THE ESSENTIAL Vygotsky THE ESSENTIAL VygotSky

Edited by Robert W. Rieber City University ofNew l&rk New 1'&rk. New 1'&rk and David K. Robinson Truman State University KirkstJiJJe. Missouri

In collaboration with

Jerome Bruner Michael Cole New 1'&rk University University of Odifornia-San Dietl' New York. New York La Jolla. Odifornia

Joseph Glick Carl Ratner City University of New 1'&rk Institute for Cultural Research and EtirKation New York. New York TrinidtuJ. Odifornia

Anna Stetsenko City University ofNew York New 1'&rk. New York

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vygotskii, 1. S. (Lev Semenovich), 1896-1934. [Collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. English Selections] The essential Vygotsky 1 edited by Robert W. Rieber, David K. Robinson ; in collaboration with Jerome Bruner ... [et al.]. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Psychology. 1. Rieber, R. W. (Robert w.) II. Robinson, David Kent. III. Bruner, Jerome S. Oerome Seymour) IV. Title. BF121.V94213 2004 15O--dc22 2004047336

ISBN 978-1-4757-1010-6 ISBN 978-0-387-30600-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-30600-1

© 2004 by Springer Science+ Business Media N ew York Originally published by Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers in 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2004

1098765432 1

A C.1.p. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Permissions for books published in Europe: [email protected] Permissions for books published in the United States of America: [email protected] Dedicated to the memory ofAlexander Luria and with gratitude to the l1gotsky family, especially G. L. l1godskaya Prologue: Reading Vygotsky

MICHAEL COLE, Laboratory ofComparative Human Cognition, University ofCalifornia, San Diego

Writing a prologue for a collection like this is truly astonishing to me for many reasons. It is now more than forty years since I first encountered the name of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a Russian scholar born just before the start of the twentieth century. By virtue of my education in the middle of the twentieth century as an experimental psychologist who specialized in learn• ing, I was reasonably well trained in that form of positivist behavioral sciences that took it as a simple truth that the errors of the originators of the discipline of psychology were a thing of the past. To my generation of experimental psychologists, the history of psychology was the uplift• ing story of that long trail of errors that had been overcome by recent scientific advances. Such history served primarily as a cautionary tale about not succumbing to the temptations of subjective, unscientific speculation but instead mastering the quantitative methods that had been pioneered during recent years, leading psychology out of its dark past into a genuinely sci• entific future that will benefit humankind. A corollary of this scientific worldview was a strong claim for the continuity of species, such that general laws of human behavior could be studied at least as effectively by studying the behavior of rats as by studying the behavior of college sophomores; the choice of "subject" was merely a matter of convenience. Rats had the advantage that one could control their histo• ries with moral impunity, while at least some consideration had to be given to avoiding harm• ing undergraduates. On the other hand, rats had to be taken care of over the weekend, while undergraduates were the responsibility of university officials who enforced the procedures of in loco parentis. Needless to say, the same notions of continuity applied to age differences. The study of children was a relatively small, and relatively low-status, enterprise. The major mechanism of developmental change favored by psychologists was learning from the environment, using procedures which were often directly modeled on procedures initially developed to study rats, dogs, and cats. Yet another widely held belief, which admitted of a few exceptions, was that, by and large, scientific psychology could be adequately mastered by knowing how to read only English and, moreover, by restricting one's reading primarily to research conducted in the United States. The few exceptions to this rule do not, so far as I can tell, form any pattern. Frederick Bartlett's experiments on remembering were well known, but his book on thinking was not. Pavlov was of

vii viii Prologue course required reading because American behaviorists of the 1920s and 1930s adopted condi• tioned reflexes as a major mechanism of learning, but his physiological theories were largely ignored. This situation was, of course, about to change. In retrospect the signs of change were per• vasive. Some were geopolitical. When the Soviet Union put a satdlite into space, the term "sput• nik" entered the English language, and suddenly a psychology of learning that could transform American education became a compelling national need. Outstanding physicists, biologists, and mathematicians began joint research projects with psychologists. Perhaps not acciden• tally, the psychologists began to consider the possibility that rats did not, after all, offer an ade• quate modd of learning in college students. I take it as more than accidental that the "cogni• tive revolution" began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where somehow professors from a few departments at Harvard and MIT discovered different disciplines and even the other end of Massachusetts Avenue (which connects those revered institutions).

Why Is Vygotsky Relevant Today?

So, one of the first things we might want to think about is why you are reading the pro• logue to a sdection of essays by a Soviet, Jewish, Belorussian psychologist who died seven decades ago after a brief career. Little of his work was published during his lifetime, even in Russian, and the number of copies of those publications was very small. Some of his work was known to a few specialists in human devdopment and abnormal psychology during his lifetime, thanks in large part to the efforts of Alexander Luria, a contributing editor to the Journal o/Genetic Psychology. and in part to Eugenia Hanfmann (1953), who replicated Vygotksy's research on concept formation and published in English. Neverthdess, Vygotsky was not well known within his own country and had nothing of the international stature of his great contemporary, Piaget, nor of Werner, Kohler, Gesell, and other "father figures" of the study of human devdopment. It is only in the past two decades that Vygotsky's work has become influential in Russia and on the international scene, where some of his work has been translated into many languages. It has been influential not only among devdopmental psychologists, but has become increasingly important to other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, and in the application of psychology in such areas as education, human-computer interface design, and the organization of work. What can account for this "Vygotsky boom" of recent years?

The Publication of Thought and Language

Prior to 1962, when MIT Press published a translation ofVygotsky's Thought and Lan• guage, he was best known in the United States for a block-sorting task that resembled classifi• cation methods used by American psychologists. This translation was blessed by two circum• stances. First, the lead translator, Eugenia Hanfmann, was the daughter of a Russian emigre who had studied in Germany with Kurt Lewin, and for whom Vygotsky was more than a myth of the past. Second, Jerome Bruner, a leader in organizing the cognitive revolution in the United States, wrote the book's preface. (He has also contributed an introduction to the present volume.) Prologue ix

Bruner's education had included time with William McDougall, an Englishman who became one of the giants of early American psychology. At that time the Department of Social Rela• tions at Harvard retained a historically oriented, interdisciplinary faculty who respected the intellectual contributions of past psychologists from many countries, as well as the potential contributions of other social sciences to psychology. Consequently, Bruner was able to draw connections between Vygotsky's ideas and those of other, previously influential scholars in a way that created an "intergenerational bridge" to the 1960s. Moreover, Bruner was himself turn• ing to the study of the role of culture in child development with a special focus on education, and hence he could appreciate the importance ofVygotsky's formulation of cultural-historical psychology and convey that importance in a clearly understandable manner. Despite these auspicious advantages, the publication of Thought and Language did not evoke massive interest in Vygotsky, although his work did gradually begin to attract more atten• tion. There are several potential reasons for its modest impact. First, the threat of conflict between the United States and the USSR reached its zenith that year in the Cuban missile crisis. To dis• play enthusiasm for a Soviet psychologist who declared himself to be a Marxist was, at the very least, to court suspicions of one's allegiances. The translators, in fact, excised a significant por• tion of the book on grounds that it was either repetitious or polemical. Nonetheless, Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov all remain in the text, even if their appearance was abbreviated. Second, the book still required reasonable familiarity with a wide range of early-twentieth-century psychologists and presumed an interest in developmental psychology, features which were unlikely to find a broad audience at the time. Nor, with the exception of the block-sorting experiment, did it offer a simple experimental paradigm that could be expanded to encompass a major part of the field of cognitive development. Perhaps also significant at the time was the American fas• cination with Piaget, who did offer easy-to-repeat cognitive tasks and who directly challenged the dominant American notion that learning is the major force in cognitive development, thus generating an entire industty of research designed to prove him wrong. As fate would have it, I had only minimal familiarity with Vygotsky's work when I went to the USSR in the fall of 1962 as a postdoctoral fellow working under the direction of Alexan• der Luria. I did not choose to work with Luria because he was a colleague ofVygotsky. I did not know he had been, and I would have made little of the fact even if I had known. I was attracted, instead, by research that Luria had published using Pavlovian conditioning meth• ods to study the acquisition of word meaning, what was termed "semantic conditioning." I divided my year in Moscow between research on the retention or loss of semantic conditioning in patients with lesions in different parts of their brains, the study of avoidance conditioning in dogs at a laboratory in the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, and research with E. N. Sokolov and his students on orienting reflexes and psychophysics. Although Luria occasionally encouraged me to read Vygotsky (indeed, Thought and lan• guage was published in 1962 owing to his initiative), I actually spent very little time trying to understand Vygotsky's work. The only version of his writings to which I had access was in Russ• ian (mail traveled slowly between Cambridge and Moscow at that time). And as far as I could tell, there was little difference between Vygotsky, with his idea that words begin to mediate thought when children acquire language, and the American neobehaviorists who, starting with Margaret Kuenne in the late 1940s, had made pretty much the same argument (Kendler & x Prologue

Kendler, 1962; Kuenne, 1946). I was not particularly interested in child development at the time, and I did not see the general significance of such claims.

Discovering Vygotsky

I have written elsewhere of the long, slow, process through which I came to appreciate and eventually greatly admire the work ofVygotsky and his students (Cole, 1979). And, of course, Luria was responsible for a good deal of this process, just as he played a central role in bringing Vygotsky to the attention of world psychology. One critical event was totally serendipitous. I was sent to Mrica to worry about develop• ment and education, and in a state of total ignorance about the appropriate literature to con• sult on this topic, I contacted Luria to ask about his work in Central Asia, work he had planned with Vygotsky. In part I wanted to get a better specification of the tasks that he had used, since they could possibly provide a useful point of departure for my own work, whatever that might turn out to be. But I also wanted to understand what the theoretical relevance of their cross-cultural work was, with respect to issues such as semantic conditioning and recovery from brain injury. And why was there such an emphasis on development? The second crucial event was a simple extension of Luria's unflagging efforts to get more ofVygotsky's work published in English. Appreciative of the efforts he had extended on my behalf while I was a postdoctoral fellow in Moscow, I agreed to help in two intertwined proj• ects. One was the translation and publication of two of Vygotsky's books; The History ofthe Development ofHigher Psychological Functions and Tool and Symbol in Child Development, the latter perhaps co-authored with Luria, although I did not suspect that at the time. (See Vygot• sky, 1987-99, vols. 4 and 6, respectively, for the fullest translations of these works.) The other project was the editing and publication of Luria's autobiography (Luria, 1979), a brief version of which I had translated earlier for the series on the history of psychology in autobiography (Luria, 1974). Both projects turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. I enlisted the help of my col• leagues, Vera John-Steiner and Sylvia Scribner with the translation of the Vygotsky works, and I spent a lot of time becoming familiar with the sources of Luria's ideas by working through the citations in his autobiography. It soon became clear that the two projects were related, because a great number of the "old-fashioned" citations I encountered while reading Vygotsky were the same citations I found in Luria. Combined with my research in Africa, which carried me inevitably into the topics of culture, cognitive development, and education, the conditions were created which allowed me to make some sense of both Luria and Vygotsky.

The "Vygotsky Boom"

I received the Vygotsky manuscripts from Luria in the early 1970s. But even with the expert help of able colleagues and a good translation to work from, I could not convince the publisher, with whom Luria had made arrangements, that the manuscripts were worth publishing. All of Prologue xi the problems that I had experienced earlier remained in place. The work seemed dated, the polemics either opaque or outdated, and the overall product was certain to produce fiscal disas• ter, not to say personal embarrassment. Faced with this seemingly insurmountable barrier and with help from Luria, whom I vis• ited every year or cwo and with whom I corresponded regularly, we were able to produce a reasonable selection of readings from the cwo manuscripts he had given me. To these we added several essays of an applied nature so that readers could see how the abstract theoretical argu• ments played out in practice. The result, entitled Mind in Society, was published in 1978. I heaved a great sigh of relief: I had finally discharged my obligation to Luria and the publisher, thanks in good measure to the hard work of my colleagues. What happened next was totally unexpected. For reasons I have never learned, the philoso• pher Stephen Toulmin (1978) was assigned the book to review for the New York Review ofBooks. He entitled his article "The Mozart of Psychology." This review argued, as Sylvia Scribner and I had in our introduction, that Vygotsky's work was of great contemporary relevance, despite the fact that it had first been published forty years earlier. In effect, and in brief, the shortcomings of psychology against which Vygotsky struggled in the 1920s-in particular, the failure to recognize the centrality of culture and history to human psychological functioning-had not been overcome by his scientific successors. Instead, his dissatisfactions with psychologists of the early cwentieth century applied with at least as great justification at the century's end. Our group had become convinced that Vygotsky and his colleagues had, indeed, for• mulated a metapsychology that encompassed the phylogeny, cultural history, ontogeny, and moment-to-moment dynamics of human psychological functioning as a life-long process of becoming. Toulmin, to our great surprise, agreed and strongly conveyed his judgment to a very wide readership. It is now cwenty-five years since the publication of Mind in Society. Recently, within a very few years, Vygotsky has become a fad, and, as with all fads, the greater notoriety brought with it both genuine evolution and dimestore knockoffs. Within the former USSR, Vygotsky, who was virtually a forgotten man in 1978, except for a few of his aging followers and a handful of younger scholars, has become a cottage industry generating not only books and arti• cles but entire departments and institutes. Within the United States there have now been cwo additional translations of Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1986; "Thinking and Speech," in Vygotsky, 1987-99, vol. 1, pp. 37-285), and there are dozens of books devoted to his ideas, their origins, their virtues, their shortcom• ings, etc. This book provides the reader with carefully chosen selections from a wide range of his writings. The largest collection ofVygotksy's writings, but not all of them, can be found in The Collected WOrks, now available in English due to the long labors of the general editor, Robert Rieber (Vygotsky, 1987-99). With introductory essays by various scholars who have made careful studies ofVygotsky, the reader will find here a fine sampling ofVygotsky's work from the main domains that he investigated. The reading will not be easy. It requires patience and reflection. Speaking from my own life experience, the time and effort required will more than recompense the reader and will open new vistas in thought about human nature, anyone of which could provide the material for a life's work. xii Prologue

References

Cole, M. (1979). Epilogue. In The malting ofmind: A pmonAl fl&CfJUnt ofSOfJiet pJ]Chology by A. R Luria (pp. 189-225). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kendler, H. H. & Kendler, T. S. (1962). Vertical and horizontal processes in problem solving. Psychological RnMw. 69, 1-16. Kuenne, M. (1946). Experimental investigation of the relation oflanguage to transposition behavior in young chil• dren. Journal ofExperimental Psychology, 36. 471-490. Luria, A. R. (1974). A. R. Luria (M. Cole, Trans.). InA history ofpJ]Chology in autobiography (Vol. 6, G. Lindzey, Ed.; pp. 251-292). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Luria, A. R. (1979). The malting ofmind: A pmonal fl&CfJUnt ofSOfJiet pJ]Chology (S. Cole & M. Cole, Eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Toulmin, S. (1978, September 28). The Mozart of psychology. The New York RtviewofBooks, 51ff. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought anti La"fUlle (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Eds. and Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Minti in socielJ: The dnJelopmmt ofhightr pJ]Chologicai procmes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman, Eds). Cambridge: Harvatd University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought anti Language (A. Kozulin, Ed. and Rev.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987-99). The coliecttd works ofL. S. 17gotsky (6 Vols.) (R.w. Rieber, Ed.). New York: K1uwer Academic/Plenum. Preface

ROBERT W. RIEBER, City University ofNew York and DAVID K. ROBINSON, Truman State University

The Essentiallrygotsky is a selection of the writings of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), taken from the six volumes of The Collected WOrks ofL. s. lrygotsky that have appeared both in Russian (1982-84) and in English translation (1987-99). The editors have endeavored to choose the most important and most interesting contributions from all types ofVygotsky's writings, and thus from all six volumes, so as to reflect the overall purpose of the program that Vygot• sky was developing at the time of his early death. The introductory essays for each section to follow will explore various aspects ofVygot• sky's biography in order to explain certain parts of his work and his writing, but the essentials of his life can be noted briefly here. Lev Semenovich Vogodsky was born to a well-educated Jew• ish family in the Russian empire, in Orsha, Belarus, on November 5, 1896. Soon the family moved to the larger city of the region, Gomel, where the father worked in a bank. (How the psychologist came to change the spelling of his name, replacing dwith t, remains mysterious.) There were eight children, and Lev was the second. Lev was tutored at home, and in 1911 he entered a private classical school. Receiving the gold medal upon graduation (first place in his class), Vygotsky enrolled in Moscow Imperial University in 1913 and studied in the Faculty of Law. Simultaneous with legal studies, he took courses in the Faculty of History and Philol• ogy in Shanyavsky University, a coeducational and otherwise avant-garde institution in prerev• olutionary Moscow. It seems likely that Vygotsky made many contacts in both schools, and he gained the reputation of a brilliant, busy student. We know, for example, that he took courses with P. P. Blonsky, G. G. Shpet, and G. l. Chelpanov in the recently opened Institute of Psy• chology in Moscow. As Russia suffered terrible defeats in the Great War, Vygotsky finished his university courses. For Shanyavsky University he wrote a thesis in 1916, "Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark," his first important writing (some of which is included in Vygotsky, 1971). Because of the wars and the revolution, the events of the next period ofVygotsky's life are unclear, but they were undoubtedly very difficult. He returned to his family in Gomel, where he worked as a schoolteacher and/or instructor in a teacher-training school, and he remained there during German occupation, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Civil War, a time of starvation for the people in that region. In 1920, Vygotsky suffered his first, acute attack of tuberculosis, the dis• ease that repeatedly interrupted his life and would eventually kill him.

xiii xiv Preface

Vygotsky's return to the center of Russian intellectual life was marked by his participa• tion in the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd (soon to be renamed Leningrad) held in January 1924. He gave a lecture that was later published as "Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior." By the end of that year, notable for Lenin's death, Vygotsky had married and accepted a position in the Moscow Institute of Psychology, whose directorship had recently passed from G. I. Chelpanov to K. N. Kornilov. His early work there concentrated on what the Russians called (and still call) "defectology," a combination of abnormal psychology and special education. Vygotsky worked directly with children who had been orphaned and damaged by the ravages of the recent wars and revolutionary upheavals. In summer 1925 he even traveled to Western Europe to present some of this work. The next year, however, Vygotsky suffered a second life-threatening attack of his disease, so he spent time in bed reading and rethinking his theoretical approaches. By this time he had clearly emerged as a leading thinker in the Institute, and even psychologists who had arrived there before him, such as A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria, were clearly under his influence. In 1929 Vygotsky and a study group visited Tashkent. Luria remained there to carry out extensive ethnopsychological studies until 1931, his mentor being too sickly to stay on. As Vygotsky continued his writing and research in Moscow, Stalinist repression began to take a toll on his students and colleagues. P. P. Blonsky and A. B. Zalkind, leaders in the wider educational movement called "pedology," lost their lives. Others were scattered by internal exile, and an important group, including Luria and Leontiev, sought refuge in Kharkov, the Ukrainian capital at the time. Vygotsky made some trips there and to Leningrad as his failing health allowed, but on June 11, 1934, following a month of serious hemorrhages, he died in a Moscow sanatorium and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. Stalinist ideology eventually settled on Pavlovian "reflexology" as the appropriate Soviet approach to human psychology, and Vygotsky's students and admirers were unable even to refer to their teacher's name in their pub• lications until well after Stalin's death. There has been a gradual increase of appreciation ofVygotsky's work, long overdue. He appeared on the horiwn of professional psychology briefly, after World War I; then his work was lost in the waves of Stalinist repression and the Cold War. Although a few writings ofVygotsky began to appear in Russian a bit earlier, the first breakout may actually have been in the United States, rather than in the Soviet Union: the MIT Press publication of an English translation of Thought and Language (VygOtsky, 1962). Certainly, VygOtsky had been continuously revered, at least in private, by a select number of people, an avant-garde in Russia and elsewhere, during a period when behaviorism was the dominant paradigm for the mainstream of psychology. Mter working in Moscow with Luria and others who were inspired by Vygotsky, Michael Cole joined forces with a few other Westerners (including Jerome Bruner) and, in the late 1960s, started to bring Russian work in psychology, including that ofVygotsky, to a Western audience. This interest gradually increased through the 1980s in the United States (and, interest• ingly, in the Soviet Union as well); the greater attention corresponded with increased interest in qualitative research in psychology. Cole (1996), for example, has even related this trend back to Wilhelm Wundt's original project, the marriage of the experimental and the natural-histori• cal approaches to psychology. During the 1980s, social constructionists (for example, Gergen, 1994, and Gergen & Davis, 1985) enhanced interest in Vygotsky, as did the rising interest in xv theoretical psychology in Europe. At the same time. in many venues. there was a growing inter• est in neuropsychology. which drew attention to the contributions of Luria. one ofVygotsky's most important associates. The European Theoretical Psychology Activity Theory Group started in the 1980s. their name derived from a concept promoted by Leontiev. Since 1986. the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) has been meeting annually. under changing tides and acronyms. Although few of the members would identify themselves as Vygotsky disciples. they clearly find inspiration in the cultural-historical approach. Vygotsky's hallmark. Interest in Vygotsky grew during the climax of the Cold War in the 1980s and during the optimistic time of its ending; the interest continues today. as people are concerned about disappointing. potentially tragic developments in the post-Soviet countries. We could call these groups neo• Vygotskian; they often invoke his name. analyze his works in light of present concerns. and oth• erwise are influenced by Vygotsky's thought. The editors decided to follow the structure of the English version of the Collected WOrks. which has a different order than that chosen by the Soviet editors. It could easily be argued that the Soviet ordering would be better. or perhaps a chronological or some other order would be ideal. However. our chosen arrangement has the convenience that the serious reader can use The Essential ijtgotsky as an introductory textbook and then easily turn to the six vol• umes of the English language Collected WOrks for more extensive reading. To give the reader a taste of the resources in the six volumes. we have included the references and notes (by Russian and by English editors) for Section I only. Any citations in the other sections refer to materi• als in the corresponding volumes of Collected WOrks. The following list shows the order of volumes in the English edition of Collected WOrks (I 987-99). the direct source of The Essential ijtgots9 with corresponding volume numbers and tides of the Russian edition (1982-84):

Vol. 1. Problems of General Psychology 2. Problemy obshchei psikhologii Vol. 2. Fundamentals of Defectology 5. Osnovy defoktologii Vol. 3. Problems of the Theory and 1. \IOprosy teoni i istoni psikhologii History of Psychology Vol. 4. History of the Development of 3. Problemy razvitiia psykhiki Higher Mental Functions Vol. 5. Child Psychology 4. Detskaia psikhologiia Vol. 6. Scientific Legacy 6. Nauchnoe narledstvo

Actually. a note of caution about text is in order. Even using the Russian "original text." Sobranie sochineni (I 982-84). we cannot be assured of the purity ofVygotsky's text. The Russ• ian editors. inspired by Luria. and ably chaired by A. V. Zaporozhets. surely did their best. and psychologists and intellectual historians will ever be in their debt for their monumental work. All the same. close work with the manuscript materials. most of them still held by Vygotsky's f.unily. remains to be done (see Vygodskaya & Lifanova. 1996). The Russian editors themselves admit that the "collected works" are not the "complete works"; they particularly draw attention to many reviews and early essays that could not be included. xvi Preface

Doubts about the text involve even some of the most important ones. One example is discussed in the introduction to Section III of this volume. Elkhonon Goldberg told one of the editors (RWR) the story of another textual problem. When Luria began the project for the col• lected works, he was of course interested in finding the complete text of "Tool and sign," which had become an important Vygotskian concept in the intervening years. (see Section VI) How• ever, looking in Vygotsky's papers, they could only locate an English version of this famous work. Luria assigned Goldberg the task to produce the Russian version by translating the English one! The Russian original had apparently been lost. This brings up an interesting line of questions. Why was there an English text, which to that time had never appeared in print? Was there ever a Russian original? As Goldberg recounts, Luria and Vygotsky had both planned to attend a conference at Yale University in 1929. Luria actually did attend and presented his paper, "The new method of expressive motor reactions in studying affective traces" (1930). Vygotsky had apparently planned to attend also, to present "Tool and sign," but probably illness (or perhaps politics or some pressing personal matter) had prevented him from making the trip to the New World. It is interesting, now, to think that Vygotsky was planning to come to Yale, now that so many classes in psychology in the United States, particularly courses in child development, regularly invoke the name ofVygotsky. This is only one extreme example of the efforts the Russian editors had to make in order to collect the work of this seminal thinker in psychology. Critical studies of the source materials and man• uscripts remain to be done. Maybe people who are becoming acquainted with this interesting writer by reading this book will do them someday. In his review of Mind in Society. an important article that marked the rediscovery of Vygotsky for a wider Western readership, Stephen Toulmin (1978) called Vygotsky the "Mozart of psychology." Likely he chose this term because, like the great composer, Vygotsky was a very influential Wunderkind who died at an early age. Toulmin might just as well have called him the "Leonardo of psychology," since Vygotsky explored the psychol• ogy of art as well as the fundamentals of science; also, he left lots of unpublished work and had a hidden or delayed influence on his followers. The dedicated reader of The Essential lrygotsky can join in the process by which this important thinker will surely be raised to the highest ranks in the history of psychology.

References

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once andfoture discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gergen. K. J. (1994). Reality and relationships: Soundings in social construction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gergen, K. J., & Davis, K. E. (Eds.). (I 985). The social construction 0/ the pmon. New York: Springer-Verlag. Luria, A. R. (1930). The new method of expressive motor reactions in studying affective traces. In Ninth Interna• tional Congress o/Psychology, held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 1st-7th, 1929, Proceed• ings and Papers U. M. Cattell, Ed.). New York: Psychological Review. Toulmin, S. (1978, September 28). The Mozart of psychology [Review of the book, Mind in society]. New Mlrk Review o/Books, 51-57. Vygodskaya, G. L., & Lifanova, T. M. (1996). Lev Snnenovich 17ptrkii: Zhizn,' tkyatel'noct.' shtri-'hi k portretu [Lev Semenovich Vygotsky: Life, activity, and sketches for a portraitl. Moscow: Smysl. xvii

Vygotsky. L. S. (1962). ThoughtanJLanPllle (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar. Eels. and Trans.; J. S. Bruner. Inteo.). Cam• bridge. MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky. L. S. (1971). The pfJCho/ogy ofart Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky. L. S. (1978). MinJ in sociay (M. Cole. S. Scribner. V. John-Steiner & E. Souderman. Eels. and Trans.). Cam• bridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky. L. S. (1982-84). Solmmie sochinmii (6 vols .• A. V. Zaporozhets. Ed.). Moscow: Pedagogika. Vygotsky. L. S. (1987-99). ColkmJ worlts (6 vols .• R. W. Rieber. Ed.). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Acknowledgments

The production of a book such as this one requires the efforts of a collective. as Vygot• sky would have had it. The editors wish to thank all the contributors. whose introductory essays not only provoke thought but also reflect patience and cooperation. Mariclaire Cloutier. Sharon Panulla. Herman Makler. and Joseph Zito at Kluwer/Plenum have our undying gratitude for their talent and professionalism. The junior editor (DKR) also thanks his student assistants• Ryan Buck. Greg Mueller. and Thomas Stuart-without whom he simply could not have fin• ished his part of the work. Contents

A Dialogue with Vygotsky: Robert W. Rieber ...... 1

SECTION I: Problems of General Psychology: Thinking and Speech Section introductions: Jerome Bruner and Robert W. Rieber ...... 9 1. The Problem and the Method of Investigation ...... 33 2. The Genetic Roots ofThinking and Speech ...... 43 3. Thought and Word ...... 65 4. Perception and Its Development in Childhood...... 111 5. Emotions and Their Development in Childhood...... 125 References and Notes to Section I ...... 138

SECTION II: Fundamentals of Defectology {Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities} Section introduction: David K Robinson ...... 149 6. Introduction: The Fundamental Problems of Defectology ...... 153 7. The Difficult Child ...... 177 8. The Dynamics of Child Character ...... 189 9. The Collective as a Factor in the Development of the Abnormal Child ...... 201

SECTION III: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology: Crisis in Psychology Section introduction: Robert W. Rieber and David K Robinson 221 10. The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation ...... 227

xix Contents

SECTION IV: The History of the Development of High Term Mental Functions: Exegesis ofVygotsky's Text Section introduction: Joseph Glick...... 345 11. The Structure of Higher Mental Functions ...... 359 12. Mastering Attention...... 375

SECTION V: Child Psychology: Vygotsky's Conception of Psychological Development Section introduction: Carl Ratner ...... 401 13. Development ofThinking and Formation of Concepts in the Adolescent ...... 415 14. Dynamics and Structure of the Adolescent's Personality...... 471 15. The Crisis at Age Seven ...... 491

SECTION VI: Scientific Legacy: Tool and Sign in the Development of the Child Section introduction: Anna Stetsenko ...... 501 16. The Problem of Practical Intellect in the Psychology of Animals and the Psychology of the Child ...... 513 17. The Function of Signs in the Development of Higher Mental Processes...... 539 18. Sign Operations and Organization of Mental Processes ...... 551 19. Analysis of Sign Operations of the Child ...... 557

Bibliography of Works about Vygotsky in English ...... 571

Index...... 581