The formation of the psychological theory of L.S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky Lev Semenovich

Discipline: Psychology

Topic: "Russian psychologist L.S. Vygodsky: biography, stages of activity"

1. Brief biography of L.S. Vygotsky - p.3.

2. Cultural-historical psychologist - p.5.

3. Teacher and student - page 7.

4. Vygotsky's concept - p.9.

5. Looking back - p.12.

6. List of used literature - p.12.

1. Brief biography

Vygotsky Lev Semenovich (1896-1934) - an outstanding domestic psychologist, the creator of the concept of the development of higher mental functions, was born on 11/05/1896. Lev Semenovich was born in the Belarusian town of Orsha, but a year later the Vygodskys moved to Gomel and settled there for a long time. His father, Semyon Lvovich Vygodsky, graduated from the Commercial Institute in Kharkov and was a bank clerk and insurance agent. Mother, Cecilia Moiseevna, devoted almost her entire life to raising her eight children (Lev was the second child). The family was considered a kind of cultural center of the city. For example, there is information that Father Vygodsky founded a public library in the city. Literature was loved and known in the house, it is not by chance that so many famous philologists came from the Vygodsky family. In addition to Lev Semenovich, these are his sisters Zinaida and Claudia; cousin David Isaakovich, one of the prominent representatives of "Russian formalism" (somewhere in the early 20s he began to publish, and since both of them were engaged in poetics, it is natural to want to "disengage" so that they are not confused, and therefore Lev Semenovich Vygodsky I replaced the letter "d" in my last name with "t").

Young Lev Semenovich was fond of literature and philosophy. Benedict Spinoza became and remained his favorite philosopher until the end of his life. Young Vygotsky studied mainly at home. Only the last two classes he studied at the Ratner private gymnasium in Gomel. He excelled in all subjects. At the gymnasium, he studied German, French, Latin, at home, in addition, English, ancient Greek and Hebrew.

After graduating from the gymnasium, L.S. Vygotsky entered Moscow University, where he studied at the Faculty of Law during the First World War (1914-1917). Then he became interested in literary criticism, and in several magazines his reviews of the books of symbolist writers - the rulers of the souls of the then intelligentsia: A. Bely, V. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovsky appeared.

In these student years, he wrote his first work - the treatise "The Tragedy of Hamlet Danish W. Shakespeare." After the victory of the revolution, Vygotsky returned to Gomel and took an active part in the construction of a new school. The beginning of his scientific career as a psychologist falls on this period, since in 1917 he began to engage in research work and organized a psychological office at the pedagogical college, where he conducted research. In 1922-1923. he conducted five studies, three of which he later reported at the II All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology. These were: "Methodology of reflexological research as applied to the study of the psyche", "How psychology should be taught now" and "Results of a questionnaire on the mood of students in the final grades of Gomel schools in 1923". In the Gomel period, Vygotsky imagined that the future of psychology lay in the application to the causal explanation of the phenomena of consciousness by reflexological methods, the merit of which was in their objectivity and natural scientific rigor. The content and style of Vygotsky's speeches, as well as his personality, literally shocked one of the participants in the congress - A.R. Luria.

The new director of the Moscow Institute of Psychology, N.K. Kornilov, accepted Luria's proposal to invite Vygotsky to Moscow. Thus, in 1924, the ten-year Moscow stage of Vygotsky's work began. This decade can be divided into three periods. First period (1924-1927). Having just arrived in Moscow and having passed the exams for the title of research assistant of the 2nd category, Vygotsky delivered three reports in six months. In terms of further development of the new psychological concept conceived in Gomel, he builds a behavior model based on the concept of speech reaction. The term "reaction" was introduced in order to delimit the psychological approach from the physiological one. He introduces into it signs that allow one to correlate the behavior of the organism regulated by consciousness with the forms of culture - language and art.

After moving to Moscow, he was attracted by a special area of practice - working with children suffering from various mental and physical defects. In essence, his entire first year in Moscow can be called "defectological". He combines classes at the Institute of Psychology with active work in the People's Commissariat of Education.

Having shown brilliant organizational skills, he laid the foundations of the defectological service, and later became the scientific director of the special scientific and practical institute that still exists. The most important direction of Vygotsky's research in the first years of the Moscow period was the analysis of the situation in world psychology. He writes a preface to Russian translations of the works of the leaders of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, gestaltism, trying to determine the significance of each of the directions for developing a new picture of mental regulation.

Back in 1920, Vygotsky fell ill with tuberculosis, and since then outbreaks of the disease have more than once plunged him into a "borderline situation" between life and death. One of the most severe outbreaks hit him at the end of 1926. Then, having got to the hospital, he set about one of his main studies, to which he gave the name "The Meaning of the Psychological Crisis." The epigraph to the treatise was the biblical words: "The stone that the builders despised has become the cornerstone." This stone he called practice and philosophy.

The second period of Vygotsky's work (1927-1931) in his Moscow decade was instrumental psychology. He introduces the concept of a sign, which acts as a special psychological tool, the use of which, without changing anything in the substance of nature, serves as a powerful means of transforming the psyche from natural (biological) into cultural (historical). Thus, the didactic "stimulus-response" scheme adopted by both subjective and objective psychology was rejected. It was replaced by a triadic one - "stimulus - stimulus - reaction", where a special stimulus - sign acts as an intermediary between an external object (stimulus) and the body's response (mental reaction). This sign is a kind of tool, when operating with which an individual from his primary natural mental processes (memory, attention, associated thinking) develops a special system of functions of the second sociocultural order, inherent only to a person. Vygotsky called them the highest mental functions. The most significant achievement of this period by Vygotsky and his group was summarized in a lengthy manuscript, The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions. Among the publications that preceded the indicated generalizing manuscript, we note "Instrumental method in pedology" (1928), "The problem of the cultural development of the child" (1928), "Instrumental method in psychology" (1930), "Tool and sign in the development of the child" ( 1931).

In all cases, the problem of the development of the child's psyche was at the center, interpreted from the same angle of view: the creation of new cultural forms from its biopsychic natural "material". Vygotsky becomes one of the main pedologists of the country. Out of print "Pedology of school age" (1928), "Pedology of youth" (1929), "Pedology of a teenager" (1930-1931). Vygotsky strives to recreate a general picture of the development of the mental world. He moved from studying signs as determinants of instrumental acts to studying the evolution of the meanings of these signs, primarily speech ones, in the child's mental life. The new research program became the main one in his third and last Moscow period (1931-1934). The results of its development were captured in the monograph "Thinking and Speech". Having dealt with global questions about the relationship between training and education, Vygotsky gave it an innovative interpretation in the concept he introduced about the "zone of proximal development", according to which only that training is effective, which "runs ahead" of development. In the last period of his work, the leitmotif of Vygotsky's searches, linking various branches of his work into a common knot (the history of the doctrine of affects, the study of the age dynamics of consciousness, the semantic subtext of the word), became the problem of the relationship between motivation and cognitive processes.

Vygotsky worked at the limit of human capabilities. From dawn until late, his days were oversaturated with countless lectures, clinical and laboratory work. He made numerous presentations at various meetings and conferences, wrote abstracts, articles, and introductions to materials collected by his staff. When Vygotsky was taken to the hospital, he took his beloved Hamlet with him. In one of the notes about Shakespeare's tragedy, it was noted that the main state of Hamlet is readiness. "I'm ready" - these, according to the testimony of the nurse, were Vygotsky's last words. Although early death did not allow Vygotsky to implement many promising programs, his ideas, which revealed the mechanisms and laws of the cultural development of the personality, the development of its mental functions (attention, speech, thinking, affects), outlined a fundamentally new approach to the fundamental issues of personality formation. Bibliography of L.S. Vygotsky has 191 works. Vygotsky's ideas received wide resonance in all sciences that study man, including linguistics, psychiatry, ethnography, and sociology. They determined a whole stage in the development of humanitarian knowledge in Russia and still retain their heuristic potential.

Biography

Daughter of L. S. Vygotsky - Gita Lvovna Vygotskaya- a well-known Soviet psychologist and defectologist.

Chronology of the most important events of life

1924 - report at the psycho-neurological congress, moving from Gomel to Moscow
1925 - dissertation defense Psychology of art(On November 5, 1925, Vygotsky was awarded the title of senior researcher, equivalent to the modern degree of a candidate of sciences, due to illness without protection, a contract for the publication Psychology of art was signed on November 9, 1925, but the book was never published during Vygotsky's lifetime)
1925 - the first and only trip abroad: sent to London for a defectological conference; on the way to England, he traveled through Germany, France, where he met with local psychologists
November 21, 1925 to May 22, 1926 - tuberculosis, hospitalization in the Zakharyino sanatorium hospital, writes notes in the hospital, later published under the title The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis
1927 - employee of the Institute of Psychology in Moscow, works with such prominent scientists as Luria, Bernstein, Artemov, Dobrynin, Leontiev
1929 - International Psychological Congress at Yale University; Luria presented two reports, one of which was co-authored with Vygotsky; Vygotsky himself did not go to the congress
1929, spring - Vygotsky lectures in Tashkent
1930 - report by L. S. Vygotsky on the study of higher psychological functions in psychotechnical research at the VI International Conference on Psychotechnics in Barcelona (April 23-27, 1930)
1930 October - report on psychological systems: the beginning of a new research program
1931 - entered the medical faculty at the Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy in Kharkov, where he studied in absentia with Luria
1932, December - report on consciousness, formal disagreement with Leontiev's group in Kharkov
1933, February-May - Kurt Lewin stops in Moscow on his way from the USA (through Japan), meetings with Vygotsky
1934, May 9 - Vygotsky was transferred to bed rest
1934, June 11 - death

Scientific contribution

The formation of Vygotsky as a scientist coincided with the period of restructuring of Soviet psychology based on the methodology of Marxism, in which he took an active part. In search of methods for an objective study of complex forms of mental activity and behavior of the individual, Vygotsky subjected a number of philosophical and most of his contemporary psychological concepts to critical analysis (“The Meaning of the Psychological Crisis”, manuscript), showing the futility of attempts to explain human behavior by reducing higher forms of behavior to lower elements.

Exploring verbal thinking, Vygotsky solves the problem of localization of higher mental functions as structural units of brain activity in a new way. Studying the development and decay of higher mental functions on the material of child psychology, defectology and psychiatry, Vygotsky comes to the conclusion that the structure of consciousness is a dynamic semantic system of affective volitional and intellectual processes that are in unity.

Cultural-historical theory

The book “The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions” (, publ.) gives a detailed presentation of the cultural-historical theory of the development of the psyche: according to Vygotsky, it is necessary to distinguish between lower and higher mental functions, and, accordingly, two plans of behavior - natural, natural (the result of the biological evolution of the animal world ) and cultural, socio-historical (the result of the historical development of society), merged in the development of the psyche.

The hypothesis put forward by Vygotsky offered a new solution to the problem of the relationship between lower (elementary) and higher mental functions. The main difference between them lies in the level of arbitrariness, i.e., natural mental processes cannot be regulated by a person, and people can consciously control higher mental functions. Vygotsky came to the conclusion that conscious regulation is associated with the mediated nature of higher mental functions. Between the influencing stimulus and the human reaction (both behavioral and mental) there is an additional connection through the mediating link - stimulus-means, or sign.

The most convincing model of mediated activity, which characterizes the manifestation and implementation of higher mental functions, is the "situation of Buridan's donkey". This classical situation of uncertainty, or a problematic situation (the choice between two equal possibilities), interests Vygotsky primarily from the point of view of the means that make it possible to transform (solve) the situation that has arisen. By casting lots, a person "artificially introduces into the situation, changing it, new auxiliary stimuli that are not connected with it in any way." Thus, the cast die becomes, according to Vygotsky, a means of transforming and resolving the situation.

Thinking and speech

In the last years of his life, Vygotsky paid most of his attention to the study of the relationship between thought and word in the structure of consciousness. His work "Thinking and Speech" (1934), devoted to the study of this problem, is fundamental for Russian psycholinguistics.

Genetic roots of thinking and speech

According to Vygotsky, the genetic roots of thinking and speech are different.

For example, Köhler's experiments, which discovered the ability of chimpanzees to solve complex problems, showed that human-like intelligence and expressive speech (absent in monkeys) function independently.

The ratio of thinking and speech both in phylogenesis and in ontogenesis is a variable value. There is a pre-speech stage in the development of the intellect and a pre-intellectual stage in the development of speech. Only then thinking and speech intersect and merge.

The speech thinking that arises as a result of such a merger is not a natural, but a socio-historical form of behavior. It has specific (in comparison with natural forms of thinking and speech) properties. With the emergence of speech thinking, the biological type of development is replaced by a socio-historical one.

Research method

An adequate method for studying the relationship between thought and word, says Vygotsky, should be an analysis that dismembers the object under study - speech thinking - not into elements, but into units. A unit is the smallest part of a whole that has all its basic properties. Such a unit of speech thinking is the meaning of the word.

Levels of formation of thought in a word

The relation of thought to word is impermanent; it process, the movement from thought to word and vice versa, the formation of a thought in a word:

Thought motivation.
Thought.
Inner speech.
External speech.

Egocentric speech: against Piaget

Vygotsky concluded that egocentric speech is not an expression of intellectual egocentrism, as Piaget argued, but a transitional stage from external to internal speech. Egocentric speech initially accompanies practical activity.

Vygotsky-Sakharov study

In a classic experimental study, Vygotsky and his collaborator L. S. Sakharov, using their own methodology, which is a modification of N. Akha's methodology, established types (they are also age stages of development) of concepts.

Worldly and scientific concepts

Exploring the development of concepts in childhood, L. S. Vygotsky wrote about worldly (spontaneous) and scientific concepts (“Thinking and speech”, ch. 6).

Everyday concepts are acquired and used in everyday life, in everyday communication, words like “table”, “cat”, “house”. Scientific concepts are words that a child learns in school, terms built into the knowledge system that are related to other terms.

When using spontaneous concepts, a child for a long time (up to 11-12 years old) is aware only of the object they point to, but not the concepts themselves, not their meaning. This is expressed in the lack of the ability "to verbal definition of the concept, to the possibility in other words to give its verbal formulation, to the arbitrary use of this concept when establishing complex logical relationships between concepts."

Vygotsky suggested that the development of spontaneous and scientific concepts goes in opposite directions: spontaneous - towards a gradual realization of their meaning, scientific - in the opposite direction, because "just in the area where the concept of "brother" turns out to be a strong concept, that is, in the sphere of spontaneous use, its application to countless specific situations, the richness of its empirical content and connection with personal experience, the scientific concept of the schoolchild reveals its weakness. An analysis of the child's spontaneous concept convinces us that the child is much more aware of the object than the concept itself. The analysis of a scientific concept convinces us that the child at the very beginning is much better aware of the concept itself than the object represented in it.

The awareness of meanings that comes with age is deeply connected with the emerging systematicity of concepts, that is, with the appearance, with the appearance of logical relations between them. A spontaneous concept is associated only with the object to which it refers. On the contrary, a mature concept is immersed in a hierarchical system, where logical relations connect it (already as a carrier of meaning) with many other concepts of a different level of generalization in relation to the given one. This completely changes the possibilities of the word as a cognitive tool. Outside the system, Vygotsky writes, only empirical connections, that is, relations between objects, can be expressed in concepts (in sentences). “Together with the system, relations of concepts to concepts arise, a mediated relation of concepts to objects through their relation to other concepts, a generally different relation of concepts to an object arises: supra-empirical connections become possible in concepts.” This finds expression, in particular, in the fact that the concept is no longer defined through the connections of the defined object with other objects (“the dog guards the house”), but through the relation of the defined concept to other concepts (“the dog is an animal”).

Well, since scientific concepts that a child learns in the process of learning fundamentally differ from everyday concepts precisely in that, by their very nature, they must be organized into a system, then, Vygotsky believes, their meanings are recognized first. The awareness of the meanings of scientific concepts is gradually spreading to everyday ones.

Developmental and educational psychology

Vygotsky based the periodization of the human life cycle on the alternation of stable periods of development and crises. Crises are characterized by revolutionary changes, the criterion of which is the emergence neoplasms. Thus, each stage of life opens with a crisis (accompanied by the appearance of certain neoplasms), followed by a period of stable development, when the development of neoplasms takes place.

Neonatal crisis (0-2 months).

Infancy (2 months - 1 year).

Crisis of one year.

Early childhood (1-3 years).

Crisis of three years.

Preschool age (3-7 years).

Crisis of seven years.

School age (8-12 years).

Crisis of thirteen years.

Adolescence (pubertal) period (14-17 years).

The crisis of seventeen years.

Youth period (17-21 years).

Vygotsky's influence

Notes

Main works

Psychology of Art ( idem) (1922)
Tool and sign in the development of the child (1930) (co-authored with A. R. Luria)
(idem) (1930) (co-authored with A. R. Luria)
Lectures on Psychology (1. Perception; 2. Memory; 3. Thinking; 4. Emotions; 5. Imagination; 6. The Problem of Will) (1932)
The Problem of Development and Decay of Higher Mental Functions (1934)
Thinking and speech idem) (1934)
- The bibliographic index of the works of L. S. Vygotsky includes 275 titles

Publications on the Internet

Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria Etudes on the History of Behavior: Monkey. Primitive. Child (monograph)
Course of lectures on psychology; Thinking and speech; Works of different years
Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich(1896-1934) - an outstanding Russian psychologist

About Vygotsky

Section of Lauren Graham's book "Natural Science, Philosophy and the Sciences of Human Behavior in the Soviet Union", dedicated to L. S. Vygotsky
A. M. Etkind. More about L. S. Vygotsky: Forgotten texts and unfound contexts
Tulviste P. E.-J. Discussion of the works of L. S. Vygotsky in the USA // Questions of Philosophy. No. 6. 1986.

Years of life: 1896 - 1934

Homeland: Orsha (Russian Empire)

Vygotsky Lev Semenovich was born in 1896. He was an outstanding domestic psychologist, the creator of the concept of the development of higher mental functions. Lev Semenovich was born in the Belarusian town of Orsha, but a year later the Vygodskys moved to Gomel and settled there for a long time. His father, Semyon Lvovich Vygodsky, graduated from the Commercial Institute in Kharkov and was a bank clerk and insurance agent. Mother, Cecilia Moiseevna, devoted almost her entire life to raising her eight children (Lev was the second child). The family was considered a kind of cultural center of the city. For example, there is information that Father Vygodsky founded a public library in the city. Literature was loved and known in the house, it is not by chance that so many famous philologists came from the Vygodsky family. In addition to Lev Semenovich, these are his sisters Zinaida and Claudia; cousin David Isaakovich, one of the prominent representatives of "Russian formalism" (somewhere in the early 20s he began to publish, and since both of them were engaged in poetics, it is natural to want to "disengage" so that they are not confused, and therefore Lev Semenovich Vygodsky I replaced the letter "d" in my last name with "t"). Young Lev Semenovich was fond of literature and philosophy. Benedict Spinoza became and remained his favorite philosopher until the end of his life. Young Vygotsky studied mainly at home. Only the last two classes he studied at the Ratner private gymnasium in Gomel. He excelled in all subjects. At the gymnasium, he studied German, French, Latin, at home, in addition, English, ancient Greek and Hebrew. After graduating from the gymnasium, L.S. Vygotsky entered Moscow University, where he studied at the Faculty of Law during the First World War (1914-1917). At the same time, he became interested in literary criticism, and several magazines published his reviews of the books of symbolist writers - the rulers of the souls of the then intelligentsia: A. Bely, V. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovsky. In these student years, he wrote his first work - the treatise "The Tragedy of Hamlet Danish W. Shakespeare." After the victory of the revolution, Vygotsky returned to Gomel and took an active part in the construction of a new school. The beginning of his scientific career as a psychologist falls on this period, since in 1917 he began to engage in research work and organized a psychological office at the pedagogical college, where he conducted research. In 1922-1923. he conducted five studies, three of which he later reported at the II All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology. These were: "The methodology of reflexological research as applied to the study of the psyche", "How psychology should be taught now" and "The results of a questionnaire on the mood of students in the final grades of Gomel schools in 1923. ". In the Gomel period, Vygotsky imagined that the future of psychology lay in the application to the causal explanation of the phenomena of consciousness of reflexological methods, the dignity of which lies in their objectivity and natural scientific rigor. The content and style of Vygotsky's speeches, as well as his personality, literally shocked one of the participants in the congress - A. R. Luria.The new director of the Moscow Institute of Psychology, N.K. Kornilov, accepted Luria's proposal to invite Vygotsky to Moscow. Thus, the ten-year Moscow stage of Vygotsky's work began in 1924. This decade can be divided into three periods. The first period (1924-1927 Having just arrived in Moscow and having passed the exams for the title of researcher of the 2nd category, Vygotsky delivered three reports in six months. In terms of further development of the new psychological concept conceived in Gomel, he builds a behavior model based on the reactions The term "reaction" was introduced in order to distinguish the psychological approach from the phi siological. He introduces into it signs that allow one to correlate the behavior of the organism regulated by consciousness with the forms of culture - language and art. After moving to Moscow, he was attracted by a special area of practice - working with children suffering from various mental and physical defects. In essence, his entire first year in Moscow can be called "defectological". He combines classes at the Institute of Psychology with active work in the People's Commissariat of Education. Having shown brilliant organizational skills, he laid the foundations of the defectological service, and later became the scientific director of the special scientific and practical institute that still exists. The most important direction of Vygotsky's research in the first years of the Moscow period was the analysis of the situation in world psychology. He writes a preface to Russian translations of the works of the leaders of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, gestaltism, trying to determine the significance of each of the directions for developing a new picture of mental regulation. Back in 1920, Vygotsky fell ill with tuberculosis, and since then outbreaks of the disease have more than once plunged him into a "borderline situation" between life and death. One of the most severe outbreaks struck him at the end of 1926. Then, having got into the hospital, he set about one of his main studies, which he gave the name "The Meaning of the Psychological Crisis." The epigraph to the treatise was the biblical words: "The stone that the builders despised has become the cornerstone." This stone he called practice and philosophy. The second period of Vygotsky's work (1927-1931) in his Moscow decade was instrumental psychology. He introduces the concept of a sign, which acts as a special psychological tool, the use of which, without changing anything in the substance of nature, serves as a powerful means of transforming the psyche from natural (biological) into cultural (historical). Thus, the didactic "stimulus-response" scheme adopted by both subjective and objective psychology was rejected. It was replaced by a triadic one - "stimulus - stimulus - reaction", where a special stimulus - sign acts as an intermediary between an external object (stimulus) and the body's response (mental reaction). This sign is a kind of tool, when operating with which an individual from his primary natural mental processes (memory, attention, associated thinking) develops a special system of functions of the second sociocultural order, inherent only to a person. Vygotsky called them the highest mental functions. The most significant achievement of this period by Vygotsky and his group was summarized in a lengthy manuscript, The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions. Among the publications that preceded the indicated generalizing manuscript, we note "Instrumental method in pedology" (1928), "The problem of the cultural development of the child" (1928), "Instrumental method in psychology" (1930), "Tool and sign in the development of the child" ( 1931). In all cases, the problem of the development of the child's psyche was at the center, interpreted from the same angle of view: the creation of new cultural forms from its biopsychic natural "material". Vygotsky becomes one of the main pedologists of the country. Out of print "Pedology of school age" (1928), "Pedology of youth" (1929), "Pedology of a teenager" (1930-1931). Vygotsky strives to recreate a general picture of the development of the mental world. He moved from studying signs as determinants of instrumental acts to studying the evolution of the meanings of these signs, primarily speech ones, in the child's mental life. The new research program became the main one in his third and last Moscow period (1931-1934). The results of its development were captured in the monograph "Thinking and Speech". Having dealt with global questions about the relationship between training and education, Vygotsky gave it an innovative interpretation in the concept he introduced about the "zone of proximal development", according to which only that training is effective, which "runs ahead" of development. In the last period of his work, the leitmotif of Vygotsky's searches, linking various branches of his work into a common knot (the history of the doctrine of affects, the study of the age dynamics of consciousness, the semantic subtext of the word), became the problem of the relationship between motivation and cognitive processes. Vygotsky worked at the limit of human capabilities. From dawn until late, his days were oversaturated with countless lectures, clinical and laboratory work. He made numerous presentations at various meetings and conferences, wrote abstracts, articles, and introductions to materials collected by his staff. When Vygotsky was taken to the hospital, he took his beloved Hamlet with him. In one of the notes about Shakespeare's tragedy, it was noted that the main state of Hamlet is readiness. "I'm ready" - these, according to the testimony of the nurse, were Vygotsky's last words. Although early death did not allow Vygotsky to implement many promising programs, his ideas, which revealed the mechanisms and laws of the cultural development of the personality, the development of its mental functions (attention, speech, thinking, affects), outlined a fundamentally new approach to the fundamental issues of personality formation. Bibliography of L.S. Vygotsky has 191 works. Vygotsky's ideas received wide resonance in all sciences that study man, including linguistics, psychiatry, ethnography, and sociology. They determined a whole stage in the development of humanitarian knowledge in Russia and still retain their heuristic potential.

_________________________

http://www.nsk.vspu.ac.ru/person/vygot.html
http://www.psiheya-rsvpu.ru/index.php?razdel=3&podrazdels=20&id_p=67

Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich (1896-1934) - Soviet psychologist, creator of the cultural-historical theory of the development of higher mental functions.

Born November 17, 1896 in Gomel. He studied at Moscow University (Faculty of Philology) and at the Faculty of Law of the Shanyavsky Institute, professionally engaged in literary criticism and psychology of art.

"Pedology arises on the basis of the achievements of anatomy, physiology and psychology of childhood ... But these sciences themselves will become sciences in the true sense of the word only when they rely on pedology, which historically arose on their basis, but is methodologically their basis."

Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich

In 1924 he worked as a junior researcher at the Psychological Institute in Moscow, where he soon became the central figure in a group of young scientists, among whom were A.N. Leontiev and A.R. Luria.

The key methodological concepts in the scientific and psychological work of L.S. Vygotsky are the cultural-historical theory, the concepts of internalization and higher mental functions.

According to his cultural-historical theory, the main difference between a person and an animal is the conditionality of his behavior and development by socio-cultural factors. There are two types of human mental functions: "natural" - organic and "higher" - socio-cultural. The former are predominantly determined by genetic factors, while the latter are formed on the basis of the former under the influence of social influences.

The main regularity of the ontogeny of the psyche (i.e., the formation of its main structures in childhood), according to Vygotsky, is the child’s internalization of the structure of his external, socio-symbolic activity (i.e., joint with other people, primarily between a child and an adult, and mediated by speech signs). As a result, the structure of his "natural" mental functions changes and is mediated by internalized signs. Mental functions take on the character of higher, or "cultural" and become conscious and arbitrary.

Interiorization (from lat. interior - internal) - the transition of the structures of external social and objective activity into the internal structures of the psyche. It is the source of the formation of higher mental functions: initially they are carried out as an interpsychic process (i.e., activity mediated by the use of signs, a form of interaction between people), and only then are they realized as an internal, intrapsychic process. The structure of external activity is transformed and "collapsed" in order to transform and "unfold" again in the process of exteriorization (from Latin exterior - external), to move from an internal, mental plan of action to an external one, implemented in the form of techniques and actions with objects.

As a result, concrete "external" social activity is built on the basis of this higher mental function. The word, speech acts as a universal tool that changes mental functions. Vygotsky's work Thinking and Speech (1934) reveals the role of speech in the transformation of a child's thinking, in the formation of concepts, and in solving problems. He found that in the course of the development of the child the meanings of words change significantly - from purely emotional to concrete meanings and, finally, to abstract concepts. In the same work, Vygotsky deals with the problem of egocentric speech and experimentally confirms his interpretation of this phenomenon as an important stage in the development of inner speech. L.S. Vygotsky substantiates the basic law of the development of higher mental functions of a person: “We can formulate the general genetic law of cultural development in the following form: every function in the cultural development of a child appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first social, then psychological, first - between people, as an interpsychic category, then within the child, as an intrapsychic category. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, to the formation of concepts, to the development of the will. "

Biography

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (in 1917 and 1924 he changed his patronymic and surname) was born on November 5 (17), 1896 in the city of Orsha, the second of eight children in the family of a bank employee, a graduate of the Kharkov Commercial Institute Semyon Yakovlevich Vygotsky and his wife Tsili (Cecilia) Moiseevna Vygotskaya . He was educated by a private teacher, Solomon Aspitz, known for his use of the so-called Socratic dialogue method. A significant influence on the future psychologist in childhood was also exerted by his cousin, later the well-known literary critic David Isaakovich Vygotsky (-, English).

Daughter of L. S. Vygotsky - Gita Lvovna Vygodskaya - Soviet psychologist and defectologist, candidate of psychological sciences, co-author of the biography “L. S. Vygotsky. Strokes for a portrait" (1996).

Chronology of the most important events of life

1924 - report at the psycho-neurological congress, moving from Gomel to Moscow
1925 - dissertation defense Psychology of art(On November 5, 1925, Vygotsky was awarded the title of senior researcher, equivalent to the modern degree of a candidate of sciences, due to illness without protection, a contract for the publication Psychology of art was signed on November 9, 1925, but the book was never published during Vygotsky's lifetime)
1925 - the first and only trip abroad: sent to London for a defectological conference; on the way to England, he traveled through Germany, France, where he met with local psychologists
1925 - 1930 - Member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPSAO)
November 21, 1925 to May 22, 1926 - tuberculosis, hospitalization in the Zakharyino sanatorium hospital, writes notes in the hospital, later published under the title The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis
1927 - employee of the Institute of Psychology in Moscow, works with such prominent scientists as Luria, Bernstein, Artemov, Dobrynin, Leontiev
1929 - International Psychological Congress at Yale University; Luria presented two reports, one of which was co-authored with Vygotsky; Vygotsky himself did not go to the congress
1929, spring - Vygotsky lectures in Tashkent
1930 - At the VI International Conference on Psychotechnics in Barcelona (April 23-27, 1930), a report by L. S. Vygotsky on the study of higher psychological functions in psychotechnical research was read
1930 October - report on psychological systems: the beginning of a new research program
1931 - entered the medical faculty at the Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy in Kharkov, where he studied in absentia with Luria
1932, December - report on consciousness, formal disagreement with Leontiev's group in Kharkov
1933, February-May - Kurt Lewin stops in Moscow on his way from the USA (through Japan), meetings with Vygotsky
1934, May 9 - Vygotsky was transferred to bed rest
1934, June 11 - death

Scientific contribution

Cultural-historical theory

The hypothesis put forward by Vygotsky offered a new solution to the problem of the relationship between lower (elementary) and higher mental functions. The main difference between them is the level of arbitrariness, that is, natural mental processes cannot be regulated by a person, and people can consciously control higher mental functions. Vygotsky came to the conclusion that conscious regulation is associated with the mediated nature of higher mental functions. Between the influencing stimulus and the human reaction (both behavioral and mental) there is an additional connection through the mediating link - stimulus-means, or sign.

Thinking and speech

Genetic roots of thinking and speech

According to Vygotsky, the genetic roots of thinking and speech are different.

Research method

Levels of formation of thought in a word

The relation of thought to word is impermanent; it process, the movement from thought to word and vice versa, the formation of a thought in a word:

Thought motivation.
Thought.
Inner speech.
External speech.

Egocentric speech: against Piaget

Vygotsky came to the conclusion that egocentric speech is not an expression of intellectual egocentrism, as Piaget argued, but a transitional stage from external to internal speech. Egocentric speech initially accompanies practical activity.

Vygotsky-Sakharov study

Worldly and scientific concepts

Exploring the development of concepts in childhood, L. S. Vygotsky wrote about worldly (spontaneous) and scientific concepts (“Thinking and speech”, ch. 6).

Developmental and educational psychology

In the works of Vygotsky, the problem of the relationship between the role of maturation and learning in the development of higher mental functions of the child is considered in detail. Thus, he formulated the most important principle, according to which the preservation and timely maturation of brain structures is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of higher mental functions. The main source for this development is the changing social environment, to describe which Vygotsky introduced the term social development situation, defined as "a peculiar, age-specific, exclusive, unique and unrepeatable relationship between the child and the surrounding reality, primarily social". It is this attitude that determines the course of development of the child's psyche at a certain age stage.

Vygotsky proposed a new periodization of the human life cycle, which is based on the alternation of stable periods of development and crises. Crises are characterized by revolutionary changes, the criterion of which is the emergence neoplasms. The cause of the psychological crisis, according to Vygotsky, lies in the growing discrepancy between the developing psyche of the child and the unchanging social situation of development, and it is precisely at the restructuring of this situation that the normal crisis is directed.

Thus, each stage of life opens with a crisis (accompanied by the appearance of certain neoplasms), followed by a period of stable development, when the development of neoplasms takes place.

Neonatal crisis (0-2 months).

Infancy (2 months - 1 year).

Crisis of one year.

Early childhood (1-3 years).

Crisis of three years.

Preschool age (3-7 years).

Crisis of seven years.

School age (8-12 years).

Crisis of thirteen years.

Adolescence (pubertal) period (14-17 years).

The crisis of seventeen years.

Youth period (17-21 years).

Later, a slightly different version of this periodization appeared, developed within the framework of the activity approach by Vygotsky's student D. B. Elkonin. It was based on the concept of leading activity and the idea of a change in leading activity during the transition to a new age stage. At the same time, Elkonin singled out the same periods and crises as in Vygotsky's periodization, but with a more detailed consideration of the mechanisms operating at each stage.

Vygotsky, apparently, was the first in psychology to approach the consideration of a psychological crisis as a necessary stage in the development of the human psyche, revealing its positive meaning.

In the 1970s, Vygotsky's theories began to generate interest in American psychology. In the following decade, all the main works of Vygotsky were translated and formed, along with Piaget, the basis of modern educational psychology in the United States.

Notes

Bibliography L.S. Vygotsky

Psychology of Art ( idem) (1922)
Tool and sign in child development
(1930) (co-authored with A. R. Luria)
Lectures on Psychology (1. Perception; 2. Memory; 3. Thinking; 4. Emotions; 5. Imagination; 6. The Problem of Will) (1932)
The Problem of Development and Decay of Higher Mental Functions (1934)
Thinking and speech idem) (1934)
- The bibliographic index of the works of L. S. Vygotsky includes 275 titles

Publications on the Internet

Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria Etudes on the History of Behavior: Monkey. Primitive. Child (monograph)
Course of lectures on psychology; Thinking and speech; Works of different years
Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich(1896-1934) - an outstanding Russian psychologist

About Vygotsky

Book section Lauren Graham"Natural science, philosophy and the sciences of human behavior in the Soviet Union", dedicated to L. S. Vygotsky
Etkind A. M. More about L. S. Vygotsky: Forgotten texts and unfound contexts // Issues of Psychology. 1993. No. 4. S. 37-55.
Garai L., Kechki M. Another crisis in psychology! A possible reason for the noisy success of the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky // Questions of Philosophy. 1997. No. 4. S. 86-96.
Garay L. On Meaning and the Brain: Is Vygotsky Compatible with Vygotsky? // Subject, cognition, activity: To the seventieth birthday of V. A. Lektorsky. M.: Kanon+, 2002. C. 590-612.
Tulviste P. E.-J. Discussion of the works of L. S. Vygotsky in the USA // Questions of Philosophy. 1986. No. 6.

Translations

Vygotsky @ http://www.marxists.org
Some German translations: @ http://th-hoffmann.eu
Denken und Sprechen: psychologische Untersuchungen / Lev Semënovic Vygotskij. Hrsg. und aus dem Russ. übers. vom Joachim Lompscher und Georg Rückriem. Mit einem Nachw. von Alexandre Métraux (German)

Psychology
Sections	General psychology Acmeology Differential psychology Psychogenetics Psychodiagnostics Psycholinguistics Psychology of perception (smell, color) Personality psychology Developmental psychology Psychophysiology Social psychology Special psychology Comparative psychology Evolutionary psychology Experimental psychology