M. I. Valdislavlev was professor of philosophy at St Petersburg Imperial University who taught and wrote about psychology for three decades until his death in 1900; some of his students later developed the new psychology in Russia, before and after the Revolution. He had training in German philosophy, but many of the introspective investigations that he published also resonated with moral and ethical teachings of Russian Orthodoxy, reflecting his early training in the religious academy. Valdislavlev's primary methods were introspection and linguistic analysis, and he carried out elaborate investigations of the will and the imagination. By 1924 the new Soviet government favored objective, experimental approaches and virtually proscribed "spiritual" psychology, leaving some questions open: did the teaching of Vladislavlev disappear, or was it absorbed into other trends in Soviet psychology? Are introspective approaches still relevant for psychological research today?