René van der Veer

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Leiden University

(analítico): En este artículo reportamos los hallazgos encontrados en un estudio acerca de las teorías subjetivas o personales presentes en una muestra constituida por nueve libros latinoamericanos con consejos para padres y madres, basados en la educación emocional de los hijos y de las hijas. Objetivo: describir las teorías subjetivas presentes e...

In this paper it is argued that a full understanding of Vygotsky’s legacy should be based on the study of not just his published writings but also on his notebooks, manuscripts, and correspondence. The author provides several examples of hitherto unknown findings that illustrate his argument.

This paper explores John Bowlby’s foundational contributions to attachment theory, particularly his fascination with ‘separation’ and its impact on child development. Tracing the origins of Bowlby’s interest to his personal experiences and his exposure to ideas of mental hygiene and child guidance in the 1930s, it underscores the alignment of his i...

The article discusses Vygotsky's attitude towards Gestaltpsychology. It is a translation of chapter 8 of Understanding Vygotsky (1991)

The article sketches the history of the study of Vygotsky’s legacy in the Soviet Union and the West and then switches to a brief discussion of the origin of the book Understanding Vygotsky published 30 years ago. Several features and shortcomings of the book are discussed and it is shown that recent publications partly fill the gaps in our knowledg...

This chapter highlights the scientific cooperation between Jaan Valsiner and René van der Veer as a special case of intellectual interdependency. The ups and downs of the fruits of their joint projects are being discussed as well as the difficulties we experience in remembering, reconstructing, and understanding the events and feelings of bygone da...

In this paper, newly uncovered archival material from the Bowlby archives is presented on Bowlby’s own dreams and dream interpretation. Although he was critical of orthodox psychoanalysis, Bowlby appears to have been seriously involved in Freudian dream interpretation in the 1930s and 1940s. Here, we present in annotated form his own interpretation...

Attachment theory, developed by child psychiatrist John Bowlby, is considered a major theory in developmental psychology. Attachment theory can be seen as resulting from Bowlby’s personal experiences, his psychoanalytic education, his subsequent study of ethology, and societal developments during the 1930s and 1940s. One of those developments was t...

Harry Harlow, famous for his experiments with rhesus monkeys and cloth and wire mothers, was visited by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby and by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in 1958. They made similar observations of Harlow’s monkeys, yet their interpretations were strikingly different. Bettelheim saw Harlow’s wire mother as a perfe...

The present edition of Vygotsky’s book differs from the Russian original in a number of respects. The original book appeared in four installments of each two chapters (or assignments, as they were called) in the summer or fall of 1928. The chapters were preceded by a brief instruction (e.g., ‘Carefully read the text and write a summary. Find an exa...

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist active in the 1920s and early 1930s. He developed a theory of human development that emphasized the role of education and language. In his view, language not only serves communication but also allows children to regulate their behavior. Communicative speech undergoes a series of transformations and becomes in...

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (real name Lev Simkhovich Vygodsky; Orsha 1896–Moscow 1934) was a Russian psychologist who created cultural-historical theory, which proved influential in developmental psychology and other psychological disciplines. Vygotsky characterized his approach as “height psychology” (as opposed to “depth psychology”) and posited th...

На материале известных и малоизвестных работ Л.С. Выготского, а также его личных записей обобщается эволюция представлений Л.С. Выготского о природе эгоцентрической и внутренней речи. В анализ включена, в частности, малоизвестная монография «Педология школьного возраста» (1928), а также доклад Л.С. Выготского и А.Р. Лурии «Функция и судьба эгоцентр...

In the history of psychology and theoretical discourse on the socio-emotional development of children, the names Bowlby and Spitz are often mentioned in tandem. Both men were hugely interested in research on the consequences of maternal deprivation for young infants. However, though they would appear to have been thinking along the same lines and o...

The seventh and last chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934) is generally considered as his final word in psychology. It is a long chapter with a complex argumentative structure in which Vygotsky gives his view on the relationship between thinking and speech. Vygotsky's biographers have stated that the chapter was dictated in the final mon...

On the basis of both published and unpublished manuscripts written from 1914 to 1917, this article gives an overview of Lev Vygotsky’s early ideas. It turns out that Vygotsky was very much involved in issues of Jewish culture and politics. Rather surprisingly, the young Vygotsky rejected all contemporary ideas to save the Jewish people from discrim...

Like so many psychologists, Vygotsky observed his own two children and performed little experiments with them. This chapter contains two documents with his observations of his youngest daughter, Asya, who was not yet 2 years old in the summer of 1932.

This chapter is based on a notepad with a hard green cover with an illustration of a caduceus and the heading “Notes.” Part of the pages have been lost, and a number of the statements have been crossed out, which in all likelihood means that they found their way into manuscripts that were to be printed. Paragraph headings in bold script have been a...

In 1932, Vygotsky declared the semic (semantic, semasiological) method to be the principal method in the study of mind and consciousness, but nowhere did he give an elaborate description of this method. The fullest description can be found in his notebooks.

This chapter contains three notes written in pre-revolutionary spelling. The documents reveal the idea of the book About the New Jewry, which Vygotsky called his “spiritual testament.” In the book he planned to give a critical analysis of the new political currents and the way of life of the contemporary Jews.

The documents in this chapter date from the years 1927 to 1930 and are connected with the creation of the theory of the higher psychological functions and its method of double stimulation.

This notepad, with a cardboard cover and the text “Notepad № 204,” contains 19 pages plus 4 loose pages torn from the notepad.

This chapter is based on notes written in violet ink in an exercise book with a cream-colored cover. The name of the conference is written on the cover. The internal conference was dedicated to themes that are rarely discussed in Vygotsky’s published writings. Vygotsky presents a plan for the study of child neuroses that differs substantially from...

This chapter is based on a small notebook with a black leather cover and contains notes written in ink as well as in pencil, which may reflect the time of writing.

This chapter is based on the content of a notebook without a cover. Its text is written in violet ink and runs from two sides. The first and last pages are dated “October, 1932,” which suggests that all notes were written in that month. The text consists of three parts: (1) the plan for the unwritten book On the question of the study of consciousne...

This chapter combines several documents dealing with neuropsychology, a topic that fascinated Vygotsky in the last months of his life.

This series contains documents that are connected with the unfinished work on the “Theory of emotions” (Vygotsky in The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky Vol. 6, Scientific legacy. Plenum Press, New York, 1999) and dates from approximately the end of 1931 to early 1933. They are difficult to read both because the text borders on inner speech and bec...

This chapter is based on the notes Vygotsky made while working in the EDI clinic in 1931. The notes were found in a notebook with a black leatherette cover and written in pencil as well as in ink of various colors.

These are three documents connected with the presentations by chess master Benyamin Blumenfeld and Vygotsky about the psychology of chess. The paragraph headings were added by the editors.

The present chapter is based on notes that were primarily made on cards with the heading “Processing the manuscript.” These were the cards Vygotsky used in the last months of his life (see also the next chapter). The main theme of the notes is play as a leading activity in the preschool period and the semantic field as an independent plane of the c...

The present chapter is based on texts written in pencil and in ink of various colors on sheets torn from two different notepads. The sheets were kept together presumably because they are thematically connected and written around the same time.

Like many of his contemporaries, Vygotsky repeatedly claimed that the study of mind should be based on the data of comparative psychology, developmental psychology, and clinical psychology.

This chapter contains documents connected with Thinking and speech written not before 1933. As mentioned previously, this book contained much older material: chapters 2 to 5 were written before 1930 and are included more or less intact; chapters 1, 6, and 7 were written after 1932 on the basis of existing lectures, notes, etc.. (Yasnitsky & Van der...

The present chapter is based on a notebook with concise descriptions of children seen at the Donskaya Clinic. The notebook has a leatherette cover with 36 pages, and the notes were written in violet ink. Stuck on the front cover was a piece of paper with the penciled text “About volition.” L.E. Tuzovskaya helped with the first deciphering of the te...

This chapter contains three notes written between 1926 and 1928. The notes discuss the need to define the object and method of the new Marxist psychology, whose creation Vygotsky deemed essential in “The historical meaning of the psychological crisis.”

This chapter contains notes written from 1929 to 1931 connected with the introduction of the systemic principle into cultural–historical theory. In Vygotsky’s publications, this principle was first discussed in his article “About psychological systems” (October 1930), but the present series provides the broader historical context of Vygotsky’s reth...

“A tragicomedy of strivings” is the oldest manuscript found in the Vygotsky archive. Its text was jotted down in an exercise book with the following text printed on its cover: “This exercise book belongs to the pupil… of the … class in the year 191…” A handwritten “2” was added, so that we can date the manuscript to 1912. The text is written in the...

This theme can be found in three exercise books numbered with the Roman numbers III, IV, and V. They are written in black ink and use the pre-revolutionary spelling. Exercise books I and II have not been found, and the editors invented the title of the chapter. On the inside of the back cover of exercise book V there is the inscription “Spring (Apr...

The present chapter contains a collection of short chapters written in an impressionistic style and was meant for a book about the Jewish question, but it was never finished. The notes were written in pre-revolutionary spelling in black ink and pencil on strips of paper with a width of 10 to 12 cm.

This chapter contains documents that were written in the first half of 1934 and that show a sudden deterioration of the handwriting (large, uneven, shaky) and an even more dense style. During that same period

These notes, written in black ink on seven narrow strips of paper, date from the time of writing of The Psychology of Art. The ink has faded badly, and various words could not be deciphered.

This chapter contains documents connected with Vygotsky’s reception of Kurt Lewin’s field theory. It is well known that the work of Lewin, together with that of Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Karl Bühler, and Jean Piaget, formed a major source of inspiration for Vygotsky and that he borrowed many of their ideas. Much of the empirical work of Vygotsk...

This chapter gives an idea of the ideological atmosphere in the Soviet academic world of the early 1930s. The first part of the text is based on a note written in violet ink and in pencil on seven notebook pages fastened together by a paperclip. Part of the pages have been lost. The manuscript documents, among other things, Vygotsky’s presentation...

The chapter contains various documents connected with the problem of consciousness: accounts of internal conferences, book plans, and reflections.

The seventh and last chapter of L.S. Vygotsky's main work "Thinking and Speech" (1934) devoted to relations of thought and language, is usually viewed as his last word in psychology. Although the chapter became famous, its structure has seldom been subjected to textual analysis. The article analyzes the structure of argumentation of Chapter 7 and r...

Introduction. Sleep patterns in infants is one of the main issues regarding children upbringing and has different positions in publications. Objective. To analyze 63 publications with parenting advice on sleep in infants to subsequently characterize them in terms of their position on co-sleeping and sleep training. Materials and methods. Publicatio...

In the first half of 1950, the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby visited France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the USA to gain information about the state of the art in the care of homeless children. The World Health Organization published Bowlby’s conclusions as Maternal Care and Mental Health (1952). The article aims to present an...

old article describing the ZPD idea, better one is its new re-write

John Bowlby is generally regarded as the founder of attachment theory, with the help of Mary Ainsworth. Through her Uganda and Baltimore studies Ainsworth provided empirical evidence for attachment theory, and she contributed the notion of the secure base and exploratory behavior, the Strange Situation Procedure and its classification system, and t...

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies brings together recent critical investigations which examine historical and textual inaccuracies associated with received understandings of Vygotsky’s work. By deconstructing the Vygotskian narrative, the authors debunk the 'cult of Vygotsky', allowing for a new, exciting interpretation of the logic and di...

After a brief account of Vygotsky's life, this article discusses four of Vygotsky's fundamental ideas: that (1) higher mental functions are originally shared between persons; (2) inner speech derives from communicative speech; (3) word meanings are not stable in ontogeny and can be influenced by education; and (4) individual task performance can be...

Research Findings: Two longitudinal studies are reported examining the effects of full-time day care in Mapuche and non-Mapuche families in Chile. First, the Magellan-Leiden Childcare Study (MLCS) used a sample of 95 mothers with children younger than 1 year old (n = 36 in day care). Second, we partially cross-validated our results in a large and r...

From 1957 through the mid-1970s, John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, was in close personal and scientific contact with Harry Harlow. In constructing his new theory on the nature of the bond between children and their caregivers, Bowlby profited highly from Harlow's experimental work with rhesus monkeys. Harlow in his turn was inf...

In this article, we test the hypothesis that beliefs about the ideal mother are convergent across cultures and that these beliefs overlap considerably with attachment theory’s notion of the sensitive mother. In a sample including 26 cultural groups from 15 countries around the globe, 751 mothers sorted the Maternal Behavior Q-Set to reflect their i...

This article offers a preliminary analysis of Vygotsky’s theatrical reviews from his Gomel period against the background of Russian theatrical history. For several years Vygotsky published theater reviews of performances by local and travelling companies in the local newspaper. His writings show him to have been a very knowledgeable and demanding t...

The American-Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999) developed the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to measure mother-child attachment and attachment theorists have used it ever since. When Ainsworth published the first results of the SSP in 1969, it seemed a completely novel and unique instrument. However, in this paper we will show that...

Two studies are reported examining ethnicity differences in child rearing between Mapuche and non-Mapuche families in Chile. The first study, the Magellan-Leiden Childcare Study (MLCS), consists of a sample of 110 mothers (n = 42 Mapuche) with children younger than 1 year old (M = 6.41 months old). In the second study, we cross-validated our result...

The field of cultural-historical psychology originated in the work of Lev Vygotsky and the Vygotsky Circle in the Soviet Union more than eighty years ago, and has now established a powerful research tradition in Russia and the West. The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology is the first volume to systematically present cultural-histo...

The present study is the first step towards validating the Massie-Campbell attachment during stress scale (ADS). The ADS is a one-page guide to standardized observation of mother-infant interactions meant to detect insecure attachment behaviors. So far it was used infrequently in scientific research but it is widely applied in the Chilean public he...

Background Several studies have shown that quality of childcare is a potentially important determinant of child outcomes. Despite the enormous growth in public childcare centers in Chile, little is known about the quality of these childcare centers. Objective The main purpose was to evaluate the quality of a sample of public childcare centers in C...

This article discusses significant changes in childcare policy and practice in Chile. We distinguish four specific periods of childcare history: child abandonment and the creation of foundling homes in the 19th century; efforts to reduce infant mortality and the creation of the health care system in the first half of the 20th century; an increasing...

Twenty years is a long time in the lives of the authors of a treatise – but a minuscule period in the development of core concepts in a science. When we addressed the issue of the zone of proximal development (ZPD in the English version, but zona blizhaishego razvitia – ZBR – in the original Russian) two decades ago (Valsiner and van der Veer, 1993...

In this article we report the findings found in a study about the subjective or personal theories present in a sample made up of nine Latin American books with advice on parenting, based on the emotional education of children. Objective: to describe the subjective theories present in the Latin American books with tips on parenting, specifically abo...

Introducción: Históricamente han existido consejos y directrices de "expertos" para la crianza de los hijos (Beekman, 1977; Hardyment, 2007; Hulbert, 2003). En las últimas décadas se ha incrementado la publicación y consumo de libros de auto ayuda en general (Smith, Vartanian, DeFrates-Densch, Van Loon y Locke, 2003) y en particular aquellos con co...

In this contribution the reciprocal influence of Harlow and Spitz concerning the consequences of maternal deprivation of monkeys and men, respectively, is described. On the basis of recently disclosed correspondence between Harlow and Spitz, it is argued that not only was Spitz's work on hospitalism an inspiration for Harlow to start his cloth and...

The article discusses L.S. Vygotsky's sole journey abroad which took place in the summer of 1925. L.S. Vygotsky's personal diary found in the family archive and analyzed by the authors allows a partial reconstruction of L.S. Vygotsky's stay in London throwing light on his mental state on the eve of dramatic events in his life (the illness of the en...

A brief outline of Vygotsky's major ideas is presented with only cursory reference to their historical background. Drawing on psychological and linguistic research, Vygotsky developed a theory of the development of mind. Central is the idea that the child's naturally given mental processes become transformed by the acquisition of speech and meaning...

Previously unknown correspondence between Nadya Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts, author of The Chimpanzee Child and the Human Child (1935), and Harry Harlow shows a reciprocal interest in, and admiration for, each other's work. In 1960 and 1961, they exchanged some 9 letters as well as numerous reprints and publications. The correspondence shows that Lad...

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) left the Soviet Union only once to attend a conference on the education of the deaf in London. So far almost nothing was known about this trip, which took place in a period when Vygotsky was still completely unknown as a psychologist, both inside his own country and abroad. Making use of a newly dis...

The problem of aesthetic perception occupied Vygotsky throughout his life. Working in different research collectives or networks he worked out different answers but never reached a final solution. Inadequate and incomplete access to his writings unfortunately hinders us from understanding Vygotsky's ideas and his personal motives. Publication of hi...