Not all motives adequately respond to needs: the "embodiment" can be fallacious. Nevertheless, these fallacious motives engender activity in the same way as adequate motives do, and their fallacious nature shows only at the end, when the goal is achieved, but instead of satisfaction and positive emotions an individual suffers havoc and devastation. The idea of fallacious motives, however promising it is, did not become a focus in Leontiev's investigations but was just a support for him to limit his analysis to motives, to how they structure activity.

Leontiev developed a specific mode of analysis of psychic processes and a set of directions for how to perform this analysis:

• Activity should be considered as a system in which structure is determined by the Motive (the Target, the Aim);

• Activity components are Acts, which are determined by situations, in which Targets are presented, i.e. by conscious goals;

• & Acts are composed of Operations, which are determined by means, available in actual situations, including tools, motor skills of the subject and his psycho-physiological functions.

So, scientific analysis performed in compliance with this theory should explain psychological contents of the points described above: targets, situations and means of the behavioral process.

The latter proposition he believed to be the essential one and the key to psychological analysis. Under the supervision of Leontiev much experimental and theoretical research was performed at the Moscow State University. Mostly known is the conception of formation of mental operations developed by Piotr Y. Galperin (1902–1989). The above – mentioned idea of Leontiev, that the structure of psychic processes is isomorphic to the structure of outward activity from which psyche is a derivative, was explained and developed by Galperin. According to his theory, initially an operation (for example counting) is carried out outwardly (counting sticks, for example), and then, passing through a number of certain phases, it is internalized and turns up as a mental operation. Leontiev's ideas have been put to educational practice by Elkonin and Davidov (Davidov, 1986) whose works laid foundations of Soviet pedagogical science.

Leontiev's propositions can be considered rather as elaborations of Rubinstein's proposition B, concerning how psyche is shaped, but these elaborations are more narrow and one-sided interpretations of Rubinstein's general formula. Rubinstein considers the interaction between the individual with the environment as a substrate generating psyche. But this does not mean that material interaction is the only and even the main factor, determining psychic development. His stressing of internal subjective mediation of external stimuli should not be underestimated. The inner, the subjective (and first of all motivational phenomena), for Rubinstein determined not only the objective process of interaction with the environment (external), but also the subjective experiencing of this interaction (internal), thus, psyche formation can never be viewed as a straightforward one-sided process of internalization of the outward processes.