Abstract
The theory of biogenetic parallelism and critiques of it—K. Groos and the theory of “concealed impulses”—The biopsychological theory of C. Bühler—Psychoanalytic theories of the transitional age—Dualistic theories of the transitional age (E. Spranger, W. Stern)—Synthetic theories (Tumlirz).
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Notes
- 1.
This is apparently Vygotsky’s formulation, not Groos’s. Nevertheless, Vygotsky’s characterization of Groos is accurate. In his very first important book, The Play of Animals, Groos is discarding the Spencer theory (later taken up by Blonsky) that play is there to absorb the excess energy the child gets from meat-eating.
A condition of superabundant nervous force is always, I must again emphatically reiterate, a favorable one for play, but it is not the motive cause nor as I believe a necessary condition for its existence. Instinct is the real foundation of it. Foundation, I say, because all play is not purely instinctive activity. On the contrary, the higher we ascend in the scale of existence the richer and finer become the psychological phenomena that supplement the mere natural impulse, ennobling it, elevating it, and tending to conceal it under added detail. (Groos, 1896/1898: 23–24)
In The Play of Man (1901/1912) and especially in Das Seelelebens des kindes (1904) Groos discards the word “Instinkte” altogether and replaces it with the word “Impuls” (drive, or “impulse”). But his basic idea is still that Darwinian instincts are the foundations, and socio-cultural features like romantic intimacy, sentimental solitude, self-assertiveness, self-adornment, and competition are all “concealings” or “coverings” of primal instincts, or impulses.
- 2.
As Vygotsky reminds his students, Hall was the founder of adolescent studies. What Hall says about adolescents might also be said about his own work, which veered from commonsensical wisdom to pure silliness. On the one hand Hall commonsensically wrote that “adolescence is a time of storm and stress” due to the pain and pleasure of puberty. On the other hand, Hall believed in the “biogenetic” principle of Haeckl, so that adolescence represented the period of barbarism just prior to civilization. Thus for boys and young men he recommended boxing, militarization, and regular beatings.
Vygotsky is referring to Volume II of Hall’s psychology of adolescence, (1907) pp. 75–88. The contradictions are:
Energy and indifference
Pleasure and pain
Self-affirmation and self abasement
Selfishness and altruism
Good conduct and bad
Sociality and solitude
Sensitivity and apathy
Curiosity and inertia
Knowing and doing
Conservatism and radicalism
Sense and intellect
Wisdom and folly
- 3.
Otto Tumlirz (1890–1957) taught at the University of Graz, where he published a number of works on youth, personality, and pedagogical psychology. Like Spranger, Jaensch, Ach, Krueger, Volkelt, Kroh, and other German psychologists who were interested in the adolescent, Tumlirz supported Nazi psychology, which was oriented towards recruiting German adolescence into the Hitler Youth, purifying the “race”, and exterminating the “mentally ill”. So after the war he was barred from teaching for about seven years, but he was allowed to republish his most racist work, as long as he changed his references to Hitler to “Caesar”.
- 4.
The word Vygotsky uses here is poд, rod, which in Russian can mean a “race”, a “kind”, a “gens” or a “family”, and it suggests kinship in both an everyday and a scientific sense. It is used in the scientific Linnaean classification to mean “genus”. But the recapitulationists (Haeckel, Hall, and later Nazi psychologists like Spranger and Tumlirz) do not mean a species, a genus, or a family. They mean something like race, nation, or fatherland (and the Russian term “poд” can indeed suggest all of these).
- 5.
We have taken this quotation from the original English by G. Stanley Hall instead of trying to back-translate it from Vygotsky’s Russian (which is a close and accurate version). The quote continues through the next two paragraphs, and it is from p. 70 of the volume cited in the references.
- 6.
Tuiskon Ziller (1817–1882) was a Herbartian high school teacher and then a university lecturer in Leipzig. His theory of adolescent development, as Vygotsky describes it, seems very fanciful, and it’s hard for us to see any recapitulation or even any sense of development: certainly, fairy tales, Robinson Crusoe, the Bible are not in historical sequence. In what sense are they a historical series, that is, a line of development for society and for the mind of the adolescent in society?
Ziller made the teachings of Martin Luther the centre of his educational system. The fairy tales of early childhood are essentially amoral from the point of view of Luther (and, more famously, Rousseau). Robinson Crusoe, which was written by the Protestant Daniel Defoe, was intended (by the author, and also by political economists before Marx) to be the simplest and smallest possible unit of moral economy (because Robinson is alone on his island). The Old Testament, Christ, the apostles, and the Reformation are an obvious religious (and even historical) sequence, and therefore, as Vygotsky says, represents a “recapitulationist” precedent for the child’s growth toward God.
- 7.
Ralph W. Pringle (1865–1948) was a high school principal and later a professor of secondary education at the University of Illinois. He published several books on high school discipline and teenage desire. These two quotations are from the 1923 volume listed in the references.
Early adolescence has been variously named the awkward age, the period of chivalry, the age of personal loyalty, the time of hero worship. According to the recapitulation theory, it is supposed to correspond to the feudal period of the world’s history. It is a time of very rapid physical growth, the increase in height during one year sometimes reaching four to six inches. (p. 34)
The period of youth as we have seen corresponds in the world’s history to the age of chivalry: it is the time in life when every individual wants to be considered a gentleman or a lady. (p. 354)
- 8.
We have taken this text from the English version of Engels (1884), in the references. Vygotsky omits a discussion of arranged marriages and how the romantic love of the ancients differed from ours (e.g. in Classical Rome and Greece there was romantic love between men and between women). Vygotsky skips to the first sentence of the next paragraph at the ellipsis.
- 9.
Groos argues that the structure of adolescence (e.g. the ebb and flow of development, the phases and sub-phases we find within it) depend on heredity. The four influences he finds interacting with sexual maturation (intimacy, solitude, self-assertion, and competition) are hereditary impulses but they have been concealed by school child habit and simple forms of will until puberty.
- 10.
Vygotsky uses a Russian word that can mean both “boils down” (i.e. reduce as in reducing a broth to a sauce in cooking) and “joins up” (e.g. the draw-bridges of Saint Petersburg, which join up after the passing of ships to connect the different banks of the Neva River). Both are relevant, since Vygotsky is speaking how the various features of the transitional age can be boiled down into a system, by jointing them up into a connected whole.
- 11.
The quote is from 1673, Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), Act III, sc. iii: “Quare Opium facit dormire: Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva.”—Act III, sc. iii. Literally: Why opium puts us to sleep—because of its sleep-inducing powers.” Vygotsky is fond of this joke—in Chap. 3 of Thinking and Speech he uses Molière’s doctor to criticize Stern’s account of child language—the child learns to speak because of his speech learning tendencies. Molière was also fond of the joke—it is from his very last play. In it, Molière played a hypochondriac, a man who is pretending to be ill. This required considerable skill, because Molière was really ill—with the same tuberculosis that was to kill Vygotsky. During the performance, actors began to worry, but he would give a wry smile to make them continue. Finally, Molière began to cough up blood and the other actors took him backstage, but he died before the play ended and never heard the applause.
- 12.
The term Vygotsky uses here is пoтpeбнocти в дoпoлнeнии which we could literally translate as “a need for supplementation”. But in her work on the social needs of adolescents, Bühler is clearly referring to a need for association and for partnership with peers. Bühler writes:
These new social relations in the adolescent’s life are the ‘crush’ and the friend. This means that, in different forms, after the self-isolation of the negative phase, a strong attachment to a single person becomes the compensational need of the next period, the period of puberty. And this person is generally an acquaintance of this new period, not one from the old authorities or companions. (1935, p. 392)
We know that at the time of writing Pedology of the Adolescent, Vygotsky was also drafting a contribution to the handbook in which this writing appeared, and it seems likely that he is referring to these views.
- 13.
Perhaps Vygotsky is being a little facetious about Spranger. First of all, Charlotte Bühler does write about boys as well as girls. See Bühler (1932, 1937) in the references, for example.
Secondly, as Vygotsky himself has pointed out, Spranger himself assumes that a particular individual (German, middle class, educated) is a universal type, a representative of the “Zeitgeist”, or the “spirit of the age” (see Chap. 2). Apparently, Professor Spranger is “clever” enough to criticize Bühler for studying girls but not clever enough to critique his own work.
Thirdly, male psychologists quite habitually take boys as a general prototype for human development. For example, the Freudians, who Vygotsky will discuss next, explain adolescent development with the “Oedipus Complex”, taking one type of boy sexuality and universalizing it. Girls are supposed to suffer from “Penis Envy”: for the Freudians, boys are normal and whole, while girls are castrated and envious!
- 14.
Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953) was a member of Freud’s inner circle in Vienna, but he was also close to Walter Benjamin, Kurt Lewin, and Martin Buber. He established a kindergarten, wrote about infant psychology, and founded a school of progressive education based on anti-authoritarianism. He was a bitter critic of Eduard Spranger, who supported Nazism. Bernfeld was briefly a Zionist, and his students founded psychoanalysis in Israel; his own work was “Freudo-Marxist”, along the lines of Alfred Adler.
- 15.
Vygotsky uses a somewhat old-fashioned Russian word oтpoчecтвo, otrochestvo, to describe the season between childhood and young adulthood—it is well known, particularly from Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy “Childhood”, “Boyhood”, and “Youth”. But it is not often used in Russian today.
- 16.
In his dialogue “Phaedo” on the death of Socrates, Plato makes a distinction between the necessary mechanical cause of an event and the sufficient ideal cause. This is a distinction elaborated by Aristotle.
Plato’s example is Socrates sitting in prison: the necessary mechanical cause is the leg muscles of Socrates, but the sufficient ideal cause is that it must bring about some social good (because the imprisonment and death of Socrates was considered an important social example, both by his friends and his enemies).
- 17.
E.R. Stern might refer to a colleague of H. Bogen in Germany, who worked on physiology. It may also refer to the Ernst Romanovich Stern (Эpнecт Poмaнoвич Штepн, 1859–1924), a professor of philology and history in Odessa who moved to Germany after the death of his son, where he taught in Wittenberg and then in Halle. Because he was a classicist, we can imagine that his theory of adolescence would be cultural-historical rather than biologistic. We can be sure of one thing, anyway: Vygotsky is not referring to W. Stern, as he is in the first sentence of this paragraph.
- 18.
E.R. Jaensch (1883–1940) was a student of Ebbinghaus and of Georg Elias Müller, two early psychologists of memory and of perception (and this explains some of what Vygotsky calls his tendency to rise above idealist psychology). So, for example, Jaensch studied hearing in the blind, and argued that what the ear perceives is not sound but “sound filtered through history”. He also discovered that perceived size doesn’t correlate with the size of an image on the retina, and suggested that throughout human history, rods (which mediate light and dark) are more important than cones (which mediate color).
Vygotsky, who is always interested in finding the link between higher and lower psychological functions, was curious about his studies on eidetism. Jaensch found strong evidence that in children and adolescents there were a number of perceptual “after images” with six qualities: they were visual, they were two dimensional, they were not physical (they had no mass or weight), they were located in exterior space, they had the color of the background, and they were fleeting. Jaensch speculated that these “images” could give rise to concepts, an idea that Vygotsky eventually rejected. Jaensch developed his ideas on eidetism into a religious psychology, which sterotyped human beings into four basic racial types: J1, J2, J3, and S1. J1s took suggestions solely from perceptions, J2s lived according to ideals, J3s were able to integrate perception and idealism, and S1 were a racially inferior type who rejected both perception and idealism (i.e. Jews). Not surprisingly, Jaensch became a Nazi, and Vygotsky denounced him. See Vygotsky (1994, pp. 327–337).
- 19.
Georg Theodor Ziehen (1862–1950), son of the famous author Eduard Ziehen, was a German neurologist and associative psychologist. He was also a philosopher and a psychiatrist (he unsuccessfully treated Nietzsche for mental illness). He argued against separate phases of adolescence and claimed adolescence was a gradual, crisis free period. He also studied gifted children and found that they remain at the level of concrete representations.
- 20.
Gustav Le Bon was a doctor, psychologist, anthropologist, and sociologist. He lived through the Paris Commune and developed a theory of crowd psychology which was based on the idea of a Gestalt—a mob is not equal to the sum of its parts, and instead has a kind of “racial unconscious”. “An individual is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” The crowd, according to Le Bon, reverses the law of evolution and uncovers atavistic tendencies in people. This theory was widely used by people like Hitler and Mussolini, as well as by Freud and Jung.
References
Bühler, C. (1932). Social behavior of the child. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 392–431). Clark University Press.
Bühler, C. (1937). From birth to maturity. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Engels, F. (1884). The origin of the family, private property and the state. International.
Groos, K. (1896/1898). Die Spiele der Tiere; translated as “The play of animals” (J.M. Baldwin, Trans.). Appleton.
Groos, K. (1901/1912). Die Spiele der Menschen; translated as “The play of man” (J.M. Baldwin, Trans.). Appleton.
Groos, K. (1904). Des Seelenleben des Kindes. Reuther & Reichard.
Hall, G. S. (1907). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (Vol. II). Appleton.
Pringle, R.W. (1923). Adolescence and high school problems. D.C. Heath.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1994). Fascism and psychoneurology. In R. E. Van der Veer & J. E. Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky reader. Blackwell.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2022). A Review of the Main Theories of the Transitional Age. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 3. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2972-4_4
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