Abstract
Activity is an important concept for any critical approach to psychology. This chapter aims to discuss the metamorphosis that occurred in the concept of activity in its transition from a relevant concept for a cultural–historical psychology to its reification as a universal concept to explain all psychological phenomena, as used by A. N. Leontiev in his theoretical proposal of activity theory. During that transformation, activity became an ideological device for the definition of psychology as a Marxist dogmatic science. Further, the paper discusses the two different geneses of the concept of activity in Soviet psychology which, in turn, had historical, theoretical, and political consequences for the use of the concept. Having the critical potential to overcome behavioral psychology according to Rubinstein’s definition, the concept of activity, as defined by Leontiev, became a device for the passive adaptation of, and control over, human beings through external operations with objects that become motives of human behavior after meeting human needs.
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Notes
- 1.
I made a small change in the original English translation based on the original Russian publication (Leontiev, 1975, p.84). Instead of “as an image of the object, as a product of its property of psychological reflection,” there appears “as a product of the psychological reflection of its nature.” This change had a twofold motivation, firstly because this is how it appeared in the Russian version and, secondly, because it stressed an important theoretical position of Leontiev’s throughout his work; reflection is understood as a reproduction of the quality of the “real world” in the image.
- 2.
Leontiev’s son and grandson were also highly recognized within Soviet psychology.
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González Rey, F. (2020). Can the Concept of Activity Be Considered as a Theoretical Device for Critical Psychologies?. In: Fleer, M., González Rey, F., Jones, P. (eds) Cultural-Historical and Critical Psychology. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2209-3_6
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