Abstract
Vygotsky ended the last chapter with the emergence of interest in the environment and the demise of the passive state of physiological separation and biological dependence that brought about the social situation of development in birth. Vygotsky commences this chapter with a new social situation of development; he continues with the social and neurological factors (backgrounded in birth and now foregrounded in infancy) that bring the neoformation into being; he then defines and delimits the neoformation that solves and dissolves the social situation of development (at least from the child’s point of view); finally, he ends this chapter with a critical review of competing theories, from the most environmentalist to the most solipsistic.
This chapter is translated from material in the Russian Collected Works of 1984.
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
Notes
- 1.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the outline of this chapter, the Russian Collected Works editors say that the first part of Vygotsky’s manuscript is missing, so they begin the section on the newborn with the number “2.” The present section on the age of infancy is, accordingly, numbered “3” in the Russian Collected Works (and, somewhat confusingly, “2” in the English edition). To avoid confusion, we have simply eliminated the numbers.
- 2.
Vygotsky is referring to the 1931 Russian translation of: Bühler, Charlotte; Hildegard Hetzer und Beatrix Tudor-Hart (1927). Soziologische und psychologische Studien über das erste Lebensjahr. Jena: Fischer.
Beatrix Tudor-Hart (1903–1979) was, along with Hildegard Hetzer, a research assistant of Charlotte Bühler in Vienna. She returned to the United Kingdom and taught at the Beacon Hill School founded by Bertrand Russell. She then had a very successful career as a teacher and principal in a number of experimental cooperative schools. In the 1930s she founded the Fortis Green School, which was the first school in Britain owned and run by parents and teachers. Later, she wrote several books on preschool and elementary school education, including Toys, Play and Discipline in Childhood (1955) and Learning to Live (1963).
- 3.
Henri Wallon (1879–1962) was a French psychologist and a Marxist (he served as Minister of Education in the underground Resistance Government formed by the uprising against Nazi rule in 1944). He was a central figure in reestablishing public school education after the war, and remained a central figure in French educational psychology for the whole of the postwar period (although less important in Switzerland because of the influence of Piaget). His periodization scheme is quite close to Vygotsky’s (and thus quite distant from Piaget’s).
- 4.
Vygotsky uses the term моторика here. It is tempting to translate this as “motor skills,” and that is certainly how we would translate the term if Piaget was using it to describe a stage of infant development. But in the next sentence, Vygotsky includes strabismus, when the eyes do not focus on the same point (e.g., in cross-eyedness). Many infants are born with strabismus, which can interfere with depth perception; this is poorly described as a “motor skill.” In fact, the sensorimotor stage about which Piaget wrote is yet to come; instead, Vygotsky is referring to Wallon (e.g., 1943, p. 129, 1949, p. 194), who uses “inquiétude motrice” to describe infant hunger and “connexions motrices” to describe feeding; in English this would be “motoric uneasiness” and “motoric connections” or “motoric links,” that is, neurological links and not nascent ability or knowledge. Moreover, Vygotsky is referring to Wallon in Russian, which does have a perfectly good single word for this, a word we have chosen to render as “motorics.” This has two disadvantages. First of all, the word is not strictly English (although it could be, since “motoric” is an English adjective). Secondly, it does not seem to describe pathology very well. So when Vygotsky speaks of defective motorics (e.g., persistent strabismus), we will translate моторика as an impaired or degraded “motility.” Like the Russian word, “motility” does refer to the self-propulsion faculty of an organism (as opposed to “mobility” which is more generally a capacity for passively being moved as well as a capacity for active motion).
- 5.
W. T. Preyer (1841–1897) was an English physiologist who studied and worked in Germany (Heidelberg and then Jena). He wrote Die Seele des Kindes (“The Soul of the Child”), one of the first books of child psychology. Preyer was a staunch Darwinian, much interested in Fechner’s “psychophysics,” which constituted the first quantitative study of the relationship between stimulus and sensation.
- 6.
This appears to contradict the editors of the Russian language Collected Works, who argue that conditional reflexes occur in the first or second week of life (see Footnote 11 in Chap. 5). But it also appears to contradict Vygotsky’s own statement, at the end of Chap. 5, to the effect that a child at only a month or 2 of age responds to a cry with a cry and smiles at the sound of a familiar voice. Perhaps it is useful to keep in mind that Vygotsky has a definition of “imitation” that includes construing its goal or purpose. Where the sense of an action is not understood, Vygotsky refers to only “apparent” or “seeming” imitation—a mere copy of real imitation.
- 7.
Oskar Pfister (1873–1956), an early colleague of Sigmund Freud, Eugen Bleuler, and Carl Jung, was a Swiss Lutheran minister who tried to apply psychoanalysis to Christian theology.
- 8.
L.L. Volpin is listed as the author of a Russian paper published in 1902 on weight data on the growth of the brain in children. Note that all of these claims about brain weight gain have been supported by modern research which is not limited to studying autopsy data: if anything, Vygotsky somewhat underestimates brain growth in the first 2 years of life, which is usually around 350% (Brodal, 2016: 155).
- 9.
This does not refer to the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (who created the idea of a pyramid of hierarchically ordered needs crowned by self-actualization) but rather to the Russian pediatrician, Mikhail Stepanovich Maslov (Михаил Степанович Маслов, 1885–1961). He published clinical lectures on childhood illness in 1924, and Vygotsky cites him in his work on belly button formation in neonates.
- 10.
The “reflex arc” (and also the “subcortical arc of action” Vygotsky refers to below) refers to the “arc” created by a sensory motor neural impulse which simply “jumps” to a motor nerve without actually entering the brain or the cerebral cortex. It is this which allows a medullar-spinal frog to catch flies, and it is also this which accounts for human reflex actions, such as removing your hand from a hot stove before you even feel pain.
Vygotsky uses the term подчиненные инстанции which we have translated quite literally as “subordinated instances.” The word “instance” here means something like “moment”: a holistic structure in itself which becomes part of another one (the way that a clause becomes a subordinate clause in a long sentence). A previously independent function becomes a subordinated instant or a moment of a more complex one, the way that the instinctive salivation of a dog is a lower, historically older, and instant in the complex operation of the dog’s feeding by a human. Not only the infant’s hunger but the whole of the neoformation of infancy, the child’s “independent, instinctual” life linked to the midbrain is similar: it lives on, but only as dependent and noninstinctual life now controlled from the cortex.
- 11.
It seems probable that the reference to “M.” Minkowski is incorrect (like the previous reference to “D. Canestrini”) and that either Eugene Minkowski (1885–1971) or Oskar Minkowski is meant. Eugene was a phenomenologist, close to Bergson, who was a student of Bleuler and who worked on the loss of psychological functions in wartime. But it is more likely that Vygotsky means Oskar Minkowski (1858–1931), who specialized in experiments on dogs in which various organs were destroyed surgically, and is best known for his work on the pancreas. The only “M. Minkowski” who might qualify would be too young and in the wrong profession—the famous conductor Marc Minkowski, who was Eugene’s grandson.
Otfrid Foerster (1873–1941) was a German doctor, a student of Wernicke and Babinsky, who did his thesis on typhoid fever. Although he was not trained as a neurosurgeon, during World War I he had patients who suffered epilepsy as a result of gunshot wounds to the head. He would give them local anesthetic and then find the areas of the cortex which caused epilepsy by poking with electrified needles. When he found the area, he would cut it out of the brain, and his cuts were delicate enough not to cause damage. By doing this to many patients, he was able to develop the first “map” of the cerebral cortex.
- 12.
If you scratch a dog’s belly, you often get an apparently sympathetic movement from the hind leg called a “scratching reflex,” as if the dog were trying to produce the effect that you are producing. Similarly, a frog, even one whose brain has been destroyed, will scratch with its hind leg if you apply an irritant to its body. Ukhtomsky, who is probably one of the others who Vygotsky refers to here, used this as evidence for his theory of development as the discovery of one “dominant” reaction that is able to overcome others. This theory is related to Vygotsky’s own theory of developmental periods that culminate in a central neoformation.
- 13.
Vygotsky is apparently referring to Virchow’s work on the spine and the medulla, in which Virchow speculated that the newborn child is essentially a “spinal-medullar” being, like a frog whose brain has been destroyed. As we saw, Vygotsky rejected this view because consciousness is not simply located in the cortex.
“Tonic” and “clonic” describe two phases of an epileptic seizure—the tonic phase is the first phase, in which the muscles suddenly contract and the person falls, while the clonic phase is the phase of convulsions. Here, Vygotsky apparently just means the kinds of nervous signals that are given by the spinal cord during muscle spasms.
- 14.
Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918) was a German neuroanatomist who in 1885 discovered the Edinger-Westphal mechanism that controls the size of the pupil and linked it to expressions in human fetuses. He was, as Vygotsky says, very interested in comparative anatomy in both ontogenesis (where he studied ancephalic children) and phylogenesis (where he and his daughter Tilly studied the neuroanatomy of fish, reptiles, and even dinosaurs). But the insight that all neurons have the same basic structure (axon, dendrites, and nucleus) was not original to him.
- 15.
Vygotsky ended Foundations of Pedology, Lecture 7, with the unusual suggestion that it is not growth that makes possible differentiation, but rather differentiation that makes growth possible. We might think that the growth of the brain, which makes possible the differentiation of behavior, disproves this. But when we really understand Vygotsky’s argument, we see that brain differentiation is a nearly perfect example of what he is talking about.
Humans are born with almost all the brain neurons they will ever have. Nevertheless, as Vygotsky says, the brain’s weight doubles in the first year alone. The main growth in the weight of the brain is in the glial cells. Glial cells build coatings of myelin around the long stem fibers of the nerve cells (the “axons”), and it is this insulation which keeps the nerve impulse from spreading to other nerve cells. In other words, the growth of weight in the brain is not in the wiring, but rather in the wiring insulation (the myelin). It is the differentiation and discrimination of brain cells that makes brain weight growth, and it is this growth that makes possible the differentiation and discrimination of signals, enabling further growth.
- 16.
See Footnote 11.
- 17.
Paul Flechsig (1847–1929) was the German neuroanatomist who discovered the lateness of myelinzation in the infants. Flechsig first became famous because of Daniel Schreber, a respected judge, who woke up one day with the idea that it would be pleasant to have sex with a man. Since Judge Schreber was male, and a highly respected jurist, he decided this idea could not possibly have come from himself, and so he sued poor Flechsig, accusing him of implanting women’s thoughts in him under hypnotism and trying to turn him psychologically into a woman using a secret “nerve language.” Freud valiantly defended Flechsig, diagnosing Schreber as a repressed homosexual. This probably saved Flechsig’s career, which is today most remembered for his work on myelination. Flechsig divided the cortex into (1) the “early” myelination zone (motor, visual, and auditory), (2) the “intermediate” myelination zone that borders it, and (3) “association,” that is, working memory. These are the areas that Vygotsky refers to above.
- 18.
As we saw earlier with the scratching reflex, Vygotsky is using the vocabulary of Ukhtomsky on the “dominant,” which underlies Vygotsky’s own theory of development as a sequence of neoformations. Ukhtomsky had observed that a cat which was about to defecate could not be distracted with an electric shock; far from diverting it, the shock actually increased cat output. He generalized his observation into a theory in which each period of human life was governed by a particular “dominant” excitation—one that absorbed and even blocked all other forms of excitation, so, for example, the neonate period is governed by the unconditional (instinctive) reflex. Ukhtomsky, who was a Russian orthodox monk as well as a physician, believed that the purpose of life was for humans to develop to the point where the needs of others become their dominant. He died in besieged Leningrad in 1942, probably of starvation.
- 19.
Note that “with sense” is used as an antonym of “mechanical”: a machine has structure, but does not by itself alter the sequence or disposition of its parts, or understand the meaning of the whole. Vygotsky says that elements of the process may be changed and the whole will retain/maintain a “structure with sense,” that is, the way the baby is held, the person feeding the baby, and even a bottle substituted for the breast can be changed and the baby will still understand the aim. Below, Vygotsky demonstrates this with the experiments of Volkelt.
- 20.
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) was a student of Carl Stumpf and a central figure in Gestalt psychology, along with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler (see Footnote 15 in Chap. 2). He wrote a monograph called Growth of the Mind (Koffka, 1925/1980) in which he argued that most early learning was simply sensorimotor learning. Unlike his Gestaltist colleagues, and rather like Vygotsky, Koffka believed that this sensorimotor learning was qualitatively different from later learning, which he called “ideational,” and which he recognized was dependent on language. But unlike Vygotsky, Koffka considered the naming process all important; for Vygotsky, learning to name is only the beginning of learning concepts.
When Koffka came to the USSR to participate in Luria’s Uzbekistan excursion, Vygotsky served as his translator (and Koffka remarked that Professor Vygotsky’s Russian translations always took far longer than his German original). Koffka wrote a paper on the expedition that came to the very opposite conclusion from Luria’s—Luria had found that uneducated Uzbek peasants scored differently on tests of lower skills such as perception as well as on higher skills such as syllogistic reasoning. Koffka reanalyzed Luria’s data and showed that there was no big difference between Uzbeks and others on the perception tests, but there was a difference in syllogistic reasoning. Note that Koffka’s interpretation is actually closer to what Vygotsky’s theory would have predicted, as well as more consistent with the division of the brain into higher centres and lower centres (Harrower, 1983).
- 21.
This appears to mean that the bottles are the same when viewed from the side, that is, they have differently shaped cross sections but the same length, breadth, and presumably the same volume of milk.
- 22.
Hans Volkelt (1886–1964) was the son of the celebrated neo-Kantian philosopher Joachim Volkelt (see Footnote 15 of Chap. 2). Vygotsky cites his work on “pre-concepts” in spiders (e.g., when a spider will attack a fly in the web but run away from a dead fly on the ground). This was the basis of Volkelt’s PhD work at Leipzig and his subsequent work demonstrating similar prelogical and nonintellectual “pre-concepts” in infants. Thanks to enthusiastic participation in the Nazi party and a popular article advocating “Aryanization” of preschools, he became head of the Froebel society and edited the journal Kindergarten under Hitler.
- 23.
Like the word “concept,” the term perezhivanie can mean a perception or an experience in a very everyday sense, and that is how Vygotsky uses the term here and in the next paragraph. Also like “concept,” the term can have a restricted, technical sense (e.g., in Chapter Four of L.S. Vygotsky’s Pedological Works Vol. 1: Foundations of Pedology (2019)). Of course, the two senses are not completely unrelated: like Volkelt’s preconcepts and true concepts, they are linked as well as distinct: in both cases, perezhivanie is a unitary moment of consciousness. Both meanings are given in the psychological dictionary published in 1931 by Varshava and Vygotsky: see Варшава Б. Е. и Выготский Л.С. (1931, p. 128).
- 24.
For a footnote on Karl Bühler, see Chap. 2, Footnote 19.
- 25.
Vygotsky uses the term дрессировка, dressirovka, literally “dressage.” In English the term dressage refers to competitive horse training; but in Russian it has a much broader meaning and can include any kind of animal or even human training by conditional responses (i.e., by carrot, stick, and repetition). Bühler’s categories, then, correspond to innate unconditional responses which are the product of phylogenetic adaptations, learned conditional ones which are the result of ontogenetic adaptations, and intellectual responses to novel situations. As Vygotsky points out, these do not exhaust the types of human behavior by any means—all of these behaviors are present in infancy and much of more mature behavior is neither innate, learned, or particularly intelligent, but it is free and voluntary behavior nonetheless (see Vygotsky, 1997, the History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions, Chapters 3 and 4, for his immanent critique of this schema). We have translated дрессировка as “entrainment,” but it should be understood as incorporating the rote learning of skills or habits through a system of rewards, punishments, and repetition.
- 26.
The word “tool” is perhaps slightly misleading: Vygotsky does not mean that there is a direct line between this instrumental thinking and child labor. The Russian word орудиe is more general and less immediately work related than “tool”—it includes guns, kitchen utensils, and—here—children’s toys. For example, many Soviet writers on infancy stressed how children learn to use a spoon (e.g., Zaporozhets et al., 1964/1971, p. 223; Leontiev, 1936/2005; 1981, p. 306). Using a spoon is linked to labor and life in an obvious way, and it also appears to be a good example of how tool use can be taught through collaboration (or, as Western writers like Bruner say, through scaffolding).
- 27.
Where Zaporozhets, Elkonin, and Leontiev located a crucial turning point in infant development in the use of the spoon (see Footnote 26), Blonsky took a less culturally bound and more biologically based view. The relationship between the child and the environment, he reasoned, depends in a direct way on the child’s energy resources, and this in turn depends on the child’s ability to take in food, which depends on the child’s teeth. (There is some basis for this in the history of early man because the ability to eat meat seems directly related to the ability of humans to undertake long journeys.) Accordingly, Blonsky divides childhood into three periods: in toothless childhood, the child is entirely dependent on milk and has very little energy as a result: the child can only lie down and sit up. In the period of incisors, the child is starting to move around. And by the age of 1, the child is the equal of an adult, so long as they are not outside, but in a quiet room doing nothing. Vygotsky agrees that the child’s attention and ability to communicate depends on having enough energy. He even agrees that as soon as man has built walls and no longer depends on hunting and gathering, child and adult can concentrate on social communication, and when we are talking about social communication, the child and the adult are indeed peers if not equals. But of course Vygotsky does not agree that teeth are the essential neoformation: when communication is the main activity, teeth cannot be the main means.
- 28.
In this paragraph, Vygotsky foresees not only the “false belief” problem posed by Simon Baron-Cohen and other researchers in the 1980s but Vygotsky also foresees a solution that does not rely on “egocentrism” but instead on the infant “Ur Wir;” the idea that the world of consciousness is shared in much the same way as the world of perceptions can be. This “Ur Wir” is the true neoformation of infancy.
Baron-Cohen’s “false belief” task was this: Anne has a covered basket. Sally has a covered box. Sally takes a chocolate and puts it in her covered box. She then goes to the toilet. While she is in the toilet, Anne takes Sally’s chocolate out of Sally’s covered box and puts it into her own covered basket. When Sally comes back from the toilet, where will Sally look for her chocolate? Children as old as 4 years will answer that Sally will look in Anne’s basket, and not in her own box. When you ask why, they answer that she will look there because that is where the chocolate is. Of course, that is correct—but that is not where Sally thinks the chocolate is.
Vygotsky says that the newborn sees, hears, smells, and feels the world, but only as a general condition, an overall situation, a state of being rather than seeing or hearing people and smelling and feeling things. The newborn feels hunger or fear or warmth or cold, but only as a condition, and not as a desire for objects such as a bottle or a blanket or a mother’s arms. The newborn has yet to discover the world of objects, the world of people, and the world where objects come to you through people.
But the infant is different. The infant understands that objects come through other people. Because the child’s “path to the outside world” is always through others, the first phenomenon to be differentiated from the newborn consciousness of the world as a general condition is a shared activity. The infant understands that other people have minds or else shared activity like peekaboo and social smiling would be impossible. But to the infant, worlds are always shared worlds, shared activities, and so on, and shared minds as well. This “shared mind” is the main neoformation of infancy, and it distinguishes the infant both from the neonate and from the speaking child at 1.
- 29.
The “Ur-wir” is the German expression for Vygotsky’s central neoformation of infant consciousness. Vygotsky, who like most psychologists of his day used German as the main language of science communication, glosses the “Ur-wir” in Russian as a пра-мы, and we have followed him by glossing it in English as a “proto-we.” But, as he says at the end of this paragraph, Vygotsky also has in mind something grander, a grandparent of the “we” that existed long before the differentiation of a paternal “you” and a child “I.”
Perhaps the best way to understand the “Ur-wir” is neither a primitive “proto-we” nor a grandiose “grand we,” but a “we” that is the analogue in interpersonal life of Goethe’s Ur-phänomen, the invisible archetype of the phenomenon to be uncovered by a holistic science, for example, the whole system of colors and the way that human consciousness responds to color that can lie hidden from the eye in apparently colorless light, a system which is only partially uncovered by the painter or by the prism.
- 30.
For a biographical footnote on Wallon, see Footnote 3.
- 31.
Jules-Gabriel Compayré (1843–1913) was an educator and a moderate politician in the French Third Republic, where he served as a deputy from southern France. He completed a doctorate in philosophy (on David Hume) but he is most famous for a series of books on Rousseau , Pestalozzi, Herbart, and other as well as other “grand educators.”
- 32.
Sara Fajans-Glück was a student of Kurt Lewin and published her dissertation on Lewin’s idea of “force fields” acting on small children. She and Kurt Lewin published a paper on this subject based on her dissertation, in 1933 (Die Bedeutung der Entfernung für die Stärke eines Aufforderungscharakters beim Säugling und Kleinkind), and Vygotsky seems to be citing this paper. So, this part of the manuscript was probably written in the year before Vygotsky’s death.
- 33.
Wilhelm Peters (1880–1963) completed his doctorate under Wilhelm Wundt on color perception in 1904. He then joined the Würzburg School, where in 1915 he published the work on the correlation of school grades; Vygotsky is quite critical of this study, which concludes that intelligence is largely hereditary because there is a significant correlation in school grades between generations. Like many German intellectuals (including Marx and Mendelssohn) he was from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity; this meant that he lost his job during the Nazi years. He went to London and then Istanbul, and returned to Wurzburg after the war, where he worked for learning disadvantaged school children.
- 34.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), together with his friend Goethe, constituted the “Ur-wir” of modern German literature, and the “proto-we” of German nationhood. Today his plays are best known through operas (e.g., Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Rossini’s “William Tell,” Puccini’s “Turandot,” and Donizetti’s “Mary Stuart”), and his poetry is best known through Beethoven (“Ode to Joy”), but to his own generation he was well-known as a critic. Vygotsky is probably referring to his criticism of sentimental and naïve poetry, where he remarks not only nature but children who make us feel both ashamed and superior in their lack of self, for example, when a child offers his father’s wallet to a needy stranger.
- 35.
The Russian Collected Works has a long footnote here on the history and membership of the reflexological school, but for contemporary readers it is not really long enough. Reflexology was cofounded by Pavlov and his now forgotten rival Bekhterev. From Vygotsky’s point of view, Bekhterev had the advantage of recognizing consciousness and mental states as legitimate objects of study. Bekhterev himself died suddenly and mysteriously after a visit to the Kremlin in 1927, and Pavlovism eventually became the official psychological science of the USSR. The Russian footnote lists, among the prominent reflexologists, N.M. Shchelovanov, M.P. Denisova, N.L. Figurin, and also N.I. Kasatkin, who was earlier cited to disprove Vygotsky’s claim that newborns are not capable of imitation.
- 36.
According to the Russian Collected Works, the theory of three stages is that of Bühler: the three stages are, as Vygotsky pointed out earlier, instincts (innate, unconditional adaptations to the environment), skills/habits (learned, conditional ones), and intelligence (unprecedented adaptations to novel problems). Like reflexology above (and Gestalism below), these three stages cannot account for qualitatively human development because the social situation of development is not the starting point, so all three stages are already present and accounted for in animals.
- 37.
When Vygotsky talks of “structuralist” theories, he is referring to Gestaltism, the holistic psychology of his friends and co-thinkers in Germany, notably Kurt Lewin. As we have seen, Vygotsky thinks that the Gestalists are correct in the way they delimit the period of infancy and also in the way they note features like perception, imitation, and social smiling as developmental milestones; Gestaltism is the trend of contemporary psychology which is most closely related to Vygotsky’s own.
But close relatives sometimes quarrel more than distant acquaintances. Vygotsky’s main criticism is that in Gestaltism, the means of development does not itself develop. The child is born with a Gestalt (a structure of perception), and the infant has the same Gestalt (perception). When the child begins to use tools, the Gestaltists explain this as a matter of perceiving the tool and the goal in the same field. Even language is seen as being a “structure” made of sound and meaning, rather than a cultural-historical practice which the child learns by mastering the acts of thinking involved in word meanings. In Gestaltism, everything changes—but nothing develops: some of the Gestaltists were aware of these criticisms, and as we shall see, Lewin tried to address them by distinguishing between intrastage structure and interstage structure.
- 38.
The Collected Works attributes this theory to Kurt Koffka, but this seems unlikely on two counts. First of all, Koffka was a Gestaltist, that is, a structuralist, and would therefore belong in the previous category. So in fact many of the arguments summarized in the previous category can be found in Vygotsky’s Проблема развития в структурной психологии (“The Problem of Development in Structural Psychology,” in the Russian Collected Works, Vol. 1, 1982, p. 195–238), which is translated simply as “Preface to Koffka,” 1997a, pp. 195–232). Secondly, Koffka’s book, “Growth of the Mind,” which Vygotsky is very familiar with, is by no means subjectivist and includes ample discussion of the child’s social relations—always within the Gestaltist paradigm of figure-ground structures. It seems more likely that Vygotsky has Stern’s personalism in mind, particularly since Vygotsky seems to be ordering the theories from objectivistic to subjectivistic.
- 39.
For a biographical footnote on Bernfeld, see Footnote 2 in Chap. 5.
- 40.
What exactly does Vygotsky mean when he says: “Piaget’s second thesis on child autism?” The English translation of the Collected Works translates this vaguely as “Another of Piaget’s statements”, but this is simply wrong: the text clearly says that there is a second assertion. The first assertion appears to be that autism and self-observation is primary. This is really not satisfactory to Vygotsky from a genetic point of view: where did this self-observing-a-self come from? Piaget derives it by going backwards from the egocentrism of older children. Vygotsky says this kind of “primacy of autism” may occur, but not in normal children: the primacy of the autistic function is a sign of a severe developmental pathology.
So the second assertion appears to be Piaget’s assertion that the coefficient of egocentrism is an index of development. The more egocentric the child is, the less developed he is. Here, Vygotsky says this is ALSO not true of normal children. With normal children, egocentric or “autistic” thinking develops along with logical thinking (and after the child acquires speech, we see a zig-zag path from logical, epistemic thinking to autistic, deontic thinking). It is only with anomalous development (e.g., brain damage), when children cannot develop culturally, that we can say that the more egocentric the child is the less developed the child is.
- 41.
Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist, Freud’s student and Piaget’s teacher. He was, as a doctor, a biologically oriented psychologist, he was also an enthusiastic champion of psychoanalysis, responsible for the concepts of “schizophrenia,” “autism,” and the idea of “ambivalence” (e.g., loving and hating your parents at one and the same time). As Vygotsky notes in the second chapter of Thinking and Speech, Bleuler fell out with Freud over the concept of “hallucinatory satisfaction.” Freud did not respond to criticism very well, and Bleuler left the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, complaining that it was more like a religious cult or a political party than a scientific institution.
- 42.
Recent evidence shows that infants as young as 3 months old (and even cats, dogs, and magpies) do understand object permanence. So, as with Piaget’s observations of self-directed speech we cannot explain Piaget’s results with Piaget’s explanations. But, as with Piaget’s observations of self-directed speech, Vygotsky can explain them; he explains the child’s propensity to look away from an object that cannot be seen and to talk to objects that are too far away to reach in the same way—it is not the “magic” of egocentrism, but rather the child’s knowledge of, and even overgeneralization of, sociality.
References
Brodal, P. (2016). The central nervous system. Oxford University Press.
Bühler, C., Hetzer, H., & Tudor-Hart, B. (1927). Soziologische und psychologische Studien über das erste Lebensjahr. Fischer.
Bühler, Ch., Hetzer, H., & Tudor-Hart, B. (1927, published in Russian 1931). Soziologische und psychologische Studien über das erste Lebensjahr. Jena and Moscow.
Elkonin, D. B., & Zaporozhets, A. V. (Eds.). (1964/1971). The psychology of preschool children. MIT Press.
Harrower, M. (1983). Kurt Koffka: An unwitting self-portrait. University Presses of Florida.
Koffka, K. (1925/1980). The growth of the mind. Transaction Books.
Leontiev, A. N. (1936/2005). Study of the environment in the pedological works of L.S. Vygotsky. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(4), 8–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2005.11059254
Leontiev, A. N. (1981). Problems of the development of the mind. Progress.
Lhermitte, J. (1925). Les fondements biologiques de la psychologie. Editions Gauthier-Villars. Science et civilisation.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). Collected works Vol. 4. Plenum.
Wallon, H. (1943). De l’acte à la pensée. Flammarion.
Wallon, H. (1949). Les origines du charactère chez l’enfant. Presse universitaires de France.
Zaporozhets, A. V., Zinchenko, V. P., & Elkonin, D. B. (1954/1971). Development of thinking. In D. B. Elkonin & A. V. Zaporozhets (Eds.), The psychology of preschool children (pp. 186–254). MIT Press.
Варшава Б. Е. и Выготский Л.С. (1931). Психологический словарь. Мособлполиграфа.
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 Age of Infancy. 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_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1907-6_6
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)