Abstract
Vygotsky begins by promising to complete his lecture on the crisis at age three and link it to the crisis at seven and even to the crisis at thirteen. He notes the very preliminary state of theories of the crisis in pedology and therefore suggests that we stay at a descriptive and empirical level before we attempt a theoretical explanation. Vygotsky then reviews the “Seven Stars” material that we viewed in the last chapter, the crisis at three, and in places he repeats it almost—but not exactly—word for word. He arrives at the conclusion with which he ended that lecture: that the crisis unfolds along the axis between the personality and the social environment.
The material in this chapter is from the collection published by G.S. Korotaeva in 2001.
The first edition (1995) of Korotaeva’s book did not have this lecture in it, but the later edition (2001) did. Korotaeva notes that the lecture was given at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad on 17 April in 1933.
On internal evidence (e.g., Vygotsky’s references to the preceding lecture), it appears to be a follow-up lecture to Vygotsky’s lecture on the “seven stars,” which can be found as “The Crisis of Three” (1998: 283) in the Collected Works. (See Part II, Chap. 8 of the present book.)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
In order to strengthen the position of women in the workforce, and also to weaken the influence of the traditional family in bringing up the new generation, the Russian revolution sought to establish a wide range of child preschool institutions. The Soviets used the term детский сад, literally “gardens for children,” a translation from German, to cover the whole range of child preschool institutions, from two to 7 years old. So the term “kindergarten” really corresponds to “preschools,” and not simply to the transitional year between preschool institutions and elementary school.
Within this general level of preschool “kindergartens,” there were, of course, sublevels and subgroups. There was младший дошкольный, or junior preschool, for children of 3–4 years of age, and средний дошкольный middle preschool for four- to five-year-olds, and then старший дошкольный, or senior preschool, for kids who were 5–6 years old. Typical kindergarten usually had several groups of each sublevel of each type. The highest level was called подготовительная (к школе) группа (6–7 years) or simply подготовительная группа (“the preparatory group”). The crisis of seven separates school age from the senior preschool (старший дошкольный). However, “transitional age” (переходном возрасте) in the next paragraph probably refers to the crisis at thirteen and the subsequent stable period of adolescence, which taken together constitute the transition from childhood to adulthood.
- 2.
Korotaeva adds the word критических or “critical” in brackets before the word “ages” in the very last sentence. We have preferred to leave the manuscript as it is, but Korotaeva’s interpolation certainly makes sense.
- 3.
In Soviet times, there was a practice of regularly and thoroughly examining the social and living conditions of children. Special commissions consisting of teachers, doctors, and social workers were engaged in this. They visited families and determined the conditions in which the child was growing up. Based on this comprehensive survey, a document was compiled. Vygotsky means that such a document was given to him as a researcher.
- 4.
Leopoldoff-Martin and Schneuwly (Vygotskij, 2018) assume that this is a mistake, and what Vygotsky means to say is that the child cannot be part of the situation. It is also possible that Vygotsky simply shifts his point of view from that of Zalkind to his own view right at the point marked “i.e.”. Vygotsky has been saying that the child is part of the environment, but in order to determine the “pure,” absolute influence of the environment on the child as the textbook written by Zalkind claims to do we would really need a social situation where the child is not an active constituent of the situation but only a passive recipient of its influence. This is consistent with the critique Vygotsky makes in Chapter Four of L.S. Vygotsky Pedological Works, Volume 1: Foundations of Pedology (2019).
- 5.
Obviously, there are some concrete instances (e.g., “Hey!” or “Hi!” or curse words) where the portion of thinking seems much reduced; similarly, there are some concrete instances (e.g., elllipsis) where the portion of speech seems to be minimal. But these are exceptions that prove the rule, because a study of speech development that only looked at such wordings would be much impoverished.
- 6.
Why does Vygotsky say that there is no link to consciousness with thinking? Vygotsky seems to be making the same point he made in Thinking and Speech about word meaning as a unit of analysis of the unity of speech and thinking. Word meaning is a minimal unit because it is not reducible any further and contains all properties of this unity. A sound without meaning is not really a word, but neither is a meaning without some potential realization in sounds. Similarly, attention without thinking (e.g., involuntary attention to a clap of thunder or a gunshot) is not consciousness, and thinking without attending to some object of thought in the environment (e.g., drug-induced fantasy or illness-induced hallucination) is not, in Vygotsky’s view, conscious awareness.
- 7.
The word that Vygotsky uses for “experiences” is переживает, that is, the active voice of the verb form of perezhivanie and the word he uses for “is experienced” is переживается, that is, the passive voice of the verb. We have translated it as ordinary English verbs because, as we explained in Lecture 4 of Foundations of Pedology (see L.S. Vygotsky Pedological Works Volume 1), in the verb form it seems to be used as an everyday concept and an ordinary Russian word, and not as a scientific concept and a special unit of analysis. However, for Vygotsky, there is never any absolute distinction between everyday concepts and scientific ones; each has the potential to become the other through research on the one hand or through everyday use on the other. Concepts are never really imaginary entities (e.g., “an experience”); they are always processes of linking a thought and some sphere of reality (e.g., “not simply passively undergo an experience but interpret, understand, and emotionally relate to the event situation”), so it should not surprise us when Vygotsky realizes a science concept by a verb rather than a noun.
- 8.
Korotaeva adds the word “reflected” to “there are (reflected—GSK) shares of the unity…” but this is not Vygotsky’s original text, and we have removed it. We are also somewhat suspicious of the word “activity” in the last sentence in this paragraph, but we have left it in because there is no clear indication that it was not in the original text.
Korotaeva was a philosophy teacher, and doubtless had to teach Lenin’s text “Materialism and Empirio-criticism.” This stresses that consciousness is always a “reflection” of reality—this was intended to establish the prior existence of a material reality, because there is no reflection in a mirror without some object. But shares of the indecomposible unity of the environment and the personality are genuine acts of sharing—they are not just passive reflections in a mirror any more than they are just inert physical objects in the world. Similarly, perezhivanie includes the mental act of “over-living” an experience in order to understand, interpret, and make sense of it, so the addition of “activity” seems either unnecessary or a concession to behaviorism uncharacteristic of Vygotsky’s thinking at this time.
- 9.
Adolf Hermann Heinrich Busemann (1887–1967) was a teacher of religion and then a student of Narziss Ach. He wrote on many important psychological topics, including the crisis, the periodization problem, and the social views of adolescents. Vygotsky cites his work on the difference between “primary” (innate), “secondary” (environmental), and “tertiary” (consciousness, self-aware) links in psychological systems. Busemann’s most important work was on the link between thinking and speech, kinds of adjectives and nouns and verbs that children used in their writing; Busemann tried to use these to make general statements about mental development.
- 10.
It is not clear where the ellipsis in this passage come from—Korotaeva does not explain. One possibility is the stenographer simply could not keep up with Vygotsky, as in previous examples which were marked with parentheses. But another possibility is that Vygotsky is quoting Busemann, and he omitted some of Busemann’s words here.
- 11.
As we noted above (see Footnote 2), “kindergartens” do not simply refer to a preparatory year prior to primary school around 6 or 7 years of age, as it does in the West. In the Soviet context, the term included a whole range of preschool institutions starting around age two, and nurseries can begin even earlier, so that women workers can return to production. For that reason, when Vygotsky speaks of crises, he is talking in general, for example, both the crisis at three and the crisis at seven.
- 12.
Both here and at the end of the previous paragraph, some crucial words seem to be missing, and we cannot speculate on what exactly Vygotsky said. But we do know that Vygotsky has said that the “bourgeois” investigators like Busemann are entirely or mostly wrong. First of all, the crisis is not identical in all children, varies a good deal according to conditions of upbringing, and therefore cannot be biological in origin, so that is entirely wrong. Secondly, their impression of an “internal” crisis is largely based on a mismatch between external changes and internal ones. But the crisis at three takes place before the changes brought on in preschool, the crisis at seven before those of primary school, and the crisis at thirteen before those of middle school. So, the impression of a crisis that is caused by a sudden change in the environment is mostly wrong.
But it is not entirely wrong. Vygotsky agrees that the crisis is essentially “internal” in origin—but for Vygotsky, that simply means it socio-psychological, not biological. This view is not consistent with the bourgeois views. But it is also not consistent with the mainstream Soviet belief that crises are caused by a mismatch between the needs of the child and the needs of capitalist society, and therefore unnecessary under socialism. It is consistent with Vygotsky’s view that crises unfold along the axis between the child and the social environment, realized, after age one, in speech.
- 13.
Vygotsky says: измеряемый в этих единицах переживания, which literally means that the process is measured in units of perezhivanie. But in English this implies reducing the data to numbers, and Vygotsky is not speaking of quantification but analysis. Vygotsky uses “measure” here the way that Hegel uses it in the Logic (Hegel, 1830/1975, p. 157), that is, a “qualitative quantum” that functions as a complete characterization (as in “God is the measure of all things”). For this reason we have slightly altered the wording and used the word “measure.”
- 14.
Leopoldoff-Martin and Schneuwly (2018, 149) say that it is not at all clear what “they go against their own facts” refers to. It is certainly true that some words seem to be missing from the stenogramme. But it seems likely that Vygotsky is continuing his argument against bourgeois investigators who hold that the critical period is entirely negative (e.g., Freud , Jung, Piaget, Spranger).
- 15.
Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964) was a student of Robert Gaupp, the racial hygienist who laid the basis for the Nazi T4 project of murdering the mentally ill rather than treating them. Kretschmer is best known today for a rather naïve holistic psychology: the belief that physical constitutions reliably predict sychological temperaments (so for example the thin “asthenic type” correlated with schizophrenia, and the fat, jolly “pyknic” correlated with manic depression, etc. Vygotsky uses Kretschmer’s holistic laws of transfer of brain functions as a framework for much of Foundations of Pedology, but he is much more critical of Kretschmer’s work on the problem of age, precisely because of these biologizing tendencies. Kretschmer signed the vow of allegiance to Hitler and the SS, which Vygotsky bitterly denounces in “Fascism and Psychoneurology” (Vygotsky, 1934/1994, 327).
- 16.
Vygotsky probably means something like a “paralyzed state,” a “rictus,” or perhaps the psychological equivalent of a rictus, an “affective fit,” that is, a temper tantrum.
- 17.
The name Katz is capitalized КАЦ in Korotaeva’s book (Выготский, 2001: 221). She adds the note “Так в стенограмме,” meaning that it is thus in the stenogramme. This suggests that neither the stenographer nor the editor understands the reference. However, it seems clear Vygotsky is referring to the work on child speech and child stories of David Katz (1884–1953), which Vygotsky cites in “The Problem of Consciousness” (Vygotsky, 1997a: 135), The History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions (Vygotsky, 1997b: 231) and in other papers. Katz was the student of Georg Müller. His early work, to which Vygotsky refers here, was in child psychology. In philosophy, he was close to Hering and Husserl, that is, to phenomenology. Like many Gestaltists he was interested in perception—unlike most of them, he wrote on touch as well as on vision. When Hitler came to power, Katz, who was Jewish, fled to England and then Sweden, where he died.
- 18.
What does Vygotsky mean here? Surely many of us have seen children under three who can and do play lions or even human characters; some of us have done so ourselves. First of all, as Vygotsky makes clear in the next paragraph, Vygotsky is not referring to copying a visible action (as in the game of “Growl” or “Peekaboo”) but rather performing an invisible character: a mother or a soldier. Secondly, Vygotsky has in mind role-play games with implicit rules as well as roles: there are guidelines as to what does and does not constitute the idealized model. Thirdly, Vygotsky’s years, including designations like “crisis at one” and “crisis at three,” are developmental years, not calendar years. Developmental years are defined by neoformations, and of course role play is one of the neoformations of early childhood. From that point of view, Vygotsky’s statement that no one has seen a child of under “three” role play is not only true but tautological.
- 19.
There is at least one word missing here: “the same,” “identical,” “similar,” “analogous?” Vygotsky’s argument is that child proto-speech (or, as Eliasberg calls it, “autonomous speech,” sounding with meaning but without wording) has the same relationship to speech proper that the child’s “antipode of will” (will that is torn form affect) has to the child’s future volition.
- 20.
What are the two examples of which Vygotsky speaks? One possibility is that Vygotsky is referring to two different types of “acting out” that appear in cases of difficult childhood. In one case, something that is artificial, pretentious and absurd appears in the child (e.g., a child who begins to write his memoirs at the age of seven!). In other words, the child acts a role which is far above his age. In another case, something that is puerile, clownish, and silly appears in the child (e.g., a child who uses baby-talk or even proto-speech). In other words, the child acts a role which is far beneath his age. The second possibility is that there originally was a “second type” of behavior manifest in the crisis at seven in difficult children, but either Vygotsky or the stenographer left it out.
- 21.
Korotaeva points out that manuscript has “делает вообще” or “shared,” “made general” or “communicated to others” instead of “manifested externally.” Of course, “made general” or “communicated to others” is also possible here; in either case, the meaning is clear: prior to the crisis, there is a direct correspondence between the outer self that behaves and the inner self that thinks. But after the crisis the child will never be so simple and direct again—like Chaplin after the rise of Hitler and the invention of talkies (when he made “The Great Dictator” and “Monsieur Verdoux,” films which are not at all based on the directness and naivete that Vygotsky discusses here).
- 22.
Vygotsky says that adult perceptions are легализировано, which means “legalized,” “legitimated,” or “made statutory,” in much the same way that legal definitions stipulate how the terms of laws can and cannot be interpreted. Perhaps there is a parallel with the way “sense-value” is stabilized as “meaning-value” by definitions in dictionaries.
- 23.
The transcript says агностик and not “agnosic,” but it seems clear that Vygotsky is speaking of agnosia and not agnosticism. Agnosia is the inability to make sense of the visual field; it is described in detail by Oliver Sacks in his book (later made into an opera) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Sacks, 1985).
- 24.
Vygotsky says движение фигурок будет определять структурно, which means “the movement of the figures would be determined structurally.” But since the child doesn’t know how to play chess, it is clear that “structurally” doesn’t refer to relationships between friendly and enemy pieces on the board structured spatially or to moves such as openings, gambits and countergambits that are structured in time. So what does Vygotsky mean here? One possibility is a figure-ground structure: Vygotsky means the child moves the black pieces on black squares and the white pieces on white ones. Another possibility is that the shape of the piece suggests to the child a way of moving them, for example, a horse will gallop, a king will walk, and a castle cannot move at all. In any case, the child is not “playing chess” but rather “playing with chess figures.”
- 25.
On the one hand, Vygotsky clearly says that self-esteem and self-respect are neoformations of the crisis at seven. On the other hand, Vygotsky says just as clearly that critical neoformations are transient and only persist as a dependent part of stable neoformation in the subsequent age period (i.e., in school age). This is clearly a contradiction.
But analogy with other crises may show that it is a real, dialectical contradiction and not a logical one. At birth, the neoformation is independent mental life, chiefly in the midbrain. This does not disappear in infancy, but it does hand most of its functions “upward” to the myelinating cerebral cortex. Similarly, at one, the neoformation is autonomous speech; that is, baby babble. This too does not disappear, but it does hand on its independent functioning to speech proper, persisting only dependently, as prosody (intonation and stress which are dependent on articulation in adult speech). At three, the neoformation is an opposition of will to affect. This persists, but only in a stable form dependent on imaginary play, not in the inherently unstable form of opposing “want” to “like.” So when Vygotsky says that the “wedge” between inner and outer personalities that is the neoformation of the seven-year crisis (that is, the child’s “acting out” and “acting up”) persists, he means that it persists as a dependent part of the school child’s self-love and self-esteem, not as narcissism and semi-autistic self-absorption.
References
Выготский Л.С. (2001). Лекции по педологии. Ижевск: Издательский дом “Удмуртский университет”
Hegel, G.W.F. (1830/1975). Hegel’s logic. (W. Wallace Trans.) Oxford: Clarendon.
Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Duckworth.
Vygotskij, L.S. (2018). La science du développement de l’enfant: Text pédologiques (1930–1934). Traduits par I. Léopoldoff-Martin. Collection Exploration: Peter Lang.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934/1994). Fascism in psychoneurology. In R. van der Veer & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 327–338). Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997a). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 3). Plenum Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997b). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 4). Plenum Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1998). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 5). Plenum Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2020). L.S. Vygotsky pedological works, volume 1: Foundations of pedology. Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vygotsky, L.S. (2021). The Crisis at Age Three and the Crisis at Age Seven. In: L.S. Vygotsky’s Pedological Works. Volume 2.. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 10. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1907-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1907-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-1906-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-16-1907-6
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)