Lev Vygotsky

Works

• 1927The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology

  A methodological study of the competing schools of psychology, calling for a general psychology built on Marx’s method rather than on quotations.

• 1934Thinking and Speech

  Thought and language have different roots but merge in childhood; inner speech arises from social speech, and concepts develop through instruction.

Position

Vygotsky held that the higher mental functions – voluntary attention, logical memory, conceptual thinking – are not simply given by nature but arise from social life: every such function appears first between people and then within the individual. Signs, above all language, serve as psychological tools that reshape the mind as technical tools reshape labour. In “Thinking and Speech” he argued against Jean Piaget that the child’s egocentric speech does not die away but turns into inner speech. His concept of the zone of proximal development – what a child can do with help today and alone tomorrow – grounds the claim that instruction leads development. Luria and Leontiev developed his approach into neuropsychology and activity theory; from the 1960s Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole and James Wertsch made him a central figure of Western educational psychology, and Andy Clark took up language as a scaffold of cognition. Objections concern the texts and their use: “revisionist” research (Anton Yasnitsky, René van der Veer) points to altered Soviet editions and to a popular image that simplifies his work, and the expedition to Uzbekistan that Luria led in 1931–32 within Vygotsky’s programme has been criticised for treating cultural difference as a developmental lag.

Life & context

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born on 17 November 1896 in Orsha into a Jewish family and grew up in Gomel, both in today’s Belarus. From 1913 he studied law at Moscow University and at the same time history and philosophy at the Shanyavsky People’s University. Back in Gomel from 1917, he taught literature and psychology at schools and a teacher-training college and wrote “The Psychology of Art”. His lecture at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad in January 1924 led to a post at the Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow. There he worked with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev, built up a laboratory for the psychology of children with disabilities, from which the Experimental Defectological Institute emerged in 1929, and also lectured in Leningrad and Kharkiv. He had suffered from tuberculosis since 1920 and died in Moscow on 11 June 1934, aged 37; “Thinking and Speech” appeared later that year. After a party decree of 1936 against “pedology” his works were hardly reprinted until 1956; the Russian collected works followed in 1982–84.

Further main works

• The Psychology of Art (Psikhologiia iskusstva, written 1925, published 1965)
• The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions (Istoriia razvitiia vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii, written 1931, published in part 1960)
• The Teaching about Emotions (Uchenie ob emotsiiakh, written 1931–33, published 1984)