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A sociocultural approach to mediated action

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 JSTOR: The American Scholar, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp...
PSYCHOLOGY
L. S. Vygotsky’s “N ew ” Theory o f Mind
JAMES V. WERTSCH
More than half a century ago, a young man
from provincial Belorussia burst onto the
scene of Soviet psychology and dramatically
changed Us course. The story of his work and
continuing influence is one of the most fasci­
nating chapters in the history of Soviet sci­
ence. Even more interesting, his ideas re­
cently have increasingly had an influence on
several disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities in the West During the past de­
cade Such American philosophers and social
scientists as Stephen Tnulmtn have labeled
him “the Mozart of psychology,” placed him
alongside Freud and Piaget as one of the
“titans of psychology,” and associated him
with the newest trends in “post-positivist”
psychology* Who was this man and why has
he had such a lasting and profound influence
on theories of the mind? To answer these
questions, one must consider not only the
individual and the ideas he developed, but
the socio-eultural settings in which he worked
and which he influenced.
I studies at Moscow University-—the best in the
His name was Lev Semenovich Vygotsky,
born on November 17,1896, in Orsha, a town
not far from Minsk in Belorussia, When he
was about a year old, his family moved to
Gomel, a somewhat larger town in Belorussia,
where he spent his childhood and youth. His
father was a department chief at the United
Bank of Gomel and a representative of an
insurance society. His mother was trained as a
teacher but spent most of her life raising eight
Q JAMES V. WEHTSCH is a piofessor of commu­
nication at the University of California, San Diego.
His most recent hook is Vygotsky tmd the Social
Formation o f Mind,
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children. It was apparently from her that
Vygotsky acquired his initial knowledge of
German and love for German poetry'. To­
gether his parents made the Vygotsky* one of
the town's most cultured families.
The picture that emerges from information
about Vygotsky's early years is one of a happy,
intellectually stimulating life—in spite of die
fact that he was excluded from several ave­
nues of opportunity' because he was Jewish,
tie displayed an early interest in intellectual
matters and as an adolescent became known
as the “little professor” because of his prac­
tice of leading student discussions on com­
plex philosophical issues. For example, he
examined the history of thought by arranging
debates in which his peers played the roles of
such figures as Aristotle and Napoleon, While
still a child in Gomel, he also began to show
fervent interest in the theater, poetry, and
literature.
Vygotsky graduated from his gymnasium in
1913; fie was widely recognized as an out­
standing student and intent on pursuing his
country, During this period there was a quota
on the number of Jews who could enter Mos­
cow and St. Petersburg universities: they
could make up no more than 3 percent of the
student bodies. This meant that all of the
Jewish gold medalists and about half of the
silver medalists could be admitted, arid since
Vygotsky was a gold medalist, he was confi­
dent of entry. But midway through his en­
trance examinations, he was suddenly faced
with an unexpected barrier, The tsarist min­
ister of education changed the procedures by
which Jews were to be chosen for Moscow
and St. Petersburg universities; the 3 percent
quota was maintained, but Jewish applicants
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 JSTOR: The American Scholar, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp...
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
were now to he selected by a lottery, a change
apparently aimed at diluting the quality of
Jewish students at the best universities. Al­
though Vygotsky attained a perfect score on
his final entrance examinations, he thought
his hopes for a university1 degree had been
dashed. But in the end the incredible hap­
pened—Vygotsky was admitted to Moscow
University by the luck of the draw.
Although his parents wanted him to go into
medicine, Vygotsky was intent on studying
law and soon transferred to that department.
He was officially enrolled at Moscow Univer­
sity, but he spent a great deal of time taking
courses at Shanyavskii People's University,
This was an unofficial institution that sprang
up in 1911 after a minister of education had
expelled most of the students and more than a
hundred of the faculty from Moscow Univer­
sity" in a crackdown on anti-tsarist activities.
Like many other students in those days, Vygot­
sky was drawn to this unofficial institution,
where he majored in history and philosophy,
by the presence of many of the strongest
intellects in the country.
After his graduation from Moscow Univer­
sity in 1917 with a degree in law, Vygotsky
returned to Gomel to teach literature and
psychology. He lived in the relative peace of
this provincial town for the next seven years.
Little information is available about his par­
ticipation in the Russian Revolution, but as it
did for many other young people, especially
Jews, it opened up new opportunities that
were to motivate him for the rest of his life. lit
Gomel he taught literature at a local school,
conducted classes on aesthetics mid the his­
tory of art at a conservatory, and gave lectures
on literature and science. Furthermore, he
organized a psychology laboratory at Cornel
Teachers' College, where he delivered a se­
ries of lectures that laid the groundwork for
bis 1926 volume, Pedugogicnt Psychology.
During this period in Gomel, Vygotsky was
already beginning to have serious bouts of
tuberculosis—the disease that would kill him
in 1934. It was a serious enough threat to his
life in 1920 that he spent a brief period in a
sanatorium and asked one of his former pro­
fessors from Shanyavskii University to pub­
lish his collected papers upon his death.
Vygotsky recovered, however, and continued
his work in Gomel. In addition to his many
projects, he managed to read widely. Among
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the authors who figured prominently in this
reading were the poets Tyuchev, Blok, Man­
delstam, and Pushkin: the novelists Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Bely, and Bunin; and such phi­
losophers as James, Aristotle, and especially
Spinoza. Vygotsky also read Freud, Marx,
Engels, Hegel, Pavlov, the Russian Formal­
ists, and such philologists as Shcherba and
Potebnya.
Everything that Vygotsky did up until 1924
seems to have served as preparation for an
event in that year that was to change his life
and the course of psychology in the USSR.
This turning point vva$ a presentation he gave
on January 6 at the Second All-Russian Psycho­
neurological Congress in Leningrad. Al­
though his lecture was framed in the technical
terms of the dominant school of psychology at
the time, it was, in reality, something much
more sweeping. It outlined a theory of mind
in socio-cnitnral context Several of Vygot­
sky’s future students were at the meeting and
were fond of recalling the electrifying effect
this unknown young man had on the confer­
ence, According to Aleksandr Romanovich
Lima, a man who was to become one of the
twentieth century's major figures in the Study
of the mind and brain,
when Vygotsky got up to deliver fits speech, he had
no printed text from which to read, not even notes.
Yet he spoke fluently, never seeming to stop and
search his memory for the next idea. Even had the
content of his speech been pedestrian, his perform­
ance would have been notable tor the persuasive­
ness of his style. But his speech was by no- means
pedestrian. Instead of choosing a minor theme, as
might befit a young man of twenty-eight speaking
for the first time to a gathering of the graybeards of
his profession, Vygotsky chose the difficult theme of
the relation between conditioned reflexes and
man's conscious behavior.. . . Although he failed to
convince ev« ryonc of the correctness of hi s view, it
was clear that this man from a small provincial town
in western Russia was an intellectual force who
would have to be listened to.
After this stunning performance Vygotsky
was invited by N. K, Kornilov, the director of
the Moscow Psychological Institute, to join
his staff, which Vygotsky did later in 1924.
With this move, Vygotsky's influence and
pace of life increased greatly. In 1926 he
finished his dissertation, “The Psychology of
Art.” This work, which was to become his first
major publication, derived from a lengthy
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 JSTOR: The American Scholar, Voi. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp...
L. S. VYGOTSKY'S "NEW" THEORY OK M1N0
manuscript on Hamlet that he had completed
as early as 1916. Vygotsky had actually begun
the manuscript as a schoolboy after a produc­
tion of this play had left a great impression on
him.
The years between his arrival in Moscow in
1924 and his death in 1934 were extremely
busy and productive. A group of devoted
students and colleagues quickly formed
around him and carried out a variety of inge­
nious studies under his direction. The general
tenor of their comments about him years later
reflect a respect bordering on awe. He seems
to have had a profound influence on the lives
of almost all of his students and colleagues.
Professor R. E. Levina recalls taking notes on
Vygotsky's brilliant—and often spontane­
ous—lectures, which typically ran for three or
more hours, and understanding them only
years later. Another of Vygotsky's students,
Professor P. Ya. Carperin has recounted how'
"all of Moscow came running” to hear
Vygotsky’s clinical diagnoses and how stu­
dents sometimes listened to his lectures
through open windows because the audito­
rium was completely packed.
This almost messianic impression is borne
out in many other observations as well- For
example, A. R. Luria said, “All of my work has
been no more than the working out of the
psychological theory which [Vvgotskv] con­
structed”; and of his own professional life
Luria wrote, ’T divide my career into two
periods; the small and insignificant period
before my meeting with Vygotsky, and tire
more important and essential one after the
meeting/'
From today’s perspective, both in the So­
viet Union and in the West, the excitement
that Vygotsky generated among his students
and colleagues is difficult to fathom. They
were totally dedicated to the man and his
ideas. According to Luria, “The entire group
gave almost all of its waking hours to our
grand plan for the reconstruction of psychol­
ogy, When Vygotsky went on a trip, the stu­
dents wrote poems in honor of his journey.
When he gave a lecture In Moscow, everyone
came to hear him,”
Several ingredients were involved in gen­
erating this excitement. To begin with, there
was Vygotsky’s undoubted genius, A speed-
reader, he was able to assimilate a vast
amount of information into the powerful the­
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oretical framework he continued to develop
until the end of his life. Just as important as
Vygotsky's genius, however, was the exciting
milieu in which he lived and worked—the
Soviet Union between the years of the 1917
Revolution and the beginnings of the Stalinist
purges in the middle 1930s, In an important
sense, he could only have existed in the time
and place that he did, As described by such
authors as Shiela Fitzpatrick {Ctdiural Revo*
lution in Russia, 192S-J931), this period of
“cultural revolution” witnessed unprece­
dented upheaval and transition. In the late
1920s and early 1930s the old intelligentsia
was challenged as never before by young
scholars and activists. In particular, it was
challenged to incorporate Marxist theoretical
tenets into all areas of scholarly inquiry and to
develop approaches that would he of practical
relevance to the problems facing Soviet soci­
ety.
In this milieu Vygotsky was encouraged to
pursue two related goals. First, he was en­
couraged to formulate a psychology' based on
Marxist tenets, Today’s readers sometimes
view his references to Marx and Engels as lip
service of a sort required to get his writings
into print, and indeed such practices have
been quite prevalent during certain periods in
the Soviet Union. However, for Vygotsky
these references reflected a sincere belief in
Marxism as he interpreted it. Along with
many other young scholars, ho was using
Marxist ideas to reformulate and integrate all
areas of intellectual inquiry. This does not
mean that all these attempts succeeded or
lived up to their professed goal. In this con­
nection it is important to note that Vygotsky’s
account of mind was a mixture of existing
psychological theories and Marxist ideas and
that in the end there may he less that is
necessarily or uniquely Marxist than he
would have liked. However, this outcome in
no way diminishes the importance of Vygot­
sky's sincere dedication to creating a Marxist
analysis of mind.
The second, related goal motivating
Vygotsky’s work also grew out of the cultural
revolution under way at the time. Like other
scholars of his day, he responded to what
Fitzpatrick calls the pressure “to focus their
research on topics that were of practical rele­
vance to society and the economy/* These
demands grew out of the dissatisfaction
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JSTOR: The American Scholar, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp...
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
Vygotsky’s generation had with the existing
state of affairs in Russia and the impatience
with which they approached the challenges
facing them, These challenges were gargan­
tuan. Vygotsky's generation inherited a coun­
try that had been through a world war, a
revolution, and a civil war in the space of a
decade. Furthermore, it was a country in
which the vast majority of the population had
long been rural and illiterate. The goal of
Vygotsky's generation was to transform tins
society in as short a period as possible into the
first grand socialist state. In the rush to do this
the responsibility for directing academic de­
partments and institutes, the military, facto­
ries, and ministries often fell on young Soviet
citizens, such as Vygotsky, many of whom
were in their twenties.
Along with many other young, energetic
people at this time, Vygotsky made it his goal
to help develop the “new Soviet man," In this
connection it was essential (o understand and
create settings in which appropriate forms of
consciousness would emerge, In the context
of the continuing drive for rapid industrializa­
tion in the USSR, this translated above all into
the need to create conditions for insuring
basic literacy and technical skills for every­
one. The challenge facing Vygotsky and his
colleagues was daunting indeed, given that
they were working in a country where literacy
was rare, special education and services for
the handicapped were virtually nonexistent,
and dozens of major nationality groups were
separated by linguistic and other cultural dif­
ferences. Yet in those heady days of Soviet
nation building, the challenge seemed merely
to have further fueled the efforts of the
younger generation.
Vygotsky constantly strove to integrate his
efforts at creating a new theory of mind with
the goal of contributing to the practical tasks
at hand. The many sincere efforts of the time
to wed general theories with practice were
typically justified in Marxist-Leninist rheto­
ric, but as with many aspects of Soviet life*
they also reflected a much longer tradition in
Russian intellectual history', a history' replete
with examples of grounding practical efforts at
reform in sweeping theoretical frameworks.
This tendency has often been noted by ana­
lysts of the early Soviet years. For example, in
outlining the major debt? that the Bolsheviks
had to the radical traditions of the Russian
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intelligentsia, J. H. Billington writes, in The
tcon and Axe, that “the first and most impor­
tant debt to the Russian intellectual tradition
was the conviction that any alternative to
tsarist authority must be cemented together
by an all-embracing ideology." Being part of
the same Russian intellectual tradition, Vygot­
sky and Iris colleagues operated on the as­
sumption that only a grand, all-encompassing
theoretical framework could provide the foun­
dation for the task at hand—piecemeal pro­
posals for reform were inadequate.
II
The all-encompassing theoretical frame­
work drat Vygotsky developed during the* last
decade of his life can he explicated in terms of
three fundamental themes. In actuality, these
themes are thoroughly intertwined in Vygot­
sky’s thinking, and any attempt to distinguish
them is somewhat artificial. Nonetheless, they
provide a useful introduction to his ideas.
The first theme that runs throughout Vygot­
sky’s writing is his reliance on a genetic, or
developmental, method. The use of this
method was motivated by the claim that any
aspect of mental functioning can be under­
stood only by understanding its origins and
history. When dealing with this theme,
Vygotsky went beyond developmental psy­
chologists' usual focus on child development;
in addition to ontogenesis (that U, life-span
development of the individual), he dealt with
phylogenesis (that is* development of species)
and soeiu-cultural history,
AH of these genetic domains were inter­
preted in accordance with Marxist theory*, but
the concern with human history in particular
reflects this debt. In contrast to most theories
in developmental psychology, which implic­
itly assume universal, ahistorical processes
and cuds, Vygotsky began with the assump­
tion that the mental processes found in dif­
ferent cultures and different historical epochs
are fundamentally distinct, Thus* his focus
was on such Issues as how the thinking and
memory processes of a twentieth-century So­
viet engineer might differ from those of an
eighteenth-century Russian peasant or a
preliterate Uzbek herdsman. Anthropologists,
social and cultural historians, and historians of
science have often investigated these issues,
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