Naum Efimovich Ischlondsky: a forgotten protagonist of the concept of reflexology

Material and methods

The basis of this article is work conducted in the framework of the research project ‘German–Russian relations in the fields of medicine, chemistry and pharmacy in the 19th century’, set up by the Saxon Academy of Sciences (Germany) and the Karl-Sudhoff Institute of the History of Medicine at the University of Leipzig. It has involved searching for the relevant primary literature in influential neuro-psychiatric journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relevant secondary literature was also taken into account.

Historical background

Given the failure of the quest for a neuroanatomical concept of psychiatric functions, a new concept called ‘reflexology’, which mainly had its origins in Russia, was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The aim was to establish an objective form of psychology. In contrast to behaviourism, which was also influenced by reflexology (Watson, 1930), reflexology did not reject the inner psychic functions, but tried to deliver a universal concept. It originated on the one hand with the nineteenth-century concept of reflex psychosis (Engmann and Steinberg, 2015), and on the other hand with the concept of a reflex basis for brain function, postulated by the Russian physiologist Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829–1905). The latter gave impetus to the research by the Russian physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), who discovered the conditioned reflex. One of the most influential alienists to be inspired by the reflex paradigm was the Russian Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev ¹ (1857–1927), who developed a universal theory of reflexology based on a kind of nerve energy. Thus, he explained not only psychic diseases, but also collective behaviour and cell metabolism, by reflexology and ‘chemical reflexes’, respectively (Bechterew, 1923: 287; 1926). The Russian physiologist Konstantin Nikolaevich Kornilov (1879–1957) went a step further, postulating both the existence of a certain amount of energy in each body and a mutual relationship between motor and psychic actions. Following a trigger, the whole body reacts, and this was why he called his theory ‘reactology’ rather than ‘reflexology’. Both theories were abandoned in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as a result of increasing political repression in the Stalin era. The assumptions of energetic phenomena underlying both Bekhterev’s and Kornilov’s theories contradicted the official doctrine of extrinsic influences on human behaviour, which implied that changes in the social system are what change mood and behaviour. This, according to the official line of argument, was the true interpretation of Pavlov’s research. Bekhterev had died in 1927, but Kornilov was forced by officials to give up his theory (Voprosy psichologii, 1994).

Some biographical information on Ischlondsky

Only a few biographical facts are available. Ischlondsky was born in 1896 in the city which is now Vilnius, Lithuania, but formerly belonged to the Russian Empire. He studied in the Russian Empire at the universities of Warsaw and Moscow, and obtained his doctorate at Rostov-on-Don in 1916. However, it is not clear which subjects he studied, and no dissertation has been identified in the Rostov-on-Don University library. Furthermore, the only biographical source available (Wininger, 1936) reveals that Ischlondsky was regarded as a physiologist, psychologist and pedagogue; most of his known works deal with physiological topics. On the other hand, in one of his later works (Ischlondsky, 1949), he used the English title ‘medical doctor’. He also used different first names: usually Naum Efimovich, but sometimes Nador Dorin. Rather surprisingly, there are also publications on archaeology, and about ancient Egypt in particular, attributed to a Nador Dorin Ischlondsky. In his book Brain and Behaviour (Ischlondsky, 1949), which includes a list of his publications, none of these archaeological works are mentioned. Could it be that there are two people with the same name? After World War I, Ischlondsky worked at a pedagogical institute in Vilnius, before moving to Berlin around 1923. There he published works in Russian on the biology of sexuality, which were released by a Russian publishing house located in Berlin. By 1930, when his influential compendium Neuropsyche und Hirnrinde (Ischlondsky, 1930a, 1930b) was published, he had already settled in Paris at 4, rue Thiers (Ischlondsky, 1930c). Ischlondsky remained in France until the outbreak of World War II, but in May 1940 he took part in a scientific meeting in Cincinnati, and then continued to live in the USA. From 1949 and through the 1950s he lived in New York, then in the 1960s in Los Angeles. It can be assumed that Ischlondsky, who had a Jewish background, fled the Nazi German occupation of France before May 1940. According to publication dates, he did not die before 1968. Throughout his life, Ischlondsky used the German transliteration of his name, and even in his English publications he preferred this spelling to Ishlondsky.

Ischlondsky’s work on reflexology

One of Ischlondsky’s most comprehensive works is the two-volume book Neuropsyche und Hirnrinde, which was published in 1930 (Ischlondsky, 1930a, 1930b). He himself regarded this as his life’s work, given that he had worked on it for 10 years (Ischlondsky, 1930c). The neologism ‘Neuropsyche’ derives from Bekhterev (Bechterew, 1909), who wanted to express the idea that psychic experiences were a kind of neurological function and could be investigated as independent entities, but only in the framework of neurological concepts. In his first volume, Ischlondsky propounded the conditioned reflex as the universal mechanism of the psyche. He often quoted Bekhterev, but at the same time he would stress that his concept was distinct from Bekhterev’s. As Bekhterev used motor responses in his reflexology research, Ischlondsky tended to use electro-galvanic responses (Ischlondsky, 1930a: 4). The scant biographical data available for Ischlondsky does not reveal any cooperation with Bekhterev, or even a meeting him. Bekhterev’s work is much better documented, but no collaborative project with Ischlondsky is extant. In Volume 2 of Neuropsyche und Hirnrinde, Ischlondsky drew parallels between depth psychology and reflexology. Once again, this was not Ischlondsky’s invention, as Bekhterev had already postulated such a connection: suppressed thoughts in the sense of depth psychology would correspond to suppressed excitation in a ‘reflexological’ sense. In this vein, catharsis corresponds to activation of traces of old stimuli which led to a (psychic) reflex action (Bechterew, 1926). Discussions of Ischlondsky’s work were mostly negative. The American physiologist Howard Scott Liddell (1895–1967) at Cornell University criticized Ischlondsky’s book as ‘devoutly orthodox and hence uninteresting’ (Liddell, 1934: 185), and according to a book review in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, ‘We suspect that the conditioned reflex scheme is too simple even though extremely intriguing’ (Anon., 1931). Alexander Herzberg (1887–1944), a German physician, psychologist and philosopher, accused the work of being ‘primitive’ (Herzberg, 1931: 79). Moreover, soon after publication, Ischlondsky had sent his two-volume edition to the German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz (1884–1970), known as the inventor of autogenic training, but later involved in Nazi crimes (Cocks, 1985). In the accompanying letter, Ischlondsky (1930c) does not directly ask for a review, but he wanted to attract Schultz’s attention, since Schultz was head of the publishing committee of the journal Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. However, no review of the work can be found there.

Nevertheless, Ischlondsky remained a proponent of reflexology all his life. Whereas the two volumes of the book Neuropsyche und Hirnrinde were written in German and were not translated into other languages, he presented papers on reflexology at international congresses from the 1930s on. For instance, he took part in a meeting of the French Academy of Medicine on 25 March 1930 and, after emigrating to the USA, he presented a paper on the ‘reflexologic bases of personality’ at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Cincinnati in May 1940. Moreover, in the 1930s he was also very busy attending congresses on other topics, such as endocrinology. He travelled to conferences in Cambridge, England, in 1931 and in Cairo, Egypt, in 1936 (Ischlondsky, 1949: appendix). Ischlondsky’s book Brain and Behaviour was published in English in 1949, and translated into Spanish in 1953. Compared with Neuropsyche und Hirnrinde, this book focuses more deeply on electromagnetic induction, which Ischlondsky postulated as an energy principle for the activity of the central nervous system. He presented a refined reflexology theory and, on this basis, discussed the hygiene of the psyche and sociological questions. He was utterly convinced of the correctness and universality of his theory. Still shocked by the German war crimes in World War II, he declared in the foreword: ‘May this work contribute to the prevention of further cataclysms’ (p. xi). In the following years, he always defended the theory of reflexology. This is exemplified in an article in English about the life and work of I.M. Sechenov in the influential Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (Ischlondsky, 1958); and, in a letter to the editor of a scientific journal, Ischlondsky (1968) criticized The Conditional Reflex: A Meaningless Concept by the American neurologist Robert Efron (1966).

Discussion

Naum Efimovich Ischlondsky (Ishlondsky) may be regarded as an important yet forgotten protagonist of reflexology. The reflex scheme is the point of overlap with Bekhterev’s work. But both Bechterev and Ischlondsky searched for a unifying basis for how the reflex scheme works. Whereas Bekhterev postulated a ‘nerve energy’ and ‘chemical reflexes’, Ischlondsky preferred electromagnetic induction as the key for understanding nerve processes. These unifying, reductionist theories were a consequence of the search for a so-called objective psychology, which meant obtaining results in psychological research while avoiding any possible subjective influence. With the failure of an all-embracing neuroanatomical concept of psychiatric function, the detection of conditioned reflexes opened up a new field of research at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is noteworthy that reflexology already invited criticism at an early stage due to its reductionist views. Nevertheless, Ischlondsky fought for the acceptance of this concept throughout his life. He moved to Germany, France and finally the USA, and through his research activities in these countries, he helped to introduce the Russian-born concept of reflexology there. This happened at a time when reflexology had already been abandoned in its ‘motherland’, the Soviet Union.