It is not news to anyone that research methods, techniques, scientific disputes have their own historical origins and explanations. But it is often worth looking for them not in the history of a given science, be it linguistics, psychology, philosophy of knowledge, or even physics or chemistry, but in general - as they would say before - spiritual history. Spiritual history can be likened not to a plane projection of the "pure" history of science, but to the three-dimensional space of the stage, in which the multi-figured "drama of ideas" unfolds (Einstein).
Conflicts of their carriers are not reducible to clashes of theories or points of view: they are always also interactions of individuals. And the personality is somehow determined by time and place: existing in historical time and space, it has a corresponding mentality - it shares not only specific ideas, but also the dominant ways in its environment to think and feel, understand the world and evaluate people. In this sense, it is customary to speak, for example, about the mentality of medieval chivalry or the mentality of a Renaissance man. But the concrete ideas and ideas that make up the content of mentality are not those ideas that are generated by individual consciousness, and not reflected spiritual constructions.
Rather, it is the life of such ideas and constructions in a certain social environment. Despite the fact that for the carriers of ideas themselves, they remain unconscious. To enter the mentality of wide circles - those whom historians, following the medieval intellectuals, call "simpletons" - these ideas must be simplified. And sometimes to be profane. Otherwise, they are doomed to remain the intellectual property of a highly educated minority.
One way or another, the collective mentality includes a collection of certain ideas in an unconscious or incompletely conscious form. A scientist may be ahead of his epoch precisely as a researcher, but whatever the depth of his personal reflection, in the core aspects of his personality, the scientist inevitably shares the mentality of his time. And new ideas, born on a historically changing soil, to one degree or another feed on an already formed common mentality. This means that cultural innovation does not arise out of nowhere. They are always the answer to the spiritual challenge of the era, and the era is the totality of the deeds and thoughts of many, and by no means only the elite. Therefore, the history of ideas, as studied by philosophy and sociology, does not coincide with the "social" history of ideas - that is, the history of the reception of ideas in the minds. It is useful to think about how the history of the development of certain scientific theories and schools relates to the general atmosphere of the life of society in certain historical periods. The key mediating link here is precisely the types of mentality prevailing in society - the recognition of this fact distinguishes a serious intellectual history from various versions of the so often reproached "vulgar sociologism". There are periods when the state of science and the state of society add up to a very special configuration. This configuration is characterized by overt or relatively latent philosophical and social throwings; erosion of the usual structures of social and cultural life, including the structures of science itself. Important feature This configuration also lies in the fact that sharply contrasting cultural stereotypes coexist within a relatively narrow circle of "leaders", "generators of ideas", people whom we call "cult figures", "iconic characters." These contrasts, already in a reduced, vulgarized form, are transmitted "downward", becoming the property of the "commoners". Then cultural disputes and conflicts arise, the essence of which is vague for the next generation. Their analysis is instructive for understanding the further ways of the emergence and development of scientific directions and the clash of minds.
Scientific and intellectual life is an amazing example of such a configuration of ideas and social demands. Soviet Russia in the 20-30s. It was during these years that the heyday (and defeat) of the "formal method" in the science of literature fell, the heyday (and defeat) of attempts to create a historical psychology, psychoanalytic school... The biographies of scientists of this period are strikingly contradictory: it seems that many people from relatively close academic circles, practically from the same cultural environment, lived in parallel worlds. I do not mean the social exclusion and poverty of some compared to the well-being of others. More productive is the analysis of not so catchy, but at the same time typical cases that reveal the types of mentality of that era as an important factor in the history of science. Why is this especially important for the sciences of the cognitive cycle?
Perhaps, in the sciences that are completely formed, well-established, and it is possible without great losses, the history of the formation of basic ideas and concepts can be neglected. On the contrary, for sciences in a state of paradigm shift, experiencing serious intrascientific conflicts, it is extremely important to understand the genesis of ideas, methods and assessments. And then much of what seems illogical to us or, on the contrary, self-evident, will appear in a different light. In this perspective, we will consider some ideological and personal collisions associated with the fate of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, who considered himself a student of Vygotsky. For Soviet psychology, the name Vygotsky still remains significant, although Vygotsky died in 1934. However, between 1936 and 1956, little was said about Vygotsky; they did not even try to "expose" him, unlike many others. It was simply not published and did not seem to be remembered. The situation changed dramatically during the heyday of structural linguistics and semiotics in the USSR, i.e. since the early 60s.
It was then that Vygotsky finally entered a number of the main cultural figures. Note that in the short term perspective completely different characters fall into this "sign set": Propp with structural-functional analysis and "The Morphology of a Tale"; Tynyanov and other "senior" formalists with their motto "How is this done?" Bakhtin with his dialogue and carnivalization; the mystic Florensky - at first mainly with the "Iconostasis"; Eisenstein, in whom from now on one should see not so much a major filmmaker as an original theorist in the humanities, and Vygotsky with his completely Marxist-oriented historical psychology. Looking at this "carousel" from today, the generation of novice humanitarians cannot understand where the juxtaposition of researchers with such different and often opposite positions came from.
We have to remind you that in the early 60s these were, first of all, "returned names" and carriers of a different mentality. Going into the nuances and specifics then was kind of "out of hand". But, indeed, in the 60s and 70s, the reception of the ideological wealth of the 20s and 30s was so hasty that much was assimilated if the terms of the well-known opposition of Levi-Strauss were played up, rather "raw" rather than "boiled." When the aforementioned persons (as, indeed, many others) finally became "cult figures", genuine involvement in their theories began to be gradually replaced, first by excessive citations of their works, and later by authoritarian and even purely ritual references. Therefore, it is worth rethinking some of the details of the life and works of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, especially since their biographies are mythologized rather than understood.
In modern psychology, there are several conceptual approaches to solving problems existing in this science. One of them is cultural-historical psychology, the founder of which is the famous Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky. According to his plan, psychology should study the psyche of the person being tested, which has not yet been formed and presented to the researcher, as was done in many other experimental areas of psychology, for example, behaviorism, and the psyche, which is in constant transformation, formation, since it is the most productive and only correct for a psychologist consider a developing, evolving person. Therefore, cognition of the psyche is most rational in the course of the real practical work of a psychologist, for example, in the field of pedagogy or medical practice, or psychological support by an employee of particularly responsible professions associated with the risk to the lives of large masses of people, etc.
In the course of its development, this theory has had different names, of which the latter is used in this book.
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY, one of the leading schools in Russian psychology and an influential trend in world psychology, focusing on the teaching of the social, cultural and historical nature of human forms of the psyche - subject perception, voluntary attention and memory, consciousness, will, speech thinking, as well as speech, counting, writing, etc.
The foundations of cultural-historical psychology were laid in the late 1920s - early 1930s by L. S. Vygotsky in his cultural-historical theory of higher mental functions, the genesis of which in an individual includes one or another artificial act of organizing his psyche, consciousness, personality with using various kinds of symbolic means (from the simplest "memory knot" to the most complex symbolic systems). Such psychotechnics and methods of their use are developed in history and fixed in culture, and only then are they transferred to an individual person and assigned to them (in specially organized training and education practices, or spontaneously). According to Vygotsky, any higher mental function initially develops in the space of communication and joint activity (that is, it is divided between people - parent and child, teacher and student, psychotherapist and patient, etc.) and only then, in the course of interiorization (“rotation "), Becomes the property of a separate individual, that is, it is carried out by him independently. First, as a rule, - with reliance on external sign means (for example, a "knot for memory" as a means of organizing memory, gesture as a way of organizing attention, or speech and external schemes as a means of organizing thinking) and only later - with reliance on purely internal means (mental images and schemes, inner speech, etc.).
In cultural-historical psychology, a fundamentally new type of genetic research is emerging (according to which the study of a phenomenon is possible only through tracing its genesis and development) - research through the formation and within specially organized development. At the same time, the psychologist finds himself in a special, non-classical research situation, when his presence not only cannot be excluded (as required by the methodology of classical natural science), but, on the contrary, turns out to be a necessary moment of the experimental situation itself and sets a new unit of study: distributed between the experimenter and the subject "Psychotechnical action". Within the framework of such a non-classical methodology, a special, “psychotechnical” type of description of the object under study, characteristic of cultural-historical psychology, is revealed, not so much fixing the laws of its “natural life” in knowledge as setting the conditions for its transformation. Cultural-historical psychology is also characterized by a new type of relationship between research and practice, when research is embedded in practice, ensuring its implementation, reproduction and development.
Vygotsky's ideas led to the formation of one of the most significant schools in Russian psychology (A.R. Luria, A.N. Leontyev, D. B. Elkonin, P. Ya. Galperin, A. V. Zaporozhets, V. V. Davydov and others), and also, as Vygotsky's main works are published in other languages, have an increasing influence on world psychology. Nowadays, cultural-historical psychology is regarded as one of the most promising programs for the development of psychology.
Since 2005 the international journal "Cultural-Historical Psychology" has been published.
Lit .: Sociocultural studies of mind / Ed. J. V. Wertsch. Camb. 1995; Davydov V.V. Theory of developing education. M., 1996; Verch JV Voices of Reason: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. M., 1996; Cole M. Cultural-Historical Psychology: Science of the Future. M., 1997; Vasilyuk F.E. Methodological analysis in psychology. M., 2003; Bubbles A. A. Psychology. Psychotechnics. Psychogology. M., 2005. See also the literature under the article Vygotsky L. S.
Cultural-historical psychology L.S. Vygotsky was born at Moscow University in collaboration with A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev. The semantic content of the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky's ideas were the following: the methodology of the systemic historical and genetic analysis of various mental phenomena in the context of biogenesis, anthropogenesis, sociogenesis and personogenesis, the search for mutual transitions between these vectors of historical and evolutionary development; the idea of signs (primarily language) invented in the history of culture as means ("psychological tools") of mastering human behavior and social groups; the hypothesis of interiorization as a constructive mechanism of human socialization that occurs in the course of cooperation, joint activities of the child with other people and leading to the transformation of the world of culture / world of “meanings” / into the world of personality / world of “meanings” /; concept system analysis the development and disintegration of the higher mental functions of a person as social in origin, culturally mediated by various signs in structure and arbitrarily regulated by the way of control forms of behavior; historical and genetic systemic concept of thinking and speech as a key to understanding the semantic dialogical nature of consciousness; the idea of dynamic semantic systems as a special unity of affect and intellect and the units of personality analysis; the concept of the "zone of proximal development" of the child's higher mental functions as a product of the child's cooperation with adults and peers in solving problems and substantiating the idea of learning as driving force mental development child. The subject of Vygotsky's psychology was consciousness. However, it would be wrong on this basis to reject Vygotsky from the PTD, which has become in the 40s. XX century, the core of all scientific schools university psychology. An analysis of Vygotsky's psychological system allows us to assert: he recognized activity as a form of human being. Activity is a whole in which behavior and consciousness exist in unity. "The psyche without behavior does not exist as well as behavior without the psyche, because at least it is one and the same," he said in his speech at the II All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in 1924. summarized some of the results of the research done ("Tool and Sign in the Development of the Child", 1930), in working discussions with collaborators known as "The Problem of Consciousness", L.S. Vygotsky noted: "In the beginning there was a deed (...), at the end there was a word, and this is the most important." Considering the question of the connection between words and deeds in the process of a child's development, he wrote: “... the word does not stand at the beginning of the development of the child's mind ... Practical intelligence is genetically older than the verbal one: an action is more original than a word, even a smart action is more original smart word. " Remarkable are the concluding statements of the work "Tool and Sign in Child Development": "... if at the beginning of development there is a deed that is independent of the word, then at the end of it there is a word that becomes a deed. A word that makes a person's action free. "
The central fact of his psychology L.S. Vygotsky called the fact of mediation. Revealing its content, he turned to the analogy between the sign as a tool for mediation and the formation of higher mental functions and technical tools in human labor operations. This addresses two issues of major importance. Firstly, the qualitative difference between man and animals lies in the tool-like nature of labor and mental activity. Secondly, the psychological tool is compared with the tools of labor activity. According to L.S. Vygotsky, this comparison goes back to the ideas of F. Bacon, whose words (- "Neither the bare hand, nor the mind left to itself have great power. The work is done with tools and aids that the mind needs no less than the hand." They express his main idea of a deep connection between the structure of human consciousness and the structure of labor activity. The concept of an instrumental act mediated, in contrast to a natural process, by a tool is introduced. member is a psychological tool that becomes a structural center or focus, that is, a moment that functionally determines all processes that form an instrumental act. Any act of behavior then becomes an intellectual operation. " or mathematical thinking, as well as the process s behavior.
Thus, mental activity (this term Vygotsky uses more than once) is related to the external activity of a person: it is also mediated by its (psychological) instruments. Investigated different shapes mental activity, in particular, play. Analyzing the attitude of play to development, L.S. Vygotsky introduced the concept of leading activity: “In essence, it is through play activity that the child moves. Only in this sense can play be called a leading activity, i.e. determining the development of the child. " Later D.B. Elkonin, one of Lev Semenovich's students and a colleague of his other students, used his understanding, as well as developed by A.N. Leontiev, in the context of the activity approach, the concept of leading activity as key in his concept of the periodization of mental development. He substantiated the proposition that at each stage of development there is its own leading activity: it is in it that the development and preparation of the next stage takes place.
