Work · Science & Human Sciences
The 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.
Introduction
Vygotsky wrote this long manuscript in 1926–27, during a period of serious illness; it remained unpublished until the Russian collected works of 1982. It surveys the schools of the time – reflexology, behaviourism, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology and introspective psychology – and argues that each expands a partial discovery into a worldview, so that the discipline falls apart into rival systems. What is needed is a general psychology: a methodology that clarifies basic concepts before facts are collected. Marxist psychology, Vygotsky insists, cannot consist of quotations from Marx and Engels; like political economy in “Capital”, it must work out its own concepts with Marx’s method. The text is read as a key to his later programme and as an early contribution to the philosophy of psychology.
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