linguistic:translation, quality:correction, quality:corruption
Freedom and mechanistic psychology

"Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life. Where consciousness began, there dialogue began also. Only purely mechanistic relationships are not dialogic, and Dostoevsky categorically denied their importance for understanding and interpreting life and the acts of man."

Throughout the novel, in the very nature of all the characters and their interactions, the freedom of the human personality is affirmed, in opposition to any form of deterministic reduction. The "physiologism" that is being attacked is identified in the repeated references to Claude Bernard, who becomes for Dmitri a despised symbol of the scientific reduction of the human soul to impersonal physiological processes. For Dmitri the word 'Bernard' becomes the most contemptuous of insults. References to Bernard are in part a response to Zola 's theories about heredity and environment, gleaned from Bernard's ideas, which functioned as the ideological background to the Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels.

Though the affirmation of freedom and rejection of mechanistic psychology is most openly and forcefully expressed through the character of Dmitri, as a theme it pervades the entire novel and virtually all of Dostoevsky's other writings. Bakhtin discusses it in terms of what he calls the unfinalizability of Dostoevsky's characters. In Dostoevsky, a fundamental refusal to be wholly defined by an external source (another person, a social interpretation, an ideology, a system of 'knowledge', or anything at all that places a finalizing limit on the primordial freedom of the living soul, including even death) is at the heart of the character. He sees this quality as essential to the human being, to being human, and in his most fiercely independent characters, such as Ivan and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Nastasya Filippovna and Ippolit in The Idiot, or the Underground man in Notes From Underground, it is actively expressed in virtually all their words and deeds. According to Bakhtin, for Dostoevsky:

A man never coincides with himself. One cannot apply the formula of identity A≡A. In Dostoevsky's artistic thinking the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being – a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, "at second hand". The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.