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Wundt, Vygotsky and Bandura: A cultural-historical science of

consciousness in three acts
Michel Ferrari, David K. Robinson and Anton Yasnitsky
History of the Human Sciences 2010 23: 95
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History of the Human Sciences
23(3) 95118
Wundt, Vygotsky and The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0952695110363643
historical science of hhs.sagepub.com
consciousness in three acts
Michel Ferrari
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
David K. Robinson
Truman State University, Missouri, USA
Anton Yasnitsky
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
This article looks at three historical efforts to coordinate the scientific study of biological
and cultural aspects of human consciousness into a single comprehensive theory of
human development that includes the evolution of the human body, cultural evolution
and personal development: specifically, the research programs of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev
Vygotsky and Albert Bandura. The lack of historical relations between these similar
efforts is striking, and suggests that the effort to promote cultural and personal
sources of consciousness arises as a natural foil to an overemphasis on the biological
basis of consciousness, sometimes associated with biological determinism.
Keywords
consciousness, culture, history, human development, personal identity
Corresponding author:
Professor Michel Ferrari, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Department of
Human Development & Applied Psychology, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada.
Email: mferrari@oise.utoronto.ca
95

96 History of the Human Sciences 23(3)
Introduction
From the beginning of psychology as a scientific discipline, some of its most influential
researchers have made efforts to coordinate biological and cultural aspects of human
experience into a single comprehensive theory of human development that coordinates
the evolution of the human body, cultural evolution and personal development. This arti-
cle looks at three such efforts by Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky and Albert Bandura.
Although there is some continuity in their ideas, the lack of historical connections
between these similar efforts is striking. How to explain that a cultural-historical psy-
chology of human experience is repeatedly reinventing itself? Perhaps it arises, from
time to time (and almost anew), as a natural foil to an overemphasis on the biological
basis of consciousness, often associated with biological determinism, which certainly
characterized many 19th-century physiological explorations of the mind and still fea-
tures widely in todays science of consciousness.
Wundts Cultural-Historical Science of Consciousness

Wundts concern with consciousness was integral to his understanding of the aims of a
scientific psychology. Psychology as a scientific discipline emerged during the 19th cen-
tury as part of the burgeoning, modernizing German culture. When they were overrun by
the French armies around the turn of the century, like much of Europe, the German states
could no longer ignore the message of reform and innovation, i.e. the ideas of the French
Revolution. Cultivating their military traditions, even more after their resounding defeat
by Napoleon, the Prussians eventually came out further ahead of other German states
after Napoleon. It was during this period of Napoleonic domination, 180615, that the
broad Prussian plan for reform from above enlisted the advice of many progressive
thinkers, including the remarkable Humboldt brothers, Wilhelm (17671835) and
Alexander (17691859). The latter had already achieved international fame with his tra-
vels of exploration and his scientific writings; after the wars he continued to promote
science internationally and to cultivate natural science in German universities, which
became world leaders in laboratory science by the time of his death. The elder brother,
Wilhelm, had followed a quieter road of bookish learning classical philology, linguis-
tics, philosophy until the Prussian king called him to a brief period of government ser-
vice in 1809; the changes that Wilhelm Humboldt effected in the Prussian educational
system eventually influenced all the German-speaking universities and, through them,
higher education throughout the world, even as the Prussian state settled back into its
conservative, militaristic traditions (Robinson, 1997).
As Wilhelm Wundt (18321920) became a university student in the 1850s, both
Humboldtian traditions were flourishing. The methods of experimental science were
branching out of physics and chemistry into physiology and medicine, and the German
university still cultivated the Humboldtian unification of research and education through
advanced studies and graduate degrees, a tradition that had actually begun in philological
seminars. In 1860 Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal began their journal Zeitschrift
fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft [Journal of Cultural Psychology and
Linguistics]. They were consciously following in the path of Wilhelm Humboldt, who
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Ferrari et al. 97
may have coined the term Volkerpsychologie to encompass the broad philosophical,
cultural studies that he valued so much.
Wundt had a long career, perhaps two somewhat separate careers: first as a pioneering
physiological psychologist, then as psychologist-philosopher and director of the world-
renowned Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig, which began operations by
1879. To appreciate Wundts approach, or approaches, to the problem of consciousness,
it is useful first to look at the fertile period before 1879, and then at Wundts mature
career. Starting out as a student of medicine, Wundt eventually became a prominent
German philosopher who promoted the new psychology as the scientific foundation for
philosophy in general.
Wundts earliest version of the new psychology in the 1860s already had two major
divisions: experimental (or physiological) psychology (based on the productive meth-
ods of the physical and biological sciences); and Volkerpsychologie (cultural psychol-
ogy, very roughly) (Wundt, 1990[1863]). In Wundts view, Volkerpsychologie an
expansion of the program of Lazarus and Steinthal was an essential complement
to laboratory investigations of consciousness; they were two equally important
branches of the modern scientific (wissenschaftlich) psychology that Wundt promoted
until the end of his long life. Since Volkerpsychologie dealt with the higher mental
functions, and experimental psychology concentrated on simple functions in the nor-
mal, adult, individual mind, Wundts dual approach seemed to favor
Volkerpsychologies contributions to a general theory of psychology; indeed in his
later life he often implied that it was the more important part of psychology:
Speech, myths and customs constitute a series of closely related subjects which are of great
importance to general psychology for the reason that the relatively permanent character of
speech, myths, and customs renders it relatively easy to recognize clearly through them cer-
tain psychical processes, and to carry out through them certain psychological analyses. Such
recognition of general processes and such analyses are much easier here than in the case of
transient compounds of individual consciousness. (Wundt, 1897[1896]: 3467)
The first version of Wundts Volkerpsychologie, which appeared in the second volume
of his Vorlesungen uber Menschen- und Thierseele [Lectures on Human and Animal Psy-
chology] (1st edition, 1863), included extensive discussions of language, myth and cus-
toms. Harsh reviews and further reading convinced him, however, that he had probably
broached the subject too hastily, so in the second, one-volume edition of the Lectures
(1892b), he cut back on the cultural material, as he continued to compile it for the more
systematic treatment, eventually to appear in the 10 large volumes of his Volkerpsychologie
(190020). In the meantime, the success of his publications in experimental psychology and
the international influence of his Institute for Experiment Psychology at Leipzig University
secured Wundts reputation as the father of experimental psychology, but not as the pro-
genitor of a new modern philosophy, as he would have hoped.
Wundts efforts to make psychology scientific made him very cautious about defining
some of its fundamental concepts. He became critical, for example, of prevailing notions
of consciousness, even more critical of investigations into the unconsciousness. In his
Lectures (1998[1892]), he makes it clear that he was much more comfortable speaking of
97

conscious processes, which psychological research can investigate, than of some

thing called consciousness. As he emphasized at the beginning of the volume, the new
scientific philosophy had to avoid the metaphysics of materialism and spiritualism,
either of which led to unwarranted assumptions about what consciousness is:
. . . the view naturally suggested itself that consciousness is a special mental condition,
requiring to be defined by certain characteristic marks. And the feeling that it was necessary
to oppose to consciousness an unconscious mental existence promoted this opinion. . . .
[M]any philosophers and psychologists consider it much more interesting to learn what
takes place behind the scenes, in unconsciousness, than what occurs in consciousness.
(Wundt, 1998[1892]: 235)
Wundt really came out not too far from what William James (1904) would later con-
sider consciousness to be, a function. Although . . . consciousness is not an especial
kind of reality coordinate with the particular facts of consciousness, modern psychology
still finds the concept indispensable. We must have a collective expression for the whole
number of mental experiences, given either simultaneously or successively (Wundt,
1998[1892]: 238). With that definition thus settled, Wundt devoted detailed attention
to questions that he considered more interesting. What is the capacity or range of con-
sciousness? How many impressions (or ideas) can it hold simultaneously? How are sim-
ple or related or unrelated ideas contained differently from complex or related ones?
These were the types of experimentally accessible issues that interested Wundt and the
students in his institute. He tended to reject experimental investigations of unconscious-
ness, from his Hypnotismus und Suggestion (1892a) at the start to his brief but thorough
rebuke of Freud in the last two editions (5th and 6th) of his major handbook of experimen-
tal psychology, Grundzuge der physiologischen psychologie [Principles of Physiological
Psychology]:
It is a remarkable sign of the times that a mystical psychology of dreams [of the school of
Schelling] has its most zealous representation amongst the neuropathologists; Sigmund
Freuds studies of dreams provide a good example of this. . . . The new Naturphilosophie
is connected with the old, particularly through the idea of the unconscious and also
through its preference for abnormal mental states. (Wundt, 1911: 636)
Even with his unitary emphasis on consciousness, Wundt still maintained the two
main approaches toward psychological studies: experimental psychology and
Volkerpsychologie. It is difficult for modern psychologists to understand why Wundt
supported both approaches or how his emphasis seemed to change over the course of his
long career, and consequently historians of psychology have interpreted his body of work
in different ways. Willem van Hoorn and Thomas Verhave (1980) have identified as
many as four different conceptions for psychological science that Wundt held over time,
whereas other historians fail to see such profound changes. William Woodward (1982),
for example, explains that the scope of Wundts work in psychology is so poorly under-
stood today because people who have been trained up in the splintered disciplinary maze
which is modern psychology simply cannot fathom Wundts will to system, something
98

Ferrari et al. 99
that was fairly typical of mid-19th-century German scholars. In his wide-ranging

study of Cultural Psychology, Michael Cole (1996) avoids the problem of how many
Wundts there may have been and merely notes that he developed two enterprises for
psychology because of the different methodologies required by experimental psychology
(laboratory investigations) and Volkerpsychologie (cultural and historical studies). For
historical reasons, Wundts way of including the second psychology was virtually
abandoned in the West, especially the USA, whereas in Russia (again due to accidents
of history) the cultural-historical approach to psychology was preserved as integral to
psychology, though under difficult conditions.
The German historian of psychology Carl Friedrich Graumann (1980) indicates
that the bifurcation actually resulted from a shift in Wundts own interests, particu-
larly as he focused on the role of consciousness rather than unconscious activity: the
earlier Heidelberg Program for psychology (before Wundt arrived in Leipzig in
1875) combined introspective, experimental, historical and statistical investigations
of unconscious mental phenomena, whereas Wundts Leipzig Program abandoned
considerations of the unconscious and split into simple conscious mental actions in
experimental psychology, on the one hand, and cultural-historical Volkerpsychologie,
on the other. Although Wundts experimental psychology after 1875 held fairly
strictly to research on the conscious, adult, normal mind (apparently attributing
unconscious action to straightforward cultural conditioning and habituation), he
surely never intended to develop two distinct disciplines of psychology. Indeed
Wundt disapproved of a distinct discipline for psychology itself for him it should
all be part of a reformed philosophy.
Wundt was trained in medicine at a time when experimental physiology was revolu-
tionizing medical training, and through his studies of sensory physiology he gravitated to
philosophy, especially psychology. In this connection, Robert Richards has made a
strong case for Darwins influence. Wundt, he claims, was among the first, perhaps the
first German scientist to integrate Darwins ideas into his own system, throughout his
career he continued to relate his changing views to what he understood as the Darwinian
position (Richards, 1980: 43). When Wundt published his first books on psychology in
the 1860s he was an enthusiastic Darwinian who envisioned a very broad program for
psychological research. This included the comparative and developmental issues (which
he never really took up in his institute) and Volkerpsychologie (which he certainly did
treat in his later years). By the time he published his landmark work on experimental
psychology, Grundzuge der physiologischen psychologie [Principles of Physiological
Psychology] (18734, later to be expanded in five further editions [1911]), Wundt had
left the broad approach to psychology behind, at least for a decade or two, and concen-
trated more on laboratory work, imposing quite a restrictive experimental method on the
study of reaction times, sensory capacities, psychophysics, etc. As Kurt Danziger has put
it, Broadly speaking, the young Wundt was more sanguine about the prospects of psy-
chology as a natural science than the mature Wundt of the middle period (18801900),
while the old Wundt had gone even further in abandoning the enthusiasms of his early
years (Danziger, 1990: 407).
The interpretations of Graumann and Richards remind us that Wundt was typical of
biological and behavioral scientists during the period 18701900: more neo-Lamarckian
99

than what we would now call Darwinian in biological theory (Bowler, 2003: ch. 7).
Experimental work on conscious thought and its development, in the individual and in
culture, received the lions share of his attention. What others consider to be unconscious
phenomena began sometime as some kind of conscious activity, later habituated. The
conscious, active creations of individuals would, over time, be codified into cultural
assumptions, often unconscious ones. Though he surely always considered himself
Darwinian, such Lamarckian processes of use-and-disuse link Wundts studies of
individual psychology to his broader cultural studies. As professor of philosophy at
Leipzig University, Wundt published many programmatic texts in the traditional areas
of philosophy (logic, metaphysics, history of philosophy, etc.), trying to integrate the
contributions of psychology into them. By 1900 he had collected and compiled enough
linguistic and anthropological studies to begin his 10 volumes of Volkerpsychologie,
190020. In his useful overview of this now almost forgotten part of Wundts work,
Kurt Danziger finds that all the concrete social and historical phenomena studied in those
heavy volumes ultimately refer back to universal human mental functions (Danziger,
1983: 308) I would add, to conscious functions.
Because the historical development of consciousness could not be investigated
directly by experiment or controlled introspection, one needed to study language, myth
and customs of historical peoples as lasting traces of their consciousness. Individual spo-
ken language would seem to be an obvious link between the two strands of Wundts psy-
chology, and indeed the first two volumes of Volkerpsychologie were devoted to
language. Psychology of emotion, a major emphasis of later experimental research at
Wundts institute, might be another. Although Wundt and his colleagues in Leipzig
devoted a great deal of attention to both of these areas, they failed to make dynamic links
needed to unite the two enterprises (to use Coles formulation). Apparently no one out-
side of Leipzig took up Wundts tri-dimensional theory of emotions, and the work in
Volkerpsychologie was superseded (and to some extent absorbed) by more successful
programs in anthropology and linguistics.1
In his broadest statements of his psychology and philosophy, Wundt assumed that
connections between individual and collective psychology would ultimately be attained:
We have here, in mental communities, and especially in their development of language,
myths, and customs, mental interconnections and interactions that differ in essential
respects from the interconnection of the psychical compounds in an individual conscious-
ness, but still have just as much reality as the individual consciousness itself. In this sense
we may speak of the interconnection of the ideas and feelings of a social community as a
collective consciousness, and of the common volitional tendencies as a collective will. In
doing this we are not to forget that these concepts do not mean something that exists apart
from the conscious and volitional processes of the individual, any more than the commu-
nity itself is something besides the union of individuals. Since this union, however, brings
forth certain mental products, such as language, myths, and customs, for which only the
germs are present in the individual, and since it determines the development of the indi-
vidual from a very early period, it is just as much an object of psychology as the individual
consciousness. For psychology must give an account of the interactions which give rise to
the products and attributes of collective consciousness and of the collective will. (Wundt,
1897[1896]: 3089)
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Ferrari et al. 101
Although Wundts approach to psychology emphasized mental activity (actuality) more

than structure (what he called the metaphysics of mind-substance), his careful applica-
tion of experimental method made him notorious for his restrictive attitude toward
experimental methods in psychology, especially among North Americans. Wundt did not
welcome studies of child psychology in his institute or publications of educational
psychology in his journals. There were no animals in his institute, nor any children or
psychiatric patients though Wundt seemed pleased that Emil Kraepelin and others
(including Russian visitors such as Vladimir Bekhterev) were able to use psychophysical
and psychometric methods to evaluate their patients (in Paul Flechsigs psychiatric clinic
in Leipzig, for example, or in clinics opened back in Russia).
North American psychologists admired the brass instrument precision of
Wundtian experimental psychology, but they virtually ignored his philosophy and
Volkerpsychologie, which few of them could read and understand even if they cared
to. Eventually, as even Wundts own German students wandered off in their own direc-
tions, the non-experimental writings of Wundt became less and less influential. The
Wurzburg School of psychology and the Frankfurt psychologists were more influenced
by the philosophy of Mach, the phenomenology of Carl Stumpf and the precision meth-
ods of G. E. Mueller than by Wundt, and so they led major German departures from
Wundtian psychology, including gestalt. Even Wundts successor as institute director
at Leipzig, Felix Krueger, wrote on Entwicklungspsychologie [developmental psychol-
ogy] rather than Volkerpsychologie.
In Russia, the cultural-historical side of psychology survived and developed further
than in North America. More of Wundts writings (including his cultural and philosophical
works) were translated into Russian than into any other language, indicating his deep influ-
ence in the Russian universities, at least up to the First World War. Vygotsky, for example,
apparently read the German easily enough, and all of Wundts original writings (as well as
many translated into Russian) were accessible to Vygotsky and his colleagues in Moscow.
Vygotskys Perspective on Methodological Dualism

in Psychology
As an undergraduate Lev Semonovich Vygotsky (18961934) studied at the Institute of
Psychology (among other institutions in Moscow), which had grown out of A. A. Tokars-
kys very Wundtian psychological laboratory in the Psychiatric Clinic of the University
of Moscow. In fact, work began in the new institute building in 1913, just as Vygotsky
arrived in Moscow. A broad-thinking, philosophically inclined psychologist,
G. I. Chelpanov (the institutes founding director) organized and supported experimental
work of the Wundtian style, though his overall approach to psychology was eclectic. Fol-
lowing the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, Vygotsky was called back to Moscow
in 1924, after the directorship of the institute had recently passed to Kornilov, who was
devoted to Marxist ideology and to his research program in reactology, which was
based on reaction-time studies of the Wundtian type.
Vygotskys thinking about mind and the ways to investigate consciousness objec-
tively were influenced both by approaches to culture and consciousness initiated by the
German Romantics (and extensively developed by Alexander Potebnya, the great
101

Russian-Ukrainian linguist and the founder of the so-called Kharkov linguistic school) and
by the natural-scientific, experimental research done under the banners of reflexology
(especially the school of V. M. Bekhterev in Leningrad) and reactology (Kornilov in
Moscow). In fact, all of Vygotskys work in psychology appears to have developed
between his university studies and his call to Moscow according to a general plan of stud-
ies that he initiated in his Gomel period (191724). This period yielded his early piece on
educational psychology (1926), as well as a series of works on literary criticism and theater
reviews that were later recast in Vygotskys 1925 dissertation The Psychology of Art.
The main theme the central nerve of his approach was Vygotskys insistence on a
science of consciousness as a distinctly human phenomenon, a theme he had to develop
in opposition to the prevailing Russian schools of the time. Indeed, in various places in
his writings from the last and most productive decade of his career (192434), Vygotsky
left rich evidence of his orientation towards understanding consciousness as the major
task for psychological research. As early as 19245 he called for the objective study
of consciousness: Scientific psychology cannot ignore the facts of consciousness; it
must materialise them, translate what objectively exists into an objective language, and
once and for all unmask and bury the fictions, phantasmagoria, etc. Otherwise, no work
is possible, neither teaching nor criticism nor research (Vygotsky, 1999[1925]: 262).
A decade later, when writing his seminal Thinking and Speech, a year before his
death, Vygotskys view on the meaning and the place of consciousness as an object of
psychological research had not changed: Psychology has defined itself as the science
of consciousness, but about consciousness psychology hardly knew anything. . . . Psy-
chologys sterility was caused by the fact that the problem of consciousness was not yet
worked out (Vygotsky, 1997[1932]: 129). Furthermore, in the very last words of Think-
ing and Speech, Vygotsky returns even more strongly to the same topic: Our investiga-
tion has brought us to the threshold of a problem that is broader, more profound, and still
more extraordinary than the problem of thinking. It has brought us to the threshold of the
problem of consciousness (Vygotsky, 1987[1934]: 285). In fact, priority of the problem
of consciousness in Vygotskys thought has been widely acknowledged by representa-
tives of the Vygotskian psychological tradition.2
Presentation at the Second All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology

Vygotskys first explicit call for systematic study of consciousness based on objective
methods of psychological research was his famous 6 January 1924 presentation at the
Second All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in Petrograd (later Leningrad, now
St Petersburg), later published in 1926 as The Methods of Reflexological and Psycho-
logical Investigation.3 It was due to this presentation that Vygotsky was invited to leave
Gomel (his provincial hometown in Belarus) and join the Institute of Psychology at
Moscow State University.
Presentation at the Open Conference of the Institute of Psychology in Moscow

Vygotsky further elaborated on the problem of consciousness in another talk that was
presented at an open conference at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow later that
102

Ferrari et al. 103
year, on 19 October 1924 (Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991: 40). This presentation,
published the following year as Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of
Behavior (Vygotsky, 1999[1925]), addressed issues of methodology of psychological
research in the context of an ongoing debate about the foundations and methods of psy-
chological research of that time (Davydov and Radzikhovskii, 1985[1980]; Leontiev,
1983[1967]; Veresov, 1999).
This second paper is remarkable as a distinctly Vygotskian work that clearly
demonstrates the development of his thought out of earlier, reflexological and reacto-
logical theories towards a cultural-historical explanatory framework. The paper
appeared in the context of the struggle between two leading schools of Russian psy-
chology: the objectivist school of Pavlov, Bekhterev, etc., and the subjectivist tradition
of introspective psychology led by Chelpanov, the first director and founder of the
Institute of Psychology in Moscow.4
The school of Chelpanov and the school of Pavlov and Bekhterev represented two
distinct approaches to understanding human nature, although they shared several basic
assumptions. The main difference between them concerns their understanding of the
meaning and the role of objectivity in psychological research. Thus, subjective-
empirical (idealist) psychology emphasized the importance of subjective experience and
featured the method of psychological introspection. In contrast, the objectivist schools
stressed the importance of objective empirical research based on a strictly scientific
methodology modeled on the natural sciences; specifically, Pavlovs theory of the higher
nervous activity and Bekhterevs reflexology. Representatives of the objectivist school
typically studied reactions and reflexes.
An assumption common to both schools was the view that consciousness was an
entity. In Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of Behavior, Vygotsky refers
to William Jamess (1904) severe criticism of the concept of consciousness in psycho-
logical research,5 understood as a specific mode of being (Vygotsky, 1999[1925]). This
was precisely the problem faced by both reflexologists and idealists. Reflexologists
could not deny the existence of consciousness and fully eliminate it from psychological
reality (and few really intended to do so, anyway), and idealists could not explain con-
sciousness objectively. Vygotsky describes this situation as a dualism in psychology that
is detrimental to the normal development of psychology as a science.
James (1904) proposes to substitute the old metaphor of consciousness as entity
with a new one, that of consciousness as a function. Vygotsky underlines the important
fact that James reached his conclusions from a very different theoretical perspective,
using the method of self-observation, or introspection. Likewise, in Consciousness
as a Problem in the Psychology of Behavior, Vygotsky (1999[1925]) calls for expel-
ling methodological dualism in all its forms and installing an objective, scientific,
monistic psychology in its stead.
The Research Program of Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology

of Behavior
In his 1925 presentation, Vygotsky proposes a program of radical transformation of the
whole paradigm of contemporary psychological inquiry. Not only is consciousness
103

necessary, it must become the primary object of psychological research. Scientific

psychology must materialize the facts of consciousness, says Vygotsky, and needs a
solid hypothesis about the psychological nature of consciousness as the first step towards
the large-scale revision of the fundamentals and methods of all future psychological
research. According to Veresov (1999), Vygotskys (1925) paper introduces such a
psychological hypothesis: consciousness is the problem of the structure of behavior.
Recall that in the early 1920s Vygotsky had completed his degree work in the
Historical-Philological Department of Shanyavsky Peoples University. His 1916 masters
thesis was entitled the Tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, by W. Shakespeare
and his 1925 doctoral dissertation was entitled the Psychology of Art. He was already
a prominent literary critic and educator, and was beginning his career as a leading
psychologist.
Vygotsky decided that behavior should be of primary interest to psychology as an
objective science. The behavior of animals is essentially adaptive and can successfully
be explained within the reflexological model: conditioned reflexes in animals develop
on the basis of inherited unconditional reflexes. Vygotskys early studies searched for
a theoretical framework and conceptual apparatus that would allow objective psycholo-
gical study of consciousness and of art.
Indeed, both his 1924 presentation at the Second All-Russian Congress on Psycho-
neurology and the 1925 Moscow paper on consciousness abound with references to
studies of reflex and reaction, and to the works of prominent physiologists of that time
such as Pavlov, Ukhtomsky, Sherrington, Bekhterev, Zelenyj, and Protopopov. In his
search for physiological foundations of human consciousness, Vygotsky turned to the
studies of physiologists who had discovered the mechanisms of coordination of reflexes;
for example, chain reflex (Pavlov), in which the response component of one reflex
becomes a conditional irritant or inhibition for another reflex. Vygotsky also refers to
Sherringtons notion of the proprioceptive field generated by the organism itself (rather
than coming from the environment) and thus secondary to the first-order, direct reflexes
of an organism. For Vygotsky, secondary reaction can both strengthen and terminate the
primary one. And this is the mechanism for consciousness (Vygotsky, 1997[1925]: 72).
In order to establish psychology as an objective investigation of consciousness as
revealed in distinctly human behavior, it is important to emphasize the secondary nature
of consciousness: The problem of consciousness must be solved in psychology in a
sense that consciousness is an interaction, reflection, and mutual excitation of different
systems of reflexes. What is conscious is what is transmitted as an irritant to other sys-
tems in which it has a response. Consciousness is always an echo, a response apparatus
(Vygotsky, 1999[1925]: 26970). Based on this methodologically valuable notion of
reflex, Vygotsky developed his methodology of psychological investigation of con-
sciousness as a distinctively human characteristic. Following Vagner, reflex became a
foundation for Vygotsky, but from this foundation we cannot possibly deduce what will
be built on it (Vygotsky, 1997[1925]: 67).
Human beings, in addition to these reflective reactions based on personal physical
experiences, are distinct in that they use also what Vygotsky refers to as historical expe-
rience of the previous generations (social experience of other people) and the doubled
experience of ones own creativity and imagination as a precondition for virtually all
104

Ferrari et al. 105
transformative and active forms of adaptation which the animal does not have
(Vygotsky, 1997[1925]: 68). According to Vygotsky, understanding the interconnec-
tions between the biological and distinctly human factors of our behavior is the main task
for psychology. However, in order to study the structure of human behavior we need to
understand that the work of each organ, its reflex, is not something static, but only a
function deriving from the overall state of the organism and, following Sherrington
(1906), to recognize that the nervous system works as an integrated whole.
The methodology of psychological research was of the utmost importance to
Vygotsky, who argues that introspection the main method for studying consciousness
in the traditional psychology of Wundt and the Wurzburg School was insufficient for
objective scientific research on the full range of human experience. The success of self-
observation relies on our access to phenomena that take place in our proprioceptive field
and our ability to have conscious awareness of mental life. However, there is a whole
group of mental phenomena that are beyond the reach of such introspection, including
a number of non-manifest reflexes (e.g. tacit speech) revealed through other reflexes that
they provoke, and Vygotsky believed that it is suicidal for psychology not to study these,
given how important they are in human mental life.
Instead of self-observation, Vygotsky proposed the objective study of internal
reflexes that, although inaccessible to direct observation, can be detected often indir-
ectly by mediation, through observable reflexes for which they serve as irritants. The
presence of a complete reflex (a word) serves as an indicator of the presence of a corre-
sponding irritant that plays a dual role. In this case it is an irritant for the complex reflex
and is itself a reflex relative to the previous irritant (Vygotsky, 1999[1925]: 272).
Furthermore, words, language and, more generally, all humanly created irritants, consti-
tute a special group of reversible reflexes, meaning that an irritant can become a reaction,
and vice versa. Reversible reflexes constitute social irritants, creating the basis for social
behavior and for the collective coordination of behavior.
Through this line of reasoning, Vygotsky arrives at a socio-genetic conclusion: the
mechanism of knowing oneself and knowing the other is identical, and we know our-
selves by virtue of knowing others.
We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous

manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same
as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as
another for myself, i.e., only to the extent that I can perceive anew my own reflexes as new
irritants. Between the fact that I can repeat aloud a word spoken silently to myself and the
fact that I can repeat a word spoken by another there is no essential difference, nor is there
any principal difference in their mechanisms: both are reversible reflexes irritants.
(Vygotsky, 1999[1925]: 278)
In other words, underlines Vygotsky, the mechanism of social behavior and the
mechanism of consciousness are the same, and acquiring human language is instrumen-
tal in emergence of consciousness: conscious awareness of speech and social experience
emerge simultaneously and completely in parallel. Therefore, the historical and social
105

components of human behavior that Vygotsky identified at the beginning of his 1925
paper must be combined:
Obviously, historical and social experience do not represent different things from the psy-
chological viewpoint as they cannot be separated in experience and are always given
together. Let us combine them with the sign. Their mechanism is entirely the same, as
I tried to prove, as the mechanism of consciousness, because consciousness, too, must be
regarded as a particular case of social experience. That is why both of these parts can easily
be designated with the same index of doubled experience. (Vygotsky, 1997[1925]: 78)
As Vygotsky (1925) pointed out, psychology still did not have the methods objectively to
investigate consciousness as revealed in the phenomena of human behavior and new
methods were urgently needed; nor does he claim to have provided any: Here we have
only defended the fundamental necessity and possibility of such methods (Vygotsky,
1997[1925]: 74).
The questions Vygotsky posed in his early writings guided a decade of inquiry into
development of mediated higher mental functions, most notably the double stimulation
research, in which human activity towards certain objects was facilitated with some kind of
auxiliary tools provided to the subjects of these studies (e.g. pictograms, pictures, mean-
ingless words). These studies, through a series of further investigations into normal child
development as well as those done in clinical settings, contributed to Vygotskys later
thinking about the object and methods of the human sciences in an integrated sense. Char-
acteristically, during the last period of his short life, Vygotsky gravitated toward paedology
as a cross-disciplinary study of the child and ultimately of human development.
Vygotskys Later Thought: the Problem of Consciousness 19324

Vygotskys early thinking about consciousness as the problem of the psychology of
behavior is reflected in his later thought, 19324. In his book Thinking and Speech
(1987[1934]), Vygotsky comes close to the very threshold of formulating a new under-
standing of the problem. However, his work was interrupted by repeated illness and
ended by his untimely death from tuberculosis, so all we have now are a number of ideas
scattered throughout his completed works, as well as some fragments, letters and
archival documents, unfinished writings and personal notes from 19314. One document
of great interest as perhaps the only source that directly reflects his later approach to the
problem of consciousness in psychological research is Vygotskys The Problem of
Consciousness: This is not an academic publication and in fact Vygotsky never actually
wrote the text. Rather, it was reconstructed from notes taken by Vygotskys students,
A. N. Leontiev and A. V. Zaporozhets, during group meetings from 19324 (so-called
internal conferences) and first published as The Problem of Consciousness in 1968,
based on a document found in the private archive of Leontiev (Vygotsky, 1968[1932]).
Another group of sources comprises archival documents published recently in Russia
by G. L. Vygodskaya and Y. Zavershneva (Vygotsky, Vygodskaya and Zavershneva,
2007[1932]; Zavershneva, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). Although the investigation of Vygotskys
106

Ferrari et al. 107
later understanding of the concept of consciousness is not yet finished, several general
conclusions can be made.
Several themes, such as the importance of language and the role of cultural-historical
mediational tools in human development, are found in Vygotskys earlier and later dis-
course, so obviously these themes remained important. Furthermore, Vygotskys socio-
genetic ideas had received experimental verification by the beginning of the 1930s:
. . . when we studied the processes of the higher functions in children we came to the fol-
lowing staggering conclusion: each higher form of behavior enters the scene twice in its
development first as a collective form of behavior, as an inter-psychological function,
then as an intra-psychological function, as a certain way of behaving. We do not notice
this fact, because it is too commonplace and we are therefore blind to it. The most striking
example is speech. Speech is at first a means of contact between the child and the sur-
rounding people, but when the child begins to speak to himself, this can be regarded as
the transference of a collective form of behavior into the practice of personal behavior.
(Vygotsky, 1997[1930]: 94)
But in a number of respects, Vygotskys work from the 1930s presents a radical depar-
ture from his earlier efforts to interpret consciousness in terms of reflexology or reactol-
ogy. The entire research program of cultural-historical psychology was apparently
redesigned around the end of 1930, when Vygotsky made his programmatic presentation,
On Psychological Systems (Vygotsky, 1997[1930]), which introduced his new
hypothesis: Consciousness is primordially something unitary this we postulate. Con-
sciousness determines the fate of the system, just like the organism determines the fate of
the functions. Each interfunctional change must be explained by a change of conscious-
ness as a whole (Vygotsky, 1997[1932]: 130). Although Vygotsky introduced the idea
of systemic structure of consciousness at the beginning of the 1930s, by 1932 he begins
to realize that the interrelation and systemic organization of mental functions do not
explain the multitude of phenomena observed, so he introduces another complementary
idea, that of the semantic (or semic) structure of consciousness. The four important
kinds of phenomena that Vygotsky repeatedly refers to are the cases of: (1) normal devel-
opment exemplified by Vygotskys younger daughter Asya; (2) pathological regression
of the mind in schizophrenia; (3) supernormal development of a human being illu-
strated by the case of a prominent Russian poet-futurist Khlebnikov when poetry and
creativity provide an opportunity to overcome the limits of human existence; and
(4) pathological expressions of supernormal development, especially that of the brilliant
mnemonist Shereshevsky, who would later become the main character of Lurias book
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (Zavershneva, 2007).
These writings show that Vygotsky had advanced beyond Wundts program for a com-
plete psychology as a science of consciousness. Where Wundt merely claimed the priority
of Volkerpsychologie in shaping individual consciousness, Vygotsky indicated how
research might proceed in explaining how the collective becomes personal. We see this
especially in his last works, where Vygotsky and his circle were branching out, exploring
many possibilities of cultural-historical psychology. But Vygotskys death, and his polit-
ical burial by Stalinism after 1934, muted the remarkable progress that he and his
107

colleagues had been making toward a cultural-historical science of consciousness. It was

left to researchers like Bandura to advance these concerns, albeit in a way that was com-
pletely independent of Vygotsky and his circle.
Bandura and Reciprocal Determinism involving

Conscious Agency
Even psychologists trained in a scientific context that denied or minimized the scientific
usefulness of the concept of consciousness can ultimately come to defend a cultural-
historical method for understanding it. We see this clearly in the case of Albert Bandura.6
Albert Bandura was born in 1925 in the small Canadian town of Mundare,
near Edmonton, Alberta. In 1946 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia,
in Vancouver, perhaps in part to travel south to warmer weather. Ironically, for a future
giant in the field, he enrolled in psychology because it helped him to schedule rides
with classmates. Graduate school in the early 1950s catapulted him to the center of the
action in social psychology. After asking where he might find the stone tablets of psy-
chology, he was advised to go to the University of Iowa, whose remarkable faculty then
included Kenneth Spence and Kurt Lewin.7 Psychology there closely followed
research at Yale because Spence and Hull were close allies. In particular, there was
a strong influence of social learning theory, developed at the Yale Institute of Human
Relations in the 1930s where John Dollard, Neal Miller and Robert Sears sought to
reconcile Freudian theory with the work of Hull. Bandura was more drawn to Millers
and Dollards studies of modeling and imitation because they explained the influence
of culture that Hulls work did not.
In 1951 Bandura received a masters degree, and in 1952 a PhD, in clinical psychol-
ogy from the University of Iowa, under the direction of Arthur Benton. Robert Sears
recruited Bandura to join the Psychology Department at Stanford University as an
instructor in 1953, where he remains to this day. With his first doctoral student,
Richard Walters, Bandura developed a systematic program of research on social and
familial precursors of aggression; they found evidence of important modeling influ-
ences that helped explain aggression in children even from advantaged families. More
specifically, they found that modeling effects in a child seeing a parent deliver punish-
ment outweighed its effect in suppressing that childs aggression a finding that con-
tradicted both Freud and Hulls assertion that such punishment would inhibit the
expression of aggressive drives. This work led to the now-famous series of studies
involving imitative learning of aggression using the Bobo Doll (Bandura, Ross and
Ross, 1961, 1963; Bandura and Walters, 1959).
In the 1960s, working with colleagues like Walter Mischel, Bandura launched another
major program of research exploring how children develop the ability to self-regulate
their own behavior (an early version of his work on personal agency) in which people
are viewed as self-regulatory and self-reflective beings who create and do not merely
react to environmental influences. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bandura and a growing num-
ber of students and colleagues studied the effects of social modeling on childrens devel-
opment of cognition and language skills, in which they were able to show evidence of
108

Ferrari et al. 109
abstract modeling that freed social learning from the direct mimicry characteristic of ear-
lier accounts.
Banduras ideas about the importance of personal agency for psychological well-
being developed in strong contrast to the dominant behaviorist and Freudian theories
of the mid-20th century. Unlike Vygotsky, who reacted to classical conditioning charac-
teristic of Pavlovs School, the dominant ideas of Banduras early career were those of
Hull and later B. F. Skinners operant conditioning framework, in which anticipated
responses from the environment determine behavior through patterns of reinforcement.
While Freudianism is very different from some would say radically opposed to the
work of Skinner, it shares with it the feature that people are not considered agents of their
own lives, but are pushed and pulled by inner psychic forces (as opposed to environmen-
tal forces) beyond their control. For Freud, the issue of consciousness and its relation to
the unconscious is central to the psychoanalytic school of psychology, while conscious-
ness was tangential to Skinners behaviorism.8 At this point, though, Bandura did not
frame his work in terms of a science of consciousness, but as a science of learning and
behavior.
By the late 1960s, Bandura and his students Bernie Ritter and Ed Blanchard had
developed a very effective guided treatment program that proved positive in helping peo-
ple with debilitating animal phobias and nightmares through participant modeling and
guided performance mastery. This work showed that a critical aspect of the success of
the program was an increase in perceived personal self-efficacy to effectively deal with
these problems. This led to Banduras 1977 book, Social Learning Theory, in which he
analyzed human learning and self-regulation in terms of reciprocal causations between
personal (cognitive and affective), behavioral and environmental determinants. In the
1980s, Bandura turned his attention to the impact of these reciprocal determinants (and
especially self-efficacy) in many areas of personal functioning.
His research on self-regulatory processes like goal-setting and perceived self-efficacy
led Bandura to integrate his initial modeling research with later work on the importance
of self-referent thought and to call his theoretical approach social cognitive. In his
social cognitive theory, Bandura (1986) identifies four core features of human agency:
intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness. As for Vygotsky,
Bandura claims that reflective self-consciousness is the hallmark of human agency. From
the 1990s to the present, Bandura has studied the mutually interacting influences of fam-
ilies, peers and schools on childrens development of self-efficacy and its impact on suc-
cess in various life-domains, including athletics, education, health and clinical problems
(e.g. stress, depression, substance abuse).
By the mid-1990s, Bandura (1995) also began to explore the effects of collective
self-efficacy on organizational functioning of social and political systems.9 On this view,
perceived self-efficacy does not merely influence ones own individual psychological
functioning, but can be projected back into the social networks in which people partic-
ipate, often through the use of increasingly powerful technologies that can be global in
scope, or can reach broad areas of the society (e.g. through the Television, the radio, or
the internet). These technologies act globally to quickly spread ideas, values and styles of
behavior. And it is in this way that Banduras theory has become cultural-historical in the
sense proposed by Wundt and Vygotsky, since both personal and collective agency shape
109

the development of culture by influencing specific knowledge domains and, more

generally, language, myths and customs (see Bandura, 2006a, Pajares, 2004, and Zimmerman
and Schunk, 2002, for a detailed overview of Banduras remarkable career).
Personal Agency and the Science of Consciousness

Although Bandura has been active for over half a century as a major force in contempo-
rary psychology, he only began to talk about consciousness within the last decade of his
career (Bandura, 1999, 2001, 2006b). This surely reflects the renaissance of conscious-
ness as a scientific concept, after being banished to the fringes of the science of psychol-
ogy for much of the 20th century. This is most evident when considering that Bandura
discusses consciousness in relation to ideas that he developed much earlier in his career
and that remain virtually unchanged, merely restated in terms of the concept of con-
sciousness. Thus, for Bandura,
Consciousness is the very substance of mental life. It provides the means to make life not
only personally manageable, but also worth living. Without deliberative and reflective con-
scious activity, humans are simply mindless automatons. Cognitive capabilities provide us
with the means to function as mindful agents. (Bandura, 2006a: 167)
As he has done on so many previous occasions in his career, Bandura challenges the
fundamental assumptions of contemporary cognitive neuroscience that undermine the
importance of personal agency. So, for Bandura, Consciousness is an emergent brain
activity with higher-level control functions, rather than simply an epiphenomenal
byproduct of lower-level processes, adding that if the neuronal processes of common
activities were automatically reflected in consciousness, it would be hopelessly clut-
tered with mind-numbing contents that would foreclose any functionality (Bandura,
2006a: 167). In defense of this position, Bandura uses an analogy from the chemistry
of water, also used by Wundt, to highlight the fact that new properties like fluidity
and viscosity emerge from the dynamic interactions between lower-level micro-
components of hydrogen and oxygen properties that are totally different from those
exhibited by the component gases themselves.10 However, rather than refer to Wundt,
Bandura (2006a) draws on the work of Roger Sperry (1991, 1993), to make an impor-
tant distinction between emergent properties and emergent causal powers (downward
control) over events at the lower level.
Bandura challenges research by those who study the science of consciousness through
sub-personal information-processing that denies the psychological importance of per-
sonal agency (e.g. Wegner, 2002) just as surely as did methodological behaviorism and
Freudian unconscious drives that Bandura attacked earlier in his career. Such a view of
cognitive science casts all relevant cognitive activity at the sub-personal level of biolo-
gical machinery and makes the real action of learning and human life sub-personal (e.g.
of the functioning of the executive system, or the amygdyla, or even of the whole
brain in some way of which we are unaware) just as did operant conditioning-making
us responsive to the environment, but not agents within it. For Bandura, consciousness
cannot be reduced to a nonfunctional by-product of the output of a mental process
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Ferrari et al. 111
realized mechanically at nonconscious lower levels. Why would an epiphenomenal con-

sciousness that can do nothing evolve and endure as a reigning psychic environment in
peoples lives? (Bandura, 2001: 3).
Although Bandura forcefully resists efforts in the contemporary science of conscious-
ness to reduce human agency to the sub-personal activity of the brain, his theory is much
less sophisticated in exploring the details of neuroscience or our biological evolution as a
species than that of either Wundt or Vygotsky. For example, although he does not, Ban-
dura might easily draw on the recent efforts to naturalize phenomenology an
approach in which subjectivity and agency are essential to embodied life itself (see John-
son, 2007; Maturana and Varela, 1992; Thompson, 2007).
Clearly, the thrust of Banduras social psychological theory throughout his career has
been to promote the importance of agency, not merely in the limited sense of directed
action, but in the fuller sense of personal agency within a social environment or cultural
context that is personally meaningful and that one acts to help create. This is important
not just in principle, but because of what it implies about human accountability and
human moral responsibility (Bandura, 2006a, 2006b; see also Ricoeur, 1992). In a deep
sense, a persons consciousness is not merely an awareness of his or her own mental
activity, it is closely tied to his or her psycho-social identity.
Like Wundt and Vygotsky earlier, Bandura (2006b) considers the evolution of the
human capacity to use language to be critical in developing an encultured higher human
consciousness that allows us to be true psychological agents within our social commu-
nities. True, the specifics of Banduras work are unique, but the spirit of the theory is
very close to that of Vygotsky in that it emphasizes self-regulation and self-mastery.
Like Vygotsky, Bandura is also interested in how people can take charge of their own
behavior; however, Bandura adds an important notion that had not yet been introduced
by Wundt or Vygotsky that our own estimates of our capacities have a profound effect
on our actual agency.
It is not merely a matter of incorporating the language, myths and customs of our
Volk, or even of mastering the psychological tools they developed historically: we also
internalize social models as examples of personal agency and use them and our own past
experience to estimate how well we can perform and what we think is possible under
particular task conditions. What Bandura (1977, 2001, 2006b) calls perceived self-effi-
cacy provides an additional mechanism to explain how children internalize or appropri-
ate social regulation. Unlike Vygotskys, Banduras work shows that social influence
need not be by direct reinforcement (even if self-directed) but can be vicarious from
observing the reinforcement received by models with whom one identifies.
Furthermore, again unlike Vygotsky, Bandura is not concerned with the enculturation
of those who exhibit physiological deficits whether inborn or acquired but rather how
otherwise normal individuals can overcome clinical conditions, like debilitating fears
and addictions, or how, for example, cardiac patients can act the better to promote their
own health. It is in this way that guided mastery can become a vehicle for personal
change in which, for example, phobics can be successful despite their reactive fears
and can reflect on this success to gain mastery over those fears. Increased perceived
self-efficacy thus becomes a critical guide to future intentions. Missing from this
account, however, is some notion of varying degrees of sensitivity to the state of our
111

own minds and what Wallace and Shapiro (2006), drawing on Buddhist ideas about psy-
chological well-being, call different kinds of mental balance (i.e. conative, attentional,
cognitive and affective balance), or what Vygotsky called internal reflexes.
Going beyond the focus on individual well-being, Banduras latest work explores how
cultural tools can be used to shape individual consciousness engaging the notion of a
collective consciousness that very much resembles the old German idea of a national
Volk, important to Wundt, with its emphasis on shared values and a shared sense of what
it means to be a conscious person within a particular cultural community. However,
unlike the 19th-century view, culture is considered less national and less homogenous
and so much less uniquely determinant of our own personal consciousness; rather our
personal consciousness reflects our engagement with subcultures and technologies that
span national borders an engagement that is often self-directed. For example, in some
of his more recent writings Bandura (2004) cites work in educational entertainment
showing how traditional media like radio and newer-media internet resources and video
games can be designed to support and enhance personal agency and physical well-being.
Astonishingly, a radio drama series designed to provide models who were more sexually
responsible led to greater family planning and contraceptive use, and fewer cases of
AIDS, in the half of Tanzania in which it was broadcast providing an experimental
demonstration of Banduras claim that greater perceived self-efficacy and effective
social modeling promote greater personal agency and well-being (see also Vaughan,
Rogers, Singhl and Swalehe, 2000); more recently, a mass media campaign also had a
significant impact on HIV/AIDS Knowledge and Behavior Change in North India
(Sood, Shefner-Rogers and Sengupta, 2006). What is exciting about this educational
entertainment work is that it allows Banduras ideas now to be projected on the
cultural-historical stage.
This work also shows how technology now has a global reach that spreads particular
values and styles of behavior, and connects us to people around the globe in ways that
were unprecedented even a generation ago. In Banduras words, The symbolic envi-
ronment, feeding off communication satellites, is altering national cultures and produc-
ing intercultural commonalities in some lifestyles, all of which must work to
homogenize collective consciousness (Bandura, 2006b: 175). With further develop-
ment of the cyberworld, Bandura (2001, 2006b) expects that people will become even
more fully embedded in global symbolic environments. Indeed, with mass movements
of people around the globe transforming cultures, or at least forcing them to notice
each other, we are entering a new era of the social-historical science of consciousness
that Wundt and Vygotsky could hardly imagine, and that seems poised to generate a
very different way of being personally conscious and engaged within a global cultural
community.
Conclusion
Considering the cultural-historical scientific writings of Wundt, Vygotsky and Bandura
shows that there has been some refinement and progress in the science of consciousness,
regarded socio-culturally and historically. This is not through direct historical influence,
but from changes in how psychology itself has been understood as a science and the
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Ferrari et al. 113
methods they thought were needed to develop it. These methods themselves are set
within a broader culture that has experienced technological developments that these psy-
chologists engaged and explored. When concepts and methods that are not transmitted
through direct mentorship or by reading history periodically - even consistently return,
it is a sign that there is something intrinsically compelling about them. This suggests
something essentially important about a cultural-historical approach to the science of
consciousness. At the very least, such an approach broadens our understanding of con-
scious human experience beyond simple biological processing or individual learning and
development.
Notes
1. As Art Blumenthal (2001) points out, the key to the Wundtian linguistic system was his
understanding of the operating characteristics of underlying universal mental processes, in
which, for example, the sentence refers to a special mental state the result of the ability
of the central focal attention process to subdivide and segregate global mental impressions into
parts and qualities and relations between them (2001: 1323). In the USA, however, the
stimulus-response conditioning model of behaviorism supplanted all influences of Wundtian
psycholinguistics by the 1930s. In this respect, although consciousness remained a topic of
discussion for some prominent psychologists (e.g. Lashley, 1923; Piaget, 1954; Skinner,
1945, 1971, 1984), J. B. Watsons (1913) famous rejection of consciousness in favor of
behavior as the focus of psychological studies, and later information-processing models,
became the scientific rule for most psychologists, as North Americans came to dominate
research in the discipline.
2. Many different authors all refer to the centrality of the problem of consciousness in
Vygotskys psychology; cf.: Behind all the diversity of the problems he developed as well
as behind a general psychological theory of Vygotsky is hidden a certain general tendency,
which constitutes, so to say, the internal context of his works. This is a psychological inves-
tigation of consciousness . . . (Leontiev, 1983[1967]: 23); This problem was the problem of
consciousness, addressed in terms of its concrete psychological content rather than from gen-
eral philosophical or methodological perspective (Elkonin, 1989: 469); The resolution of this
problem became one of the basic tasks in all of Vygotskys scientific work (Davydov and
Radzikhovskii, 1985[1980]: 47); The problem of consciousness is the alpha and omega of the
creative path of LS Vygotsky (Leontiev, 1983[1967]: 23). Furthermore, Veresov goes so far
as to assert that the only possible understanding of the work of Vygotsky is within the para-
digm of his psychology of consciousness: The system of Vygotskys theorizing is based on
. . . the explanatory principle of the development of higher mental functions (consciousness).
This means, consequently, that all the basic concepts of Vygotskys theory (cultural develop-
ment, cultural sign as a psychological tool, internalization and so on) make sense only rela-
tively to consciousness (volitional psychical processes) (Veresov, 1999: 104).
3. This January 1924 presentation has often been mistakenly identified as Consciousness as a
Problem for the Psychology of Behavior (1997[1925]).
4. In 1923 Chelpanov was replaced as the institute director by Kornilov who proposed a third
way in psychology aimed at overcoming the deficiencies of the two main rival schools at that
time. Quite in tune with the fashion of that time and in answer to the call for reconstructing
113

psychology along materialist lines, Kornilov pronounced that Marxist psychology is the study
of reactions. Vygotskys article on consciousness as the problem of the psychology of beha-
vior clearly supports the agenda put forward in Kornilovs reactological psychology (Van der
Veer and Valsiner, 1991).
5. In his article Does Consciousness exist? (1904) James critically appraises the concept of
consciousness and its place in psychological research. In a much quoted passage, he writes:
For twenty years past I have mistrusted consciousness as an entity: for seven or eight years
past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic
equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly
and universally discarded. It is not consciousness that does not exist, immediately adds
James, but consciousness as an entity. . . . There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality
of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts
of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the
performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. Conscious-
ness is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are
known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must
still provide in some way for that functions being carried on (James, 1904: 4778).
6. Of course, Bandura is not alone in this pursuit, any more than Wundt or Vygotsky were alone
in their concerns; as with our previous two protagonists, Bandura is cited as an exemplary
example of a cultural-historical psychology that specifically stresses the importance of per-
sonal conscious experience.
7. Kurt Lewin was a friend of Vygotsky and working on similar ideas, before he was forced to
flee to the United States of America to escape Nazi Germany (Yasnitsky, 2009).
8. Although Skinner (1945, 1976[1974], 1984) did not ignore the problem of consciousness, his
concern was how our ability to speak of private events is subject to conditioning from the ver-
bal community; thus like Vygotsky and the later Bandura, Skinner places a great deal of
importance on cultural-historical influences on personal experiences; unlike Vygotsky and
Bandura, however, Skinner denied the importance or even the existence of authentic personal
agency.
9. Bandura has also been influential in American psychology as a field; for example, as president
of APA, in 1975, he presided over the founding of the Association for the Advancement of
Psychology (AAP) an advocacy group championing the importance of psychology to public
policy initiatives and congressional legislation.
10. Personal agency was also an issue for Wundt and Vygotsky, as for most 19th-century
psychologists who were concerned with consciousness.
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Biographical Notes
Michel Ferrari teaches developmental and educational psychology at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. He has edited or coedited 5 books, most
recently, with Georges Potworowski, Teaching for Wisdom (Amsterdam: Springer, 2008), and is
currently preparing a Handbook on Resilience in Children of War with Chandi Fernando
(Amsterdam: Springer, in press). In 2002, he edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness
Studies celebrating the centennial of William Jamess Varieties of Religious Experience and he and
Tamara Albertini will edit a special 2011 issue of Intellectual History Review, celebrating the 500th
anniversary of Bovelless Liber de Sapiente.
David K. Robinson (PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, 1987) teaches European
history and history of science at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri (email: drobin-
son@truman.edu). He has edited, with R. W. Rieber, and contributed to Wilhelm Wundt in History:
The Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2001) and The Essential
Vygotsky (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2004). Since 2006, he has chaired the Forum for History
of Human Science in the History of Science Society
Anton Yasnitsky (PhD, University of Toronto, 2009) is a researcher at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, and a postdoctoral Fellow at York University,
Toronto (email: ayasnitsky@oise.utoronto.ca). He is primarily interested in the history, theory and
philosophy of science, specifically research on the history, theory and methodology of post-
Vygotskian psychology (cultural-historical theory and activity-oriented psychology). He has pub-
lished a series of research articles on the so-called Kharkov School of Vygotskian psychology (in
English and Russian). Among his other interests are modern-day applications of Vygotskian theory
in developmental psychological and educational research. Most recently he has edited special
issues of the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology and the Russian-language
journal Kulturno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia [Cultural-historical Psychology] on the P. I.
Zinchenko research tradition in Soviet psychology of memory in the context of contemporary
international psychology.
118

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consciousness in three acts

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Wundts Cultural-Historical Science of Consciousness

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conscious processes, which psychological research can investigate, than of some

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that was fairly typical of mid-19th-century German scholars. In his wide-ranging

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Although Wundts approach to psychology emphasized mental activity (actuality) more

Vygotskys Perspective on Methodological Dualism

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Presentation at the Second All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology

Presentation at the Open Conference of the Institute of Psychology in Moscow

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The Research Program of Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology

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necessary, it must become the primary object of psychological research. Scientific

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We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous

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Vygotskys Later Thought: the Problem of Consciousness 19324

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colleagues had been making toward a cultural-historical science of consciousness. It was

Bandura and Reciprocal Determinism involving

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the development of culture by influencing specific knowledge domains and, more

Personal Agency and the Science of Consciousness

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realized mechanically at nonconscious lower levels. Why would an epiphenomenal con-

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Bandura, A. (2001) Social Cognitive Theory: an Agentic Perspective, Annual Review of

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Veresov, N. (1999) Undiscovered Vygotsky: Etudes on the Prehistory of Cultural-historical

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Zavershneva, E. (2007) Put k svobode (K publikatsii materialov iz semejnogo arkhiva L. S.

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