Lev Vygotsky

Lev Simkhovich Vygodsky (his patronymic was later changed to Semyonovich and his surname to Vygotsky for unclear reasons)[1][2] was born on November 5, 1896,[3] in the town of Orsha in Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Belarus) into a non-religious middle-class family of Russian Jewish extraction.[4] His father Simkha Leibovich (also known as Semyon Lvovich) was a banker and his mother was Tsetsilia Moiseevna.[5][6]

Vygotsky was raised in the city of Gomel,[7] where he was homeschooled until 1911 and then obtained a formal degree with distinction in a private Jewish gymnasium, which allowed him entrance to a university. In 1913, Vygotsky was admitted to the Moscow University by mere ballot through a "Jewish Lottery": at the time a three percent Jewish student quota was administered for entry in Moscow and Saint Petersburg universities. He had an interest in the humanities and social sciences, but at the insistence of his parents he applied to the medical school at Moscow University. During the first semester of study, he transferred to the law school. In parallel, he attended lectures at Shanyavsky Moscow City People's University.[8] Vygotsky's early interests were in the arts and, primarily, in the topics of the history of the Jewish people, the tradition, culture and Jewish identity.

In January 1924, Vygotsky took part in the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd (soon thereafter renamed Leningrad). After the Congress, Vygotsky met with Alexander Luria and with his help received an invitation to become a research fellow at the Psychological Institute in Moscow which was under the direction of Konstantin Kornilov. Vygotsky moved to Moscow with his new wife, Roza Smekhova, whom he would have two children with.[9][10] He began his career at the Psychological Institute as a "staff scientist, second class".[11] He also became a secondary teacher, covering a period marked by his interest in the processes of learning and the role of language in learning.[12]

By the end of 1925, Vygotsky completed his dissertation titled "The Psychology of Art", which was not published until the 1960s, and a book titled "Pedagogical Psychology", which apparently was created on the basis of lecture notes that he prepared in Gomel while he was a psychology instructor at local educational establishments. In the summer of 1925 he made his first and only trip abroad to a London congress on the education of the deaf.[13] Upon return to the Soviet Union, he was hospitalized due to tuberculosis and would remain an invalid and out of work until the end of 1926.[14][15] His dissertation was accepted as the prerequisite of a scholarly degree, which was awarded to Vygotsky in autumn 1925 in absentia.

After his release from the hospital, Vygotsky did theoretical and methodological work on the crisis in psychology, but never finished the draft of the manuscript and interrupted his work on it around mid-1927. The manuscript was published later with notable editorial interventions and distortions in 1982 and was presented by the editors as one of the most important of Vygotsky's works.[16][17][18][19][20] In this early manuscript, Vygotsky argued for the formation of a general psychology that could unite the naturalist objectivist strands of psychological science with the more philosophical approaches of Marxist orientation. However, he also harshly criticized those of his colleagues who attempted to build a "Marxist Psychology" as an alternative to the naturalist and philosophical schools. He argued that if one wanted to build a truly Marxist Psychology, there were no shortcuts to be found by merely looking for applicable quotes in the writings of Marx. Rather one should look for a methodology that was in accordance with the Marxian spirit.[21]

From 1926 to 1930, Vygotsky worked on a research program investigating the development of higher psychological functions, i.e. culturally governed lower psychological functions such as voluntary attention, selective memory, object-oriented action, and decision making. During this period he gathered a group of collaborators including Alexander Luria, Boris Varshava, Alexei Leontiev, Leonid Zankov, and several others. Vygotsky guided his students in researching this phenomenon from three different perspectives:

• The instrumental approach, which aimed to understand the ways humans use objects as mediation aids in memory and reasoning.
• A developmental approach, focused on how children acquire higher cognitive functions during development
• A culture-historical approach, studying how social and cultural patterns of interaction shape forms of mediation and developmental trajectories [21]

Vygotsky died of a relapse of tuberculosis on June 11, 1934, at the age of 37, in Moscow. One of Vygotsky's last private notebook entries was:

This is the final thing I have done in psychology – and I will like Moses die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence.[22]

1922-24 - worked in the psychological laboratory which he organized in Gomel Pedagogical College;

January of 1924 - meeting Luria at the II Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd, moving from Gomel to Moscow, enrolling in graduate school and taking position at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow;

July of 1924 - the beginning of work as the head of the sub-department of the education of physically and intellectually disabled children in the department of social and legal protection of minors (SPON);

November of 1924 - during II Congress of the Social and Legal Protection of Minors in Moscow, a turn of Soviet defectology to social education was officially announced and collection of articles and materials edited by Vygotsky "Issues of the upbringing of blind, deaf and mentally retarded children" was published;

May 9, 1925 - the birth of the first child: the daughter Gita

Summer of 1925 - the only trip abroad: went to London for a defectology conference; on the way passed through Germany, where he met with German psychologists

November 5, 1925 - Vygotsky, in absence (due to illness), was awarded the title of senior researcher, equivalent to the modern degree of candidate of sciences for defense of the dissertation "Psychology of Art". The contract for the publication of The Psychology of Art was signed on November 9, 1925, but the text was published only in 1965;

November 21, 1925 to May 22, 1926 - hospitalization in the Zakharyino sanatorium-type hospital due to tuberculosis; upon discharge qualified as a disabled person until the end of the year;

1926 - Vygotsky's first book, Pedagogical Psychology, was published; writes notes and essays that would be published years later under the title "The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis";

1927 - resumes work at the RANION Institute of Experimental Psychology and in a number of other institutions in Moscow and Leningrad;

September 17, 1927 - approved as a professor by the scientific and pedagogical section of the State Academic Council (SUS);

December 19, 1927 - appointed as the head of the Medical and Pedagogical Station of the Glavsotsvos of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR, remained in this position until October 1928 (dismissed on his own will);

December 28, 1927 to January 4, 1928 - First All-Russian Pedological Congress, Moscow: Vygotsky works as co-editor of the section on difficult childhood, and also presents two reports: "The development of a difficult child and its study" and "Instrumental method in pedology"; these two articles together with Zankov's report "Principles for the construction of complex programs of an auxiliary school from a pedological point of view" and Luria "On the methodology of instrumental-psychological research" become the first public presentation of "Instrumental Psychology" as a research method associated with the names of Vygotsky and Luria;

1928 - Vygotsky's second book "Pedology of School Age" was published, along with a number of articles establishing "Instrumental Psychology" approach in Russian and English language journals;

December of 1928 - after a conflict with the director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology (GIEP) K. N. Kornilov, the research activities of the Vygotsky-Luria group were curtailed in this organization, and experimental research was transferred to the Academy of Communications.

1929 - freelance scientific consultant, head of psychological laboratories at the Experimental Defectological Institute (transformed Medical-pedagogical station)

Vygotsky was a pioneering psychologist with interests in extremely diverse fields: his work covered topics such as the origin and the psychology of art, development of higher mental functions, philosophy of science and the methodology of psychological research, the relation between learning and human development, concept formation, interrelation between language and thought development, play as a psychological phenomenon, learning disabilities, and abnormal human development (aka defectology). His philosophical framework includes interpretations of the cognitive role of mediation tools, as well as the re-interpretation of well-known concepts in psychology such as internalization of knowledge. Vygotsky introduced the notion of zone of proximal development, a metaphor capable of describing the potential of human cognitive development.

His most important and widely known contribution is his theory for the development of "higher psychological functions," which emerge through unification of interpersonal connections and actions taken within a given socio-cultural environment (i.e. language, culture, society, and tool-use). It was during this period that he identified the play of young children as their "leading activity", which he understood to be the main source of preschoolers' psychological development, and which he viewed as an expression of an inseparable unity of emotional, volitional, and cognitive development. At this time, Vygotsky explored his long-time interest in the philosophy of Spinoza's examinations concerning human emotion.[23][24] As his work matured, Spinoza's thought became a more central visitation in Vygotsky's later work, increasingly focused on the issue of human emotion and its role in higher psychological functions and development.

While Vygotsky never met Jean Piaget, he had read a number of his works and agreed on some of his perspectives on learning.[25] At some point (around 1929–30), Vygotsky came to disagree with Piaget's understanding of learning and development, and held a different theoretical position from Piaget on the topic of inner speech; Piaget thought that egocentric speech follows from inner speech and "dissolved away" as children matured. Vygotsky showed that egocentric speech became inner speech, and then called "thoughts".[26] Piaget only read Vygotsky's work after his death and openly praised him for his discovery of the social origin of children's thoughts, reasoning, and moral judgements.

Vygotsky remained virtually unknown outside of the Soviet Union (although well-known there) until the late 1980s when his idea of the "zone of proximal development" became popular in educational psychology and practice.

• Consciousness as a problem in the Psychology of Behavior, 1925
• Educational Psychology, 1926
• Historical meaning of the crisis in Psychology, unfinished and aborted in 1927
• The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child, 1929
• The Fundamental Problems of Defectology, 1929
• The Socialist alteration of Man, 1930
• Ape, Primitive Man, and Child: Essays in the History of Behaviour, A. R. Luria and L. S. Vygotsky, 1930
• Tool and symbol in child development, c.1930
• Paedology of the Adolescent, 1929-1931
• Play and its role in the Mental development of the Child, oral presentation 1933
• Thinking and Speech, 1934
• The Psychology of Art, 1971 (English translation by MIT Press)
• Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, 1978 (Harvard University Press)
• The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, 1987

• Wertsch J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Yaroshevsky M. (1989) Lev Vygotsky. Progress, Moscow
• Kozulin A. (1990). Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
• Van der Veer R. & Valsiner J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky. A quest for synthesis. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
• Holzman L. (1993) Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist. Routledge
• Van der Veer, R. & Valsiner, J. eds (1994). The Vygotsky Reader. Oxford, Blackwell.
• Vygodskaya, G. L., & Lifanova, T. M. (1996). Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky: Zhizn', deyatel'nost', shtrikhi k portretu. Moscow: Smysl. Translated in Vygodskaya, G. L., & Lifanova, T. M. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, volume 37.
• Van der Veer R. (2007). Lev Vygotsky. Continuum Books.
• Daniels, H., Wertsch, J. & Cole, M. (Eds.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky.
• Dafermos, M. (2018). Rethinking Cultural-Historical Theory. Singapore, Springer.
• Zavershneva, E., & Van der Veer, R. (2018). Vygotsky's notebooks: A selection. Singapore, Springer.

• Media related to Lev Vygotsky at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Lev Vygotsky at Wikiquote
• Lev Vygotsky archive, marxists.org: all major works
• Annotated bibliography of scholarly histories on Vygotsky, Advances in the History of Psychology, York University