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Cambridge handbook of cultural-historical psychology by Yasnitsky, Van der Veer, & Ferrari (Eds.)
- Anton Yasnitsky
- Alex Kozulin
- Oliver Sacks
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RESUMO Este artigo apresenta um reconhecido psicólogo soviético do Círculo Vigotski–Luria, Aleksei N. Leontiev, traz uma visão geral de suas contribuições para a pesquisa em psicologia e explora a vertente Vigotski–Leontiev–Zinchenko dos estudos psicológicos sobre a memória humana e a recordação. O quadro geral da “ciência do super-homem” vigotskiana como componente da singular ciência soviética de vanguarda também é abordado neste artigo.
RESUMO Este artigo apresenta um reconhecido psicólogo soviético do Círculo Vigotski–Luria, Aleksei N. Leontiev, traz uma visão geral de suas contribuições para a pesquisa em psicologia e explora a vertente Vigotski–Leontiev–Zinchenko dos estudos psicológicos sobre a memória humana e a recordação. O quadro geral da “ciência do super-homem” vigotskiana como componente da singular ciência soviética de vanguarda também é abordado neste artigo.
This article is dedicated to the discussion of revisionism in Vygotskian science, an approach developed by Yasnitsky and colleagues and detailed in “‘In August of 1941’: Alexander Luria’s Unknown Letter to the USA in the Light of Revisionist Revolution in the Historiography of Russian Psychology” (Yasnitsky & Lamdan, 2017). The aim of revisionist revolution supporters is a critical analysis of the scientific heritage of Vygotsky, Luria and their colleagues, and the demythologization of Vygotsky’s personality as well as the scientific contribution of his school. In our article, we analyze the shift from “archival revolution” to the revelatory “revisionist revolution” which took place in 2012. The analysis included publications of Yasnitsky and colleagues “[I Wish You Knew From What Stray Matter...]” (2011), “Back to the Future” (2013), “[Kurt Koffka: “Uzbeks Do Have Illiusions!” The Luria – Koffka Controversy]”, “Deconstructing Vygotsky’s Victimization Narrative...” (2015) as well as the paper mentioned in the heading of our article. We describe the advantages and disadvantages of the first two works, and sharply criticize the last three of them. We justify our disagreement with Yasnitsky’s undervaluation of the results of Luria’s Central Asian expeditions. We also refute the assumptions of Yasnitsky and his colleagues (2015, 2017) about the absence of documentary evidence demonstrating that the heritage and name of Vygotsky were under administrative prohibition during the years of Stalinism, and provide corresponding documents. We conclude that ignorance of one group of facts and tendentious analysis of the other, as well as partiality in the discussion, lead Yasnitsky and his colleagues to express a biased perception of psychological science development.
Introduction This chapter invites the reader to look at the ideas and notions that formed cultural-historical psychology. This will be done with a particular interest in Vygotsky’s thinking about language and hence with an explicit focus on language activity. We think that this specific approach will shed some light on the whole Vygotskian enterprise, and, consequently, on cultural-historical psychology as a framework. Looking at the “conceptual volume” of cultural-historical psychology, we will consider the historical threads the theory took up and developed from former times, and specifically, from German culture and language. It is noteworthy that German in these times – around the turn of the twentieth century – was a highly valued language, internationally used in science, and also esteemed in literary works of art. Thus, it was common for many scholars in Russia to be fluent readers of German, and we can assume a vivid exchange of ideas within the European intellectual landscape. Specifically, we can speak of a migration of concepts. This certainly holds true for the notion of inner form that we think belongs to one of the most important theories concerning language in a cultural-historical framework, namely interiorization and the relationship between word and thought. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s language philosophy, which included this notion, had a seminal influence on Russian thinking about language (van der Veer, 1996; Zinchenko, 2007; Bertau, 2011a). It was Aleksandr Potebnia who was the main transmitter of Humboldt’s ideas to the East, and the generation of scholars active in the first decades of the twentieth century – Yakubinsky, Vološinov, Vygotsky, Bakhtin – all knew Potebnia’s works, they were part of the vivid discussion of a dynamic conception of language and its consequences for theories in literature and psychology. That is, the basic idea of language as activity and the dialogue as the starting phenomenon to conceive language are to be found in Humboldt and the Russians.
Introduction The present volume thoroughly examines the most central ideas and concepts of cultural-historical theory, its method, its application to several developmental and therapeutic domains, and its expansion into different paradigms, such as cognitive science and dialogism. This programmatic essay aims to invite readers to go a step further toward developing a concept and a practice of scientific research about the complexities of human beings and human life. Note that this step forward relates back to the past – to Vygotsky and his collaborators’ quest for an integrative human science (Yasnitsky, 2011a). This integrative science involves human cultural and biosocial development and thus goes beyond the dualism of physiological versus psychological aspects (i.e. mindless body, or disembodied mind). For us, this integrative idea is interesting and we take it to be one of the main contributions of the Vygotsky Circle. It is an idea still needed in these times of even greater disciplinary fragmentation than in the early twentieth century; a fragmentation that not only builds taken-for-granted divisions into phenomena like language, consciousness, mind, body, and activity, but also reduces these phenomena to notions and frameworks specific to particular disciplines.
If 27 years of prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die. Nelson Mandela (2011, p. 274) At the center of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology is the fact that human beings are distinguished by their capacity for signification, that is their ability to use signs (words) in order to make meaning. Not only do we experience sensations and produce actions in the world but we also attempt to understand and explain our actions and experiences as well as the actions of others and other things. This bundle of interconnected human attributes that include meaning, understanding, and explaining is what we commonly call consciousness (or self-consciousness) and it is this distinctive human quality that Vygotsky designated as the object of study for the discipline of psychology. There is no better place to begin an account of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology than with the words with which he ended his book, Thinking and speech (1987, p. 285), that were written a few months before his untimely death. Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun is reflected in a droplet of water. The word is a microcosm of consciousness, related to consciousness like a living cell is related to an organism, like an atom is related to the cosmos. The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness.
In the autobiography that Luria wrote in the last years of his life, in which he put a whole lifetime, and a lifetime's work, in perspective, the final chapter is entitled "Romantic Science." It is crucial to bring out at the onset that Luria's preoccupation with "Romantic Science" was not superficial, or a late development, an idiosyncrasy, or extraneous to the wisdom of science that animated him from his earliest work to his last. Luria wrote his autobiography, 'The making of mind', in 1977, but his first book—a critique of psychoanalysis—was written in 1922. A lifetime of expansion and evolution separates these two works, but the vision of science—a complex and (it might seem) contradictory vision—remained constant, and at the heart of his work, throughout these fifty-five years.
And yet, despite Luria's own words on the matter—which he expressed not only in his published works, but in innumerate letters to colleagues and friends—there has been a persistent tendency to regard Luria's "romantic" works and preoccupations as light and superficial, scarcely deserving serious scientific and intellectual attention, or even to ignore them altogether. This essay, then, is written to redress this imbalance, to remind readers of the extraordinary complexity and richness of Luria's work and worldview, and of how vital the "romantic" was in his lifetime in science.
Introduction Dynamic assessment (DA) is a rapidly growing trend in psychological, educational, and language research and practice (Haywood and Lidz, 2007; Sternberg and Grigorenko, 2002). The key element of all DA approaches is the belief that evaluation of individual learning potential is no less important than testing the current performance level, and that the best way of doing this is to insert learning and/or interactive elements into the assessment procedure. The goal of this chapter is to identify the main conceptual aspects of DA and to elaborate the relationships between various DA approaches and the Vygotskian theoretical tradition. The chapter starts with a brief introduction to early attempts to challenge the predominantly static approach to assessment associated with the intelligence-testing tradition. Then the role of Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in shaping DA approaches is discussed together with an elaboration of the different paths taken in Russia and the West by the DA concept. The diversity of current DA approaches is reviewed and some main conceptual problems identified. The recurring theme throughout the chapter is the question of the not-so-simple relationships between the processes of learning and problem solving.
Consciousness is one of the most “inconvenient” objects of psychological research. It is so evasive and idiosyncratic that the investigation of consciousness can be compared with the study of the footprints that appear on the sand at the beach and are immediately washed away. One cannot “touch,” “weigh,” or “capture” consciousness – and not only so because consciousness is ever changing. Psychology, as well as philosophy, keeps wondering whether consciousness as a phenomenon exists as such. If it is only a sum of other psychological processes or a side effect, an epiphenomenon, that accompanies such processes, then the legitimacy of the quest for the specific characteristics of consciousness is fairly questionable. Indeed, is it
worthwhile to create a theory of something that does not exist?
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-historical psychology as an integrative/holistic developmental science of mind, brain, and culture. Its main focus is the inseparable unity of the historically evolving human mind, brain, and culture, and the ways to understand it. The contributors are major international experts in the field, and include authors of major works on Lev Vygotsky, direct collaborators and associates of Alexander Luria, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks. The handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of psychology, education, humanities and neuroscience.
* The most detailed account to date of the scientific legacies of Russian scholars, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria
* Discusses the interplay between cultural-historical psychology and other disciplines, well-established and newly emerging ones alike
* Features a concluding chapter on 'romantic science' by best-selling author, neurologist and scholar, Oliver Sacks
REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS
"What a wide-ranging view of the comprehensive subject of mind-culture-neurology! It serves a real purpose both pedagogically and in the scholarly sense."
Jerome Bruner, Professor Emeritus, New York University
Source: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/developmental-psychology/cambridge-handbook-cultural-historical-psychology
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-historical psychology as an integrative/holistic developmental science of mind, brain, and culture. Its main focus is the inseparable unity of the historically evolving human mind, brain, and culture, and the ways to understand it. The contributors are major international experts in the field, and include authors of major works on Lev Vygotsky, direct collaborators and associates of Alexander Luria, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks. The handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of psychology, education, humanities and neuroscience.
* The most detailed account to date of the scientific legacies of Russian scholars, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria
* Discusses the interplay between cultural-historical psychology and other disciplines, well-established and newly emerging ones alike
* Features a concluding chapter on 'romantic science' by best-selling author, neurologist and scholar, Oliver Sacks
