The Criminal

Abstract

Focused on Luria’s The Nature of Human Conflicts, or Emotion, Conflict and Will published in English translation in 1932, this chapter explores experiments, including word association tests, Luria conducted in police cells with people suspected or convicted of murder and explores connections between these experiments and his contemporaneous engagement with psychoanalysis. Luria’s short, matter-of-fact case histories give vivid, violent and sometimes bizarre insights into the lives of ordinary Soviet people in Moscow during the period of the New Economic Policy (1922–1928). This chapter asks what implications Luria’s lack of interest in the social details revealed in his clinical material had on his experimental methods and conclusions.