Vygotsky鈥檚 Crisis: Argument, context, relevance

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• 作者：Ludmila Hyman ^{lhyman@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de lselemen@andrew.cmu.edu}
• 关键词：Vygotsky ; Crisis in psychology ; Methodology of psychology ; Marxism ; Leon Trotsky
• 刊名：Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C ; Biological and Biomedical Sciences
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：113_13698486
• 类别：soc
• 出版时间：June, 2012
• 卷：43
• 期：2
• 页码：473-482
• 文件大小：224 K

摘要

Vygotsky鈥檚 The Historical Significance of the Crisis in Psychology (1926-1927) is an important text in the history and philosophy of psychology that has only become available to scholars in 1982 in Russian, and in 1997 in English. The goal of this paper is to introduce Vygotsky鈥檚 conception of psychology to a wider audience.

I argue that Vygotsky鈥檚 argument about the 鈥渃risis鈥?in psychology and its resolution can be fully understood only in the context of his social and political thinking. Vygotsky shared the enthusiasm, widespread among Russian leftist intelligentsia in the 1920s, that Soviet society had launched an unprecedented social experiment: The socialist revolution opened the way for establishing social conditions that would let the individual flourish. For Vygotsky, this meant that 鈥渁 new man鈥?of the future would become 鈥渢he first and only species in biology that would create itself.鈥?He envisioned psychology as a science that would serve this humanist teleology.

I propose that The Crisis is relevant today insofar as it helps us define a fundamental problem: How can we systematically account for the development of knowledge in psychology? I evaluate how Vygotsky addresses this problem as a historian of the crisis.