http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/levitin/not-born-personality.pdf
This work gives a lot of information on many of the other Soviet 'psychologists' as well as Vygotsky. It's the best profile of Elkonen I've ever found, albeit very short. CJ http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/levitin/not-born-personality.pdf Interesting excerpt: >>In the 1920s, Soviet psychologists quickly destroyed the traditional, >>subjective-empirical psychology which prevailed in Russian science before the >>Revolution. And the same years saw impatient attempts to replace it with a >>new Marxist, materialist and objective psychology. Moreover, psychologists >>were strongly influenced by Pavlov’s physiology of higher neural activity, >>which was seen as a model of scientific objectivity and materialism. Its >>successes were enough to impress any scientist in the early 1920s. Soviet >>psychologists in those years were also greatly influenced by the idea of >>explaining psychological processes in straightforward sociological terms. >>Considering that the Soviet humanities had not yet interpreted and >>assimilated Marxist philosophy with sufficient depth, these ideas were often >>regarded as authentically “Marxist.” Finally, of the psychological schools >>proper, the greatest influence on Soviet psychology was exerted by >>behaviourism, which was attractive because it was seen as an objective, >>materialistic trend. The influence of these and a series of other circumstances produced a very complex picture in psychology. Some defined psychology as “the science of behaviour” (Borovsky, Blonsky), others as “the science of reflexes” (Bekhterev), others thought that psychology was “the science of reactions” (Kornilov), and still others described it as a science “of the systems of social reflexes” (Raisner). Despite the differences in these formulations their general thrust was undoubtedly directed against the notion of psychology as “the science of the soul.” Making psychology objective was the goal of all the trends. To achieve this aim, psychologists were prepared to forego the study of any subjective elements in the human psyche. The psyche was reduced either to a system of behavioural reactions or to a combination of conditional reflexes or a set of what a modern scholar would describe as “social positions” or “social roles.” LEV VYGOTSKY. THE MOZART OF PSYCHOLOGY 37 What did that mean in relation to the problems of consciousness? Many prominent Soviet psychologists (Blonsky and Borovsky) practically ignored this problem. They believed it was beyond the scope of scientific psychology, as it was incapable of being studied by objective methods. Another group of psychologists headed by Kornilov, on the contrary, considered consciousness to be the key object of psychology. And some few psychologists led by Chelpanov still adhered to the traditional psychology of consciousness. It would seem that the above three positions exhaust every possible attitude to the problem of consciousness, but Vygotsky challenged all of them at once. He broke through the presuppositions to which the Soviet psychologists of those years had confined themselves without being aware of it. This arose from a premise which was tacitly and unconsciously accepted by all: consciousness can only be studied as it was studied by subjective empirical psychology. Vygotsky managed to escape this trap because he approached the problem of consciousness not from a psychological but from a methodological angle. To get a genuine opportunity to study the essence – genesis, structure, determinants – of consciousness, he argued, one must adopt a methodological position whereby consciousness becomes the object of study per se. That, in turn, makes it necessary to work out a more general principle of explanation. One must look for a layer of reality of which consciousness is itself the function. If consciousness could serve as a principle of explanation – and that was precisely the case in traditional psychology, which described consciousness as “the common master of psychic functions,” “the stage on which the psyche unfolds” – any study of its essence would be automatically impossible, and only a description of the individual phenomena pertaining to it would be possible. To give consciousness a different methodological status (I am deliberately using the terms of the 1960s and 1970s because this modernisation helps express Vygotsky’s idea for which there was no adequate terminology in his time) one had to identify the layer of reality that determined it. And Vygotsky accomplished that by representing consciousness as an element in the structure of man’s labour activity. The idea that consciousness is determined by labour activity led Vygotsky to the idea of the “psychological tools” created artificially by mankind which represented an element of culture. Initially they were directed “outward,” toward the partner, but then they turned “inward upon oneself” to become the means of governing one’s own psychic processes. Vygotsky considered signs to be such “psychological tools.” He viewed symbols in a unique way – not as a reflexologist (who considered a sign to be a conventional stimulus in the system of conditional reflexes), and not as a representative of Freudianism where a sign is regarded as a visual symbol of unconscious drives. For Vygotsky, a sign is a symbol which has a certain meaning worked out throughout the history of culture. This treatment of the symbol goes back to Vygotsky’s early work on the psychology of art and to his humanitarian philological background as a whole. One could single out several trends that influenced Vygotsky in particular: historical linguistics, the thinking of Humboldt, Steinhal, Potebnya; scholars of kindred spirit such as Bakhtin; symbolism in literature and art in the twentieth century, and possibly the works on semiotics by Ferdinand de Saussure. The idea of the sign as a “psychological tool” in Vygotsky’s theory is one of the most successful applications of semiotics in psychology. WERTSCH: ... One can see the influence of two areas of study which gave rise to much of Vygotsky’s genius – Marxism and semiotics. Thus, Vygotsky was interested in the role of sign systems as mediating devices, but he viewed this as an extension of Marx’s notion of how the tool or instrument mediates labour activity. 38 ONE IS NOT BORN A PERSONALITY For Marx and Engels, labour was the basic form of human activity. It lies at the foundation of any explanation of socio-cultural history and of the psychological characteristics of the individual. Their analysis stressed that in carrying out labour activity humans do not simply transform nature, they are also themselves transformed in the process. For Marx, labour is primarily “... a process going on between man and nature, a process in which man, through his own activity, initiates, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He confronts nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his own body, in order to appropriate nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops the powers that slumber within him, and subjects them to his own control.” That is, humans do not remain unchanged or unaffected by their participation in labour activity which transforms nature. They are constantly being influenced by this activity and by the demands placed on them as a result of the impact it had had on nature. The tools that are available at a particular stage in history reflect the level of labour activity. New types of instruments are needed to carry out the continually evolving new forms of labour activity. The other side of the dialectical coin is that each new level of tools or instruments gives rise to yet another round of ways of conceptualising and acting upon the world. This unending, dialectical process is particularly important in the case of sign systems. They are constantly changed to deal with new situations, but they are not the passive servants of activity. They exert a strong influence on the present and future forms this activity can take. This is a point which has been stressed by Soviet semioticians for half a century now. When trying to understand the role of the instrument or tool in Vygotsky’s theoretical framework, one should not forget that before he became interested in psychological issues, he was a semiotician. One of the main cornerstones of his psychology was the similarity between Marx’s notion of how the tool or instrument mediates overt human labour activity and the semiotic notion of how sign systems mediate human social processes and thinking. In both cases, the point is that instruments are not only used by humans to change the world; they also transform and regulate humans in this process. Daniel Lucid has recently [in his Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, 1977] made this point in connection with Soviet semiotics as follows: “The ultimate implication of Soviet semiotics is that human beings not only communicate with signs but are in large measure controlled by them. Sign systems regulate human behaviour, beginning with the instruction given children and continuing through all the programs introduced into the individual by society. A sign system possesses the capacity literally to mould or ‘model’ the world in its own image, shaping the minds of society’s members to fit its structure.” 7<<end of excerpt _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
