaviour and its physiological basis and would not treat consciousness as a subject of inquiry at all. That refusal is what makes him a forerunner of behaviourism, and it is also the limitation he shares with it.

Anatomy and Clinical Neurology

Bekhterev was a working anatomist, and the eponyms record it: the superior vestibular nucleus, the Kaes–Bekhterev layer of the cortex, and a series of reflexes of the eye, face, abdomen, shoulder and heel. In 1893, in the same decade as Adolph Strümpell and Pierre Marie, he described the spinal rigidity and ankylosis of what is called ankylosing spondylitis — Bechterew's disease in the Russian and German literature, Marie–Strümpell disease elsewhere.

He also worked on the hippocampus and its role in memory, on hypnosis and suggestion, on reaction time and attention span, and on child development, including the age at which vestibular reflexes first appear in infants.

Collective Reflexology

The most ambitious and most criticised extension was social. Bekhterev proposed that groups had reflexes too — that collective behaviour could be analysed as the association reflexes of a crowd — and argued that because social conditions produce mental disorder, improving those conditions would reduce both illness and crime. He was also involved in the early Soviet movement for the scientific organisation of labour, arguing against Taylorism that efficiency had to be bought without fatigue or hazard to the worker.

Major Publications

  • Consciousness and Its Borders (1888)
  • The Conduction Paths of the Brain and Spinal Cord (first published 1882, second edition 1896) — the two-volume anatomical work that won him the Baer Prize in December 1900 and set out his account of the hippocampus and memory
  • Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life (1899)
  • Psyche and Life (1902)
  • Foundations of the Theory of Brain Functions (1903–1907)
  • Objective Psychology (1907)
  • Psychoreflexology (1910)
  • General Diagnostics of Diseases of the Nervous System (1911–1915)
  • Subject Matter and Tasks of Social Psychology as an Objective Science (1911)
  • General Principles of Human Reflexology (first edition 1917, fourth and last 1928) — went through four Russian editions and was translated into German and English
  • Collective Reflexology (1921)
  • The Conduction Paths of the Spinal Cord and Brain (1926)
  • Brain and Activity (1928)

Impact and Legacy

Bekhterev's anatomical and clinical work was absorbed into neurology and is still cited. His laboratories, his journal and his institute gave Russian psychology an institutional base it had not had. And the priority claim over the conditioned reflex is real, even if the programme attached to it was not.

The theory is where the reservations sit.

Reflexology was reductionist in a way that even sympathetic contemporaries rejected. Explaining language, personality and the behaviour of crowds as complexes of association reflexes asserts a programme rather than carrying one out, and when Bekhterev extended it to social phenomena he was criticised — within Soviet psychology among other places — for mechanically equating physical, biological and social laws. The social claims have not survived.

The exclusion of consciousness was a strategic error shared with early behaviourism. B. F. Skinner and the American tradition later rediscovered that a psychology which refuses to speak about what people report cannot explain much of what people do.

And the laboratory discipline was genuinely weaker. Pavlov's jibe about poor controls was not empty: Pavlov's apparatus and his quantification were superior, his theory was more comprehensive, and he had the Nobel Prize of 1904 to make it canonical. Bekhterev had the wider range and the worse data.

Then there is the death. On 23 December 1927, having lectured on child neurology at the First All-Russian Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists in Moscow, where he was honorary president, Bekhterev went to the Kremlin to examine Stalin. He returned about three hours later and told colleagues: "I have just examined a paranoiac with a withered arm." He died the next day, suddenly, at seventy. The suggestion that Stalin had him poisoned for the diagnosis is repeated everywhere and has never been proved; what is documented is that his health had shown no sign of decline in the weeks before, that the authorities insisted on a rapid cremation, and that the story attached itself to a man with a withered left arm who did not tolerate comment on his mental state. The related claim that Stalin had Bekhterev's name and works struck from Soviet textbooks is treated as dubious by historians. It is a genuine unsolved death and a largely unevidenced revenge story, and the two should be kept apart.

A sculpture was erected at the Volkovo cemetery in St Petersburg in the 1970s, and a Russian stamp marked the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2007.

Learn More

References

  • Bekhterev, V. M. (1932). General Principles of Human Reflexology. International Publishers.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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