Abstract
In Vygotsky’s Collected Works, the editors present the next two chapters as a single chapter of Vygotsky’s unfinished book on child development and give it the rather misleading name “The Age of Infancy.” The editors also stipulate that the first part of the manuscript—including, presumably, the title—is missing, and this is why they begin the material with Section 2 and not (as the English version of the Collected Works has done) with Section 1.
As explained in the outline, this chapter was taken from the 1984 Russian edition of Vygotsky’s Collected Works.
As we said at the outset of the outline, the editors of the Russian Collected Works say that the first part of the manuscript is missing, and they begin this section with the number “2.” The editors of the English Collected Works, in contrast, begin this section with the number “1.” It seems less confusing to simply eliminate editorial numbering altogether and use sub-titles.
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Notes
- 1.
Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, one of the first followers of Freud. He was a socialist who developed a “Freudian Marxism” that appealed strongly to many in Russia (including Luria). From 1917 to 1921 he worked in a Zionist group with homeless children and then took a strong interest in education. He wrote a book about the psychology of the newborn (Psychologie des Säuglings), and also a work on education through labor: he was one of the very first advocates of the idea that the more cooperation we have in the classroom, the more individuation there is in the child.
- 2.
Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, and at first a close disciple of Sigmund Freud. But he soon fell out with Freud, because he believed that his patients’ stories of sexual abuse were true and that sex abuse was traumatic for children (Freud thought stories of sex abuse were child wish fantasies). His ideas were later influential for counseling psychologists like Carl Rogers and theorists like Jacques Lacan. Ferenczi believed that all children had a desire to “return to the womb” and the comfort of the amniotic fluids and placenta; this idea was later taken up by Lacan.
- 3.
Charlotte Bühler née Malachowski was a pedologist, a psychologist, and a feminist, first in her naïve Austria and then in the US. She was a student of Edmund Husserl and Oswald Külpe; her doctorate, with the latter, was on the psychology of thinking. She then worked with, and eventually married, Karl Bühler, and they founded an influential developmental institute at the University of Vienna. Charlotte wrote some of the very first studies on adolescent development, in addition to many studies on early years. Unlike most developmental psychologists, she gave equal attention to the development of girls. Eduard Spranger complained—quite wrongly—that she was only interested in women. Vygotsky criticized her—with more justice—for equating concepts with word use. Unlike Vygotsky, she ascribed full-fledged concepts to three-year-old children and saw adolescence as a time of emotional development but intellectual stagnation. When the Nazis took over Austria, the Bühlers settled in the USA. They found it difficult to find professorships (there were many other Jewish refugees looking for jobs) and did clinical work instead, but eventually became highly influential with a generation of humanistic and neo-Gestaltist psychologists including Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Abraham Maslow.
- 4.
Hildegard Hetzer (1899–1991) was working in a kindergarten in Vienna when Charlotte Bühler began her studies of poor and working-class children. She became involved in her work on intelligence, and completed a Ph.D. under Bühler in 1927. In 1931 she became a professor in early years at the University of Vienna. She is credited with creating a set of tests for very young children (one to six years old). Staying in Austria after the German Anschluss, she eventually found work with an agency which specialized in “Germanizing” promising Polish children (i.e., those who looked racially German, although they were Polish speakers). It is possible that she succeeded in saving some children from death at the hands of the Nazis; it is certain that she collaborated with the SS and their system of “relocation camps” (i.e., extermination camps).
- 5.
Silvio Canestrini (not “D. Canestrini”—this appears to be an error on Vygotsky’s part) wrote a 1913 monograph on sleeping and waking in infants using a pneumograph (measuring breathing) and also brain pulses. Bernfeld also quotes this monograph, so Vygotsky may be using Bernfeld as his source.
- 6.
Jean Lhermitte (1877–1959) was the son of a well-known realist painter, Leon Lhermitte (there is a beautiful realist painting of Jean as an infant). Jean studied medicine and became interested in spinal injuries during World War I, which is why many different hallucinations, neck injuries, and neurological diseases are named after him (e.g., Lhermitte’s syndrome, Lhermitte-Levy syndrome, Lhermitte-McAlpine syndrome, Lhermitte-Trelles syndrome). He wrote books telling priests how to distinguish between mental illness and demonic possession. Vygotsky is probably referring to his book The biological foundations of psychology (1925).
- 7.
Johann Franz Theodor Doflein (1873–1924) was a German zoologist who did extensive fieldwork in China, Japan, and the Far East and created a functionalist zoology, for example, by showing how penguins adapt to the environment in ways that are similar to seals. He was mostly interested in one-celled animals, but, as Vygotsky says, he also developed a taxonomy based on how the young are cared for (Doflein, 1910, 1914).
- 8.
The Moro reflex typically develops before birth and persists until the middle of infancy. Ernst Moro, the Austro-Hungarian doctor who discovered it, elicited it by slapping the baby’s pillow, but it can be elicited by any sudden movement near the baby’s head. The baby spreads his or her arms, then clasps them together, and usually starts to cry. Unlike the startle reflex discovered by Peiper, it persists even when you repeat the stimulus many times in a row.
- 9.
Albrecht Peiper (1889–1968) was a German pediatrician who studied neural activity in infants (Peiper, 1928). The Peiper Suspension test for reflexes is named after him, and so is the Peiper-Isbert reflex. He became a Nazi party member in 1937.
- 10.
The Russian Collected Works (p. 273) adds the following footnote:
“Studies have shown that the earliest conditional reflexes can be formed by the second to third week of life (N.I. Kasatkin, 1951).” (p. 413) The relevance (and even the accuracy) of this footnote to the text is not clear to us. Vygotsky has just said that the “second to third week of life” does not depend on the date of birth, and the date of birth can potentially occur anywhere in a window of nearly four months. Perhaps the Soviet editors were concerned that Vygotsky was understating the impact of the environment on the child and hence underestimating what early educational interventions could accomplish. This was a common criticism of Vygotsky at the time (e.g., Leontiev, 1935?/2005; c.f. van der Veer and Valsiner 1991, pp. 374–381) and remains a major theme today (c.f. prenatal and immediately postnatal programs such as “Baby Mozart” and “Baby Einstein”).
- 11.
Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) was a founder of modern pathology, social medicine, and medican theorist. He discovered trichonosis, created the methods of autopsy still used today, and formulated the dictum that all cells come from other cells. However, he rejected Darwin (as well as his own student, Ernst Haeckl, who formulated the dictum that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis). He also rejected the germ theory of disease and attributed all diseases to social inequality (“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale”). He was elected to the Reichstag, where he was a strident critic of Bismarck’s militarism; he supposedly responded to a duel challenge by asking Bismarck to choose from a pair of sausages, one of which was to be infected with the deadly parasites he had discovered. Bismarck, allegedly, declined.
- 12.
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) was a Gestaltist; student (and experimental subject) of Max Wertheimer and colleague of Wolfgang Köhler. He believed most early learning is sensorimotor (i.e., rewards and punishment) but distinguished between this and learning through language. Vygotsky uses his work extensively but critically in Thinking and Speech, English Collected Works, Volume One (1987). Koffka took part in Luria’s expeditions to Central Asia in but his conclusions were diametrically opposed to those of Luria. See Koffka, 1983.
- 13.
The “new brain” vs. “old brain” distinction is both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic distinction. Phylogenetically, lower animals tend to have relatively small, smooth, and undeveloped “new brain” cerebral cortex, while the “old brain” medulla and the midbrain are relatively large, complex, and developed. Ontogenetically, as Vygotsky says here, the “new brain” remains unmyelinated for a long time after birth, and is therefore not as functional as the “old brain,” which is responsible for the instinctive, independent mental life which Vygotsky gives as the neoformation of the neonatal crisis.
Nikolai Matveevich Schelovanov (Николай Матвеевич Щелованов, 1892–1981) was a reflexologist who specialized in brain activity. He was interested in problems of comparative psychology (i.e., comparing the development of humans and animals) and he developed a system of early education for infants still used in Russia today.
- 14.
Karl Spencer Lashley (1890–1958) was an American behaviorist psychologist. A student of Watson, he wanted to demonstrate that memories were simple areas of the brain where impressions were recorded by teaching rats to run mazes, and then destroying the parts of the brain where he believed the memories to have been stored. He succeeded in demonstrating exactly the opposite: if part of the brain is destroyed, another part simply takes over its functions.
Matvei Mikhailovich Troitsky (Троицкий Матвей Михайлович, 1835–1899) was a professor of psychology and philosophy at Moscow State University; he was much influenced by English associationist psychology (e.g., Alexander Bain).
Victor Henri Hutinel (1849–1933) was a French pediatrician. He wrote a standard five-volume work on the diseases of childhood, and had liver disease named after him.
Karl von Vierordt (1818–1884) was a German physician who created the first tools for measuring blood pressure. He also studied psychological topics like time sense.
Botallo’s duct (the ductus arteriosus) is a blood vessel that allows the fetus’s blood to bypass the lungs by connecting the left pulmonary artery (that is, the blood vessel which takes blood to the lungs) with the descending aorta (that is, the blood vessel which takes blood from the lungs). It normally closes at birth, when the baby begins to breathe air.
The umbilical vein is the blood vessel which carries oxygen and food from the mother to the fetus. Like Botallo’s duct it is obliterated at birth and like the rest of the umbilical cord it takes about a week to disappear.
Finkelstein may refer to Harry Finkelstein (1865–1939) an orthopedic surgeon who created Finkelstein’s test for “mommy’s thumb,” the pain that many mothers get in their wrists. “Reiss” may refer to the American pediatrician Oscar Reiss, who was an early advocate for immunization.
- 15.
Anaphylaxis is an extreme allergic reaction that sometimes results in infant death during the first week of life. It is associated with high levels of histamine in the blood.
- 16.
M.P. Denisova (М. П. Денисова) and N.L. Figurin (Н. Л. Фигурин), along with Schelovanov were reflexologists—students of Vladimir Bekhterev, Pavlov’s great rival. They published articles in Pedology, the journal edited by Blonsky and then Vygotsky. This is probably a reference to their 1929 article, “Some results reflexological study of behavioral development of the child from birth to 1 year.”
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2021). The Crisis of Birth. 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_5
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