The paper is dedicated to the centennial of Professor Lev Markovich Vekker (1918–2001), who
was one of the most significant and profound theoreticians in Russian psychology of the second half of
the XX century. Vekker was a student of B.G. Ananyev, so he carried on the St. Petersburg – Leningrad
scholarly traditions. He was known for his encyclopedic knowledge and academic courage that enabled him
to formulate and resolve the grand scientific task of finding underpinnings for basic principles of integrated
theory of mental processes. Within this theory, he described the consistency of these basic principles across
mental processes of various levels of development and complexity. The revealing of general regularities of such
processes was combined with the analysis of their specificity. Vekker believed that this was the only way to
systematize the avalanche-like growth of empirical data and defeat a “thousand-headed hydra of empirism”.
We believe that underestimation of Vekker’s theoretical heritage may carry some dramatic consequences for
the development of modern psychology. The paper describes the interpretative and prognostic potential of
the basic principles of Vekker’s theoretical framework, and how useful this framework can be for resolving the
most essential problems of psychology, including origins of mind, localization of mental imagery, structure
of intelligence and mechanisms of its development, mental time as a basis for memory and attention, as well
as various practical and differential-diagnostics tasks.