Abstract
At the beginning of this lecture, Vygotsky lays out three tasks: tracing the developmental path of the major neoformations of early childhood, describing them, and establishing the link between these neoformations and the next zone of development. So in the first third of the lecture, we follow the child’s generalizations from sensuous perceptions to sensible or rather “sense-able,” that is, semantic and systemic, ones; for example, we follow the child’s behavior from nonplay and quasi-play to true play. The next third of the lecture describes those neoformations as semantic and systemic consciousness, made possible by the generalizations made available through speech. The final third relates these neoformations to the next zone of development at three, which parents in Europe and the USA sometimes refer to as the “terrible twos,” or “threenage-hood,” but which Russian parents associate with a whole constellation of negative symptoms which they call, after the Pleiades, “The Seven Stars.”
The material in this chapter is from the 1984 Russian edition of Vygotsky’s Collected Works.
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Notes
- 1.
Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) was a Gestalt psychologist who was probably closest of all of the Gestaltists to Vygotsky’s own ideas. Today he is probably best known for his creation of “action research,” but in Vygotsky’s time, he was best known for a theory of human behavior based on representing the environment as a field and human orientation to action as a kind of vector. He visited Vygotsky in Moscow, befriended him and wrote a very warm obituary when Vygotsky died. He left Germany when Hitler came to power (he was a Jew) and settled in the USA, where he founded action research.
- 2.
The German word Vygotsky wants here is not actually Situationsgebundheit , but rather Situationsgebundenheit, or “situation-bindedness,” the binding between the child and the situation. It is not clear whether the mistake is Vygotsky’s, that of his Soviet editors, or a word that Kurt Lewin made up (Ponomariov, 2013: 84f). When the child acts, it must be in response to the whole situation, rather than according to a memory or a wish.
- 3.
Feldmässigkeit (note that the umlaut, like the extra syllable in Situationsgebundenheit is missing from the Russian Collected Works) is a military term: It means something like “appropriateness in the battlefield,” and actually refers to soldier’s dress on maneuvers or in combat, as opposed to on parade: the soldier’s use of his arms, his horse, and his choice of uniform must be conditioned by field conditions and not by foppery or flirting.
- 4.
Afforderungscharakter is glossed by Vygotsky as известный повелительный характер, that is, “a well-known” or “a certain” compulsory characteristic, and this is rendered as “a connectedness of the situation itself” in the English Collected Works (1997: 261). It’s a little hard to see where such a mistranslation could have come from: perhaps the translator has one or both of the previous German terms in mind. Afforderungscharakter is indeed part of a system of concepts which includes Situationsgebundenheit and Feldmässigkeit. Because the child forms a whole structure with the environment, the child’s wants and needs are not simply subjective phenomena: They can be modeled objectively as positive or negative vectors, or a tension between the child and the environment. For example, a child sees a step and is drawn to it; if the step is too high, there is no behavior appropriate to this field. So in this case, the step does not “afford” climbing for the child (although it may for the adult) and we can say it has no Afforderungscharakter. This concept, if not the word, is certainly well known and widely employed: It was developed by Lewin from von Uexküll’s notion of functional “tone” and functionally tinged objects (1940), and it was later developed into J.J. Gibson’s concept of “affordance” (1966). It is still widely used in design today.
- 5.
In his lecture on play (2016), Vygotsky describes seeing the film of this experiment when Lewin visited him in Moscow.
- 6.
Leah Solomonovna Slavina (1906–1988) was born in the same small town as Vygotsky, Gomel, in Byeolorussia (“White Russia”). Like Vygotsky, she was from a Jewish family, and like Vygotsky middle class (her father was the town apothecary). She attended Moscow University in the 1920s, and became one of the “pyatorka,” the five students who worked with Vygotsky. After the war, she finished a Ph.D. thesis on early childhood story-telling (another of the “Five,” Bozhovich, was her supervisor).
- 7.
This refers to the “Second Leipzig School” of Krueger , Volkelt and Sander, not the Original “First” Leipzig School of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Stumpf. The Second Leipzig School, like the first one, was interested in perception and strongly holistic. However, they broke with Dilthey’s humanism and Wundt’s mechanism and became advocates of a romantic Nazi psychology which idolized the “German soul” and argued that even healthy adults had a kind of “unity of perception and action.” This was the Nazi version of the “reflex arc.”
- 8.
Felix Krueger (1874–1948) studied philosophy with Dilthey and psychology with Wundt. He was, as Vygotsky says, a member of the Second Leipzig School and a professor at the University of Leipzig. Later, he was rector of the University of Leipzig: like most of the Second Leipzig School, he was sympathetic to the Nazi party. But although Krueger signed the statement of German professors in support of Hitler, he also defended his Jewish students and was eventually removed as rector.
- 9.
For a biographical note on the Nazi psychologist Hans Volkelt, please see Footnote 22, Chapter 6.
- 10.
Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (Иван Миха́йлович Се́ченов, 1829–1905) founded Russian physiology and discovered the electrochemical nature of brain signals. He was a student of Helmholtz, and his work formed the foundation for the “reflexology” of Bekhterev and the “conditioned reflex” of Pavlov.
- 11.
Neither Bleuler nor Vygotsky uses “autism” the way it is used today, as an asocial neuropsychological developmental disorder. Instead, both use it the way it is used in Freud and Piaget, as indicating the fantasy, wish-fulfillment life of young children.
- 12.
The reference to “Gabriel” is a little puzzling, as his research interests (autism, the Crisis at Three, and adolescence) are quite central to Vygotsky’s work. But we can find no other references to him, either in Vygotsky’s work or in the work of his contemporaries. Jules-Gabriel Compayré, who is also referred to in Footnote 31 of Chapter Six, wrote on precisely these subjects. Is it possible that Vygotsky or Vygotsky’s stenographer is using “Gabriel” as short-hand, to refer to him?
- 13.
Karl Groos (1861–1946) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Basel who wrote two monographs about play, The Play of Animals (1898) and The Play of Man (1919). As the titles imply, he took the point of view of evolutionary psychology, which says that play must have an evolutionary purpose. That is why he and his student Weiss insist that play is “future oriented,” and has an adaptive function: It is a kind of training for hunting.
Groos refers to opening and closing doors or sitting on rocks, as a kind of “experimental play.” He is drawing attention to something real and important: The child is experimenting with, and exploring, the properties of doors and of rocks. But for precisely that reason, Vygotsky does not consider this kind of play to be true play: It does not contain an imaginary situation, a “break with reality,” and instead constitutes an adaptation: a form of work.
- 14.
For a biographical footnote on P.P. Blonsky, see Footnote 2, Chapter One.
- 15.
D.B. Elkonin (1904–1984) worked at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute with Vygotsky, where these lectures were delivered; he was probably sitting in the audience. After Vygotsky’s death, the Leningrad group pursued a different research direction from the group in Kharkov led by Leontiev; they were more interested in teaching and less interested in the theory of activity. However, they did adapt Vygotsky’s original schema of ages of crises to a schedule of “leading activities” that did not include a clear role for Vygotsky’s neoformations, his central and peripheral lines of development, or his crises. With V.V. Davydov, Elkonin worked out a theory of “germ cells” based on Vygotsky’s ideas about analysis into units. For Elkonin, who studied preschool, play was a kind of germ cell (Davydov concentrated on concepts and school education). His most famous pedagogical innovation is the “Elkonin Box,” a kind of cloze test used for teaching phonics. The idea is to match one phoneme to one box, for example, “cat.”
Proto-speech at one (and also the proto-will at three, and the proto-self at seven, and what Halliday calls proto-conversation, proto-language, proto-narrative-and-dialogue, proto-turn-taking, and proto-variation (2004: 139) are all true prototypes: that is, they share the functional goal of the complete “ideal” version of speech, will, self, etc. For example, proto-speech is for interacting, proto-will for decision-making, the proto-self is for role-playing. Elkonin (and of course Vygotsky) rejects experimental play as play because it does not share the goal of “breaking away” from the context of situation and transferring value from one object to another, from one person to another, or from one situation to another. Experimental play is, therefore, not a proto-type for play at all, but only the negative starting point of play development: it is work rather than play, and the principle is that of rote, rather than role or rule.
- 16.
This refers to Vygotsky’s lecture on play previously referred to in Footnote 5 above; Elkonin’s research, referred to below, followed on from this lecture.
- 17.
Vygotsky says на третьем году, which is literally “upon the third year of life,” but since the organism is living before the child is born, the meaning is that the child is 2 years old when play first begins to emerge.
- 18.
For a biographical footnote on Homburger, see Footnote 24, Chapter Two.
- 19.
It is possible that Vygotsky is referring to Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), an early feminist and author who was one of the first to argue that children are socialized into gender roles (i.e., they are given by the environment and not by heredity). She wrote about the use of dolls for this purpose in an essay called “The Reform of Girls’ Schools” in 1908.
- 20.
Vygotsky is probably alluding to the Prague Linguistic Circle of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoy. The Prague Circle was founded, as Vygotsky indicates, in 1928. Trubetskoy and Jakobson demonstrated that sounds are designed for maximum distinctness, along contrastive principles, such as the voiced/unvoiced contrast Vygotsky discusses below. But these contrasts are not directly linked to functional values of words. So, for example, it is not true that all words that start with voiced sounds, like /b/, /v/, and /g/, refer to voices or vibrations or living things, while all words that start with unvoiced sounds like /p/ and /f/ and /k/ refer to things that are not living; it is not true that all words spoken loudly mean something big while all words spoken softly mean something small. Instead the relationship is indirect, conventional, and what Vygotsky would call “dialectical”: The fact a thing is not some other thing allows us to see that a word is not some other word, and the fact that a word is not some other word allows us to hear that a sound is not some other sound: The fact that a cave is not a calf allows us to see that “cave” and “calf” are different words, and the fact that these are different words allows us to hear that the vowel is longer and the consonant voiced in one word and shorter and unvoiced in the other. But this means that phonemes are not concrete descriptions of the sounds we make—they are abstract contrasts in sounding which realize meaningful morphemes according to certain dialectical rules—rules of contradiction and contrast. This is why Vygotsky insists that morpho-phonemes are units of meaning and not simply units of sound.
- 21.
Vygotsky uses the term разложение, and the English Collected Works has rendered this “decomposition,” but this has the unfortunate connotation of “rot” or “decay” in English. What Vygotsky actually means could be conveyed by taking “decomposition” apart into “de-composition” or “un-composing,” but of course no such word exists in English. We have instead chosen the simple phrasal verb “take apart” for this word wherever possible. However, “take apart” is transitive and requires a noun object, and this is not always present in the Russian. Where no noun object is present, we have chosen “division” for taking apart the whole into elements that lack the property of the whole, and “separation” for taking apart the whole into base units which retain the property of the whole in some form.
- 22.
See Chapter 3, “The Study of Heredity and the Environment in Pedology” in L.S. Vygotsky’s Pedological Works Volume 1. Foundations of Pedology (2019), pp. 45–63.
- 23.
Vygotsky is using the word “phoneme” is a slightly different sense than we use it today. Earlier, Vygotsky made the point that there is no proportionality between the acoustic or articulatory properties of phonemes and their function in adult language, for example, it is not the case that long sounds represent long things or even that loud sounds represent big ones. Of course, it is indeed possible to imagine child speech where children make long drawn-out sounds to show length and shout to indicate large size (and of course children do this even in mother tongue). One reason why it is possible to imagine this is that in adult language there are units which do have a systematic relationship to meaning. But these units are not simple sounds and the relationship they have to meaning is not at all direct or iconic (i.e., it is not mimetic, like drawing out sounds for length or shouting them for size).
For example, in English, whenever you mean more than one discrete object, you use /s/ or /z/ at the end of a noun (“cats” or “dogs”). Whenever you want to say that some event or act happened in the past, you use /d/ or /t/ at the end of the verb (“played” or “worked”). In both cases what you add on is not a specific concrete sound but a purely abstract unit of some kind; these abstract units, which do have functional value, are what Vygotsky means.
Today, we would not call Vygotsky’s units phonemes, because linguists use “phoneme” to mean elements which do not by themselves mean anything and which must therefore be defined by their acoustic or articulatory properties (i.e., /s/ as opposed to /z/ or /d/ as opposed to /t/). For the analysis of meaning, these are elements and not units. Today, we would call Vygotsky’s units of sound and functional meaning phono-morphemes, or morpho-phonemes, or simply morphemes (/s/ or /z/ as opposed to nothing, or /d/ or /t/ as opposed to nothing). That is, actually, what the Prague Linguistic Circle (Trubetskoy and Jakobson) called them.
- 24.
Kornei Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882–1966) is probably the best-known children’s writer in Russian; the humor magainze Krokodil is named after one of his early stories. The early Vygotsky (Educational Psychology, Vygotsky, 1997a: 270f) disliked his work because of its nonsense, its talking animals, and its focus on lower level psychological functions such as recognizing and repeating sounds. Here, however, he appears to take a more favorable view of his work!
Zofia Marchlewski (1898–1983) was, like Chukovsky, a journalist and a translator, later an important official in the Union of Soviet Writers.
- 25.
Vygotsky says сенсорная речь, which means something like “sensory speech” or “sensuous speech,” but since this has an erotic double-entendre in English that Vygotsky does not intend, we have chosen to render it as “sense-able,” even though this is not, strictly speaking, English.
- 26.
Vygotsky reports in detail on the experiment of raising a child in two languages in “On the question of multilingualism in childhood,” written in 1928 and published in 1935: This is available in Volume 4 of the English Collected Works (1997b: 253–259). However, Pavlovich and Ilyashevich are not mentioned. The experiment of speaking one language to one parent and another language to another is fairly close to Vygotsky’s own upbringing, since his father spoke Russian and his mother preferred German and Yiddish (S. Dobkin, in K. Levitin, One Is Not Born a Personality, 1982, p. 24).
- 27.
Vygotsky’s idea is that the acquisition of the knowledge that objects are constant in size regardless of how they seem to change in perception is a precondition for being able to walk around, because without it infants would not be able to cope with the changes in retinal image that walking around brings about.
Note that this suggests that even here, in perception, there is the function of evaluation: The brain has to assign meaning to raw perceptions that are transmitted by sense organs. For Vygotsky, the main neoformation of early childhood is twofold: first, systematicity (the saltatory or “stepwise” creation of systems of choices in sound) and second, semanticizing (the imposition of meaning on visual and aural perceptions). Both of these take place through speech.
- 28.
Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering (1834–1918) was a physiologist who worked on a wide range of topics. He worked on binocular vision (such as the problem of how we know that objects are stationary and it is our head that is moving which Vygotsky just discussed), on color perception, where he demonstrated that the perception of color was based on color oppositions rather than simply on detecting the three major primary colors (which is today the basis of printing technology). He also created the “Hering illusion” (left), and co-discovered the “Hering-Breuer” reflex (the automatic tendency to breathe in after you breathe out and to breathe out after you breathe in).
Hering was a lifelong enemy of Helmholtz: Helmholtz, the empiricist, tended to locate his explanations in the environment, while Hering, the nativist, tended to locate his in the child. For Vygotsky, of course, all explanation has to take the relationship between child and (social) environment as an axis with two poles, and locate development along that axis.
- 29.
Vygotsky is reporting here on work by the Gestaltists, especially Otto Pötzl, who believed that the basic properties of perception were a “structure” of nerve bundles connecting the eye and the brain. As we know, the image on the retina of the eye is upside down. The idea is that just as the brain is able to turn the image right side up again, the brain is able to correct retinal images for size, color, form, etc.
Otto Pötzl (1877–1962) was a student of Krafft-Ebbing and a successful neurologist and a psychiatrist. He admired Freud, and was active in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Circle. Pötzl syndrome was named after him: In this syndrome, people experience “mind blindness,” cannot read words, and sometimes even decide that their arms and legs belong to dead bodies. Vygotsky would explain this as a lack of two-way traffic between the brain and the limb: The brain is receiving sensations from the limb as if from the outside, as if from an alien being.
- 30.
Vygotsky appears to be referring to the kind of agnosia that Oliver Sacks (1998) writes about in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. His interpretation of agnosia is that while the brain is receiving sensory information, it is not giving feedback to the senses, and so constancy of size, color, form and above meaning is lost. That is why he says that perception is “exhausted,” that is, entirely used up, by the activity of the organs of sensation (eyes, ears, nose, etc.), and the brain does not reciprocate in making sense of the sensations.
- 31.
Vygotsky refers to a set of experiments by the Leipzig school. For example, if you train an infant to take a larger ring, and then you place the large ring next to a much larger object and the small ring next a much smaller object, the infant will go for the small ring and not the large one.
On p. 289 of Bernfeld’s The Psychology of the Infant, Bernfeld (1929) speaks of a similar demonstration by Stern—he made a miniature model of a baby bottle for his 8 months old and held it very close to the infant when the infant was hungry: The infant became excited and tried to take the bottle and drink from it, even though it was only one fifteenth the usual size. Stern concludes that “Grössenkonstanz” (size constancy) is lacking in infant perception. Note that more recent research suggests that size constancy is present at birth (Slater et al., 1990).
- 32.
The writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) about linguistics are less well known than his writings about politics, but in many ways even far more far reaching. He was the first person to suppose that language was man-made (he argued that when Adam disputed with God they communicated by pure thinking). As Vygotsky says, he showed that there were fewer names than things in the world, so every name has to function as an abstraction. On the one hand, that abstraction is, of course, a kind of social agreement—a social contract—and in this way Hobbes’ ideas prefigured the work of de Saussure. On the other, because names referred to actual objects, they were essentially universal signs: that is, their meanings were constant even if the signs themselves changed.
- 33.
The Russian language Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky gives a long quotation from the Theses on Feuerbach. However, the source of this is probably not the Theses on Feuerbach but rather Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx (1844/1969) says:
In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.
It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, nonhuman eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc.
We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were published in German about a year before Vygotsky wrote this.
- 34.
Natalia Grigor’ievna Morozova (1906–1989) was an early member of Vygotsky’s circle, interested in child studies and medical work. After she graduated from teacher’s college in 1925, she worked with Vygotsky under the leadership of Krupskaya at the People’s Commissariat for Education, doing child studies such as this one. Many of Vygotsky’s letters to her concern her struggles with depression and firmly reassure her of the importance of her work and the significance of her contribution. In fact, she was a member of the “Pyatorka” (the five closest students of Vygotsky, which Vygotsky sometimes joked about). After Vygotsky’s death, she became a professor at the Institute of Defectology.
- 35.
“Sinn” is a German word, left in German in the Russian text, meaning something like “sense.” Note that Vygotsky distinguishes between being able to perceive geometrical shapes (e.g., knowing that a circle is a circle and not a polygon or an ellipse) and being able to draw pictures. The one is linked to logic and to thinking, and the other to perception; hence in preschool, we teach about shapes, but drawing emerges already in early childhood. From this Vygotsky appears to suggest that the Gestaltists are wrong to assume that drawings are linked to the kinds of figure-ground perceptual discernment that formed their experiments. Instead, he suggests, the child’s drawings are the fore-runners of written speech.
- 36.
In Chapter Six of “The History of the Development of the Higher Psychological Functions” (Vygotsky, 1997b: 128), Vygotsky gives a number of examples of what we might call “mondegreens”: that is, child distortions of adult words (as when a child mishears “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green” as “And Lady Mondegreen,” or “Glady the Cross I’d Bear” as “Gladly the Cross-eyed Bear”).
The examples in Chapter Six include мокресс (“mokress) instead of “compress,” which the child creates by amalgamating the Russian word for something wet with “compress,” and Mazeline,” which the child creates by amalgamating the Russian word for “smearing” with “Vaseline.” In each case, Vygotsky points out, we have something that is the very opposite of grammatical metaphor: The wording is used to make something general or abstract into something more immediate and concrete.
- 37.
Vygotsky appears to be considering the idea that speech may be a source of development for perception. One example of this is constancy—because objects are named, the brain assumes them to be the same, even though appear to change in size. That is the “orthoscopy” that Vygotsky is referring to. Unlike Bühler, Volkelt, and the Gestaltists, he does not believe it is inborn.
- 38.
Vygotsky uses the term вычленение. It is hard to translate this with one English word and it would be misleading to use many, so we offer “singling out” as a rough equivalent. Unlike ‘singling out’, however, the Russian term means that the object is made to stand out against the background, as when you resolve an object through focusing a telescope.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2021). Early Childhood. 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_8
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