Abstract
Three stages of sexual maturation.—The theory of Spranger.—Two aspects of the psychology of sexual maturation.—Eroticism and sexuality: their unification.—Metaphysical dualism, as the basis of this theory.—Sexuality as dominant: its somatic and cortical components.—The theory of Freud.—Child sexuality, repression, sublimation.—A criticism of Freud’s theory. — Positive and negative sublimation.—The real origins of child sexuality.—Sexual parasitism in the child.—Non-coincidence of the three points of maturation as the dynamic basis for the structure of the personality of the adolescent in the transitional period.—The psychology of sexual maturation as the basis of sex education. The contrary influence of cortical components on the dominant of sexuality.—The problem of personal ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
For a biographical footnote on Biedl, see Chap. 6, Footnote 13.
- 2.
“Maslov” does not refer to the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (who created a pyramid of hierarchically ordered needs crowned by self-actualization) but rather to the Russian pediatrician, Mikhail Stepanovich Maslov (Mиxaил Cтeпaнoвич Macлoв, 1885–1961). He published clinical lectures on childhood illness in 1924, and Vygotsky cites his work on belly button formation in neonates in Chap. 5, Volume 2 of this series.
- 3.
Bergson’s believed in a “life essence” endowed with self-realization which explained all of biological development. Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a friend of Max Weber and a sociologist of romantic love and money, paid very little attention to psychology and instead hypostatized social structures, believing them supra-individual. Likewise, Nietzsche’s “vital will” is not a psychological concept; it is not simply related to individual vitality. All three thinkers, from Vygotsky’s point of view, are idealists, since the life force they have in mind is an idea, a form of spirit, and not a material force in nature.
- 4.
Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) was an Austrian poet, a contemporary of Goethe, probably best known for a gloomy trilogy about Jason and the Golden Fleece. In philosophy, he was strongly anti-Hegelian and pro-Kant. In his most famous poem, the Kiss, the closer the poet gets to sexual behavior the more disgusted, frenzied, and abstract the poem becomes—the more detached from any actual bodily organs!
- 5.
Here, Spranger means that the adolescent’s sexuality is not an element of eroticism that has fallen from grace into physical sin. Instead, sexuality and erotic love have separate genetic lines of development but they are both “heavenly” and psychic rather than earthly and physical. This is why they eventually meet in the sacred union of stability.
- 6.
“The Eternal Feminine” is a reference to the end of Goethe’s Faust, where Faust, despite his sins, is saved by the soul of Marguerite, because: “Das Ewig-Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan (The eternal feminine draws us upward!).”
Spranger’s idea is that adolescent love is similarly pure, ideal, and cleansing, at least in the male, which is apparently the only sort of adolescent under consideration.
- 7.
Alexei Alexeevich Ukhtomsky (Aлeкceй Aлeкceeвич Уxтoмcкий, 1875–1942) was a Soviet physiologist who, replicating Pavlov’s experiments with cats instead of dogs, accidentally discovered that distractions actually had the effect of strengthening rather than weakening a response. So for example he discovered that if you try to stop a cat from excretion by producing a fear response with an electric shock, you actually increase the volume of cat excrement instead of making the cat run away. From this, Ukhtomsky created a theory of development that obviously had an influence on Vygotsky. Each stage of development is associated with a particular dominant, e.g. sucking in the infant. Each dominant is a constellation of centers: a center of sensation attached to a center of cognition which is attached to a center of motor impulse. For example, a center of hunger (in the stomach but linked to a corresponding center in the brain) is attached to a center of appetite (also in the brain) and then attached to a center for sucking (in the muscles, tongue, but also linked to a center in the brain) in an infant. This is dominant in the sense that it blocks out other forms of behavior.
- 8.
The fake “rejuvenation” experiments of Voronov really do demonstrate what Vygotsky is saying here, but perhaps not the way Vygotsky thinks they do! Here Vygotsky focuses on the genetic and structural primacy (importance) of the sex glands: if the sex glands mature, then the cortical centers that control a sexual response will follow, but not vice versa. The “rejuvenation” experiments appear to support this because by surgically altering the connection of the sex glands with the bloodstream we appear to be able to “rejuvenate” old people.
The “rejuvenation operations” were very popular (Freud had one in 1923 in an unsuccessful attempt to cure the oral cancer that eventually killed him). Today we know that all such experiments were fake: Voronov was not able to transplant ape sex glands into humans, and the half-vasectomies as performed by Steinach do not “rejuvenate” men by diverting sexual energy from producing sperm to somehow driving hormones. So how did they work?
By the placebo effect, of course. Because the higher cortical centers were already operating, the diminishing function of the sex glands could be compensated for by volitional activity (e.g. actively seeking out younger women to sexually harass). This is not exactly a medical mystery, but it can be a social problem.
- 9.
For a biographical note on Moll, see Footnote 5 in Chap. 6.
- 10.
Max Scheler (1874–1928) was a student of Stumpf, Dilthey and Simmel in Berlin. In 1902 he met Husserl and became an idealist philosopher instead of an idealist psychologist; it is because of his idealism, not his philosophy, that Vygotsky refers to him as an “alchemist” instead of a scientist.
- 11.
“Self-equivalency” refers to Aristotle’s law of identity, A = A, or, as Leibniz put it, “Everything is what it is.” But in dialectics a qualitative transformation (e.g. a metamorphosis) negates the law of identity.
- 12.
Vygotsky is referring to the idea of “absolute ego” put forward by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Fichte was one of the founders of German idealism. Like Kant and Hegel, he was concerned with establishing the philosophical basis of objects, and this led him to the problem of the Subject—how is it possible for humans to know and act on the world. Fichte is probably best known for creating rather simple versions of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy (he, and not Hegel, was responsible for the idea of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”).
Vygotsky refers to his idea that the ego has to posit itself before it can posit anything, but it also has to limit itself in order for social life to be possible. From Vygotsky’s point of view, this is circular in the same way that Freud’s libido is circular: the thing itself is responsible for repressing itself.
We have taken the quotation from Scheler not from Vygotsky’s Russian version but from p. 206 of Scheler’s Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923/1975).
- 13.
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952) provided true, experimental, scientific verification of a lot of the principles that Vygotsky calls laws. For example, he demonstrated cortical localization in the brain (which was just a phrenology hypothesis before). He showed that each spinal nerve supplies a particular area of the skin and that these areas overlap. He showed that when a muscle is stimulated, other muscles are “inhibited”—and this explains what Ukhtomsky called the dominant. This put an end to the theory of simple “reflex arcs” and created the understanding of the nervous system as a single interlinked network that we have today.
Sherrington also developed the idea of the “funnel”—that is, the idea that all nervous excitation from any source (sound, touch, sight) can be “funneled” into a single dominant reaction (e.g. sex). This is not simply Ukhtomsky’s insight that even the sound of opening a tin a cat food will make a cat sexually excited, if the cat is in heat. It is also the source of the common idea that lovers have that everything about their partner is exciting: humans developed the cultural-historical institution of marriage in response.
- 14.
Ukhtomsky says дeйcтвyют нa pyкy, literally “act on the hand.” In English we would say “strengthen its hand.” We sometimes imagine a hand of poker, but Ukhtomsky’s reference is more likely Genesis 49:24:
And the arms of his hands were made strong
By the hands of the Mighty God of Jacob.
“Arms” refers to weapons, but of course it could also refer to tools of labor activity, and in Russian tools and weapons are the same word.
- 15.
Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) was a “decadent” playwright who wrote grotesque plays about sexuality and had a big effect on the young Berthold Brecht. His novel “Mine-Haha, on the bodily education of young girls” was praised as a social satire by Trotsky. Spranger, as a conservative and rather puritan writer, was clearly shocked by his work.
- 16.
In Freud, condensation and displacement are both forms of sublimation. For example, condensation involves the concentration of repressed sexual loves and hates into a single dream image (e.g. love for the mother is “condensed” into a dream about breasts, hatred of the father is “condensed” into a fear of snakes). The concept of displacement involves the displacement of repressed sexual feelings onto apparently non-sexual goals (e.g. fear of losing the penis appears as a dream about losing teeth).
- 17.
In Freud (and Janet) “conversion” disorder simply means that anxieties are displaced from one part of the body to another (e.g. from frustrated sex organs to a stomach ache). The oldest forms of “conversion disorder” (in ancient Egypt) were thought to be caused by “wandering wombs” in women who were not sexually satisfied by their husbands. So for example hysterical yawning is a substitute for sexual satisfaction and hysterical paralysis is a substitute for being able to stop an aggressor. “Conversion disorder” as a diagnosis is still used today in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and especially child sex abuse cases (where a child who has been abused sexually becomes paralyzed for no apparent neurological reason).
- 18.
Nerve impulse propagation is powered by the conversion of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) into Adenosine Diphosphate (ADP) or to Adenosine Monophosphate (AMP). It is the same process which powers muscle contraction in physical labor. ATP was discovered by Lohmann in 1929, almost exactly when this was published in Russia.
- 19.
Spinoza, in Tractatus politicus, Caput II, Sect. 6, uses the phrase “imperium in imperio” (a state within a state” to describe the view that humans stand outside nature’s laws (i.e. outside the laws of God): “The ignorant violate the order of nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in nature as a state within a state [imperium in imperio] (Spinoza, 1669/2017).”
Francis Bacon (1561–1626): Natura non vincitur nisi parendo (“Nature cannot be vanquished until she is obeyed”) is Aphorism 3 of Book 1 of Novum Organum Scientiarum (Bacon, 1620/1902). Vygotsky was impressed by this aphorism and wanted to use it as the epigraph for a book on the history of the cultural development of the child, which later became The History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions (Vygotsky, 1997).
- 20.
An 1830 French brochure on onanism was called “Book without a title” (because the title was too horrible to print) reads: “He has corrupted himself. Soon he carries the pain of his sin: old before his time…his back is hunched” (later he loses all his hair, vomits blood, is covered with pimples and dies).
In Vygotsky’s time, psychologists like G. S. Hall, Havelock Ellis, and others made a lot of money writing similar brochures. D.H. Lawrence considered it the major threat to civilized man, and of course Freud thought it ws a major source of sexual dysfunctioning. Even Vygotsky, who at least knows the science, tries to take a middle position (not too early and not too often), but this leads him to the kind of negative position he just condemned in the previous paragraph.
- 21.
Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) was a German dermatologist and psychiatrist. He discovered a lost manuscript of the Marquis de Sade (120 Days of Sodom) and later published a biography of Sade. He developed an “anthropological” approach to sexology. Contrary to what Vygotsky says here, his work is opposed to onanism: he admits it does not have any serious medical consequences, but he thinks it teaches people to expect too much from normal sex.
Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) was one of Freud’s first patients and best followers: he created the theory of “paraphilias,” the idea that perversions are really alternative forms of love. Freud broke off all relations with him when he questioned Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex in 1912. Vygotsky is probably referring to his 1920 essay in which Stekel argued that onanism should be used to treat sexual dysfunction, particularly in women having trouble reaching orgasm. (Stekel was right; it is still a very widely used treatment today).
For a biographical note on Metchnikoff, see Chap. 5, Footnote 6.
- 22.
Vygotsky seems to be quoting from Zalkind, who was a notorious puritan (author of the “12 Commandments of Revolutionary Proletarian Sex”). In any case, there is nothing indubitable about what he says here and in the next paragraph. Like sex (and pregnancy), onanism does cause hormone surges, but there is no evidence that this has any long term effect. Medical opinion now supports both Metchnikoff’s view in physiology and Stekel’s view in treating sexual dysfunction.
- 23.
Here, Pavlov, who trained as a Russian Orthodox priest, expresses the view that onanism severs the connection between a goal (reproduction) and its physiological reflex (orgasm) and drains off bodily fluids, which in Pavlov’s world are synonymous with great tasks, inter-organismic links, and (since Pavlov does not believe in psychological phenomena) “love” in a biochemical form. Pavlov re-establishes holism—but only by reducing great tasks, strong interpersonal links, and love to the male ability to retain liquids. It is very fortunate that Pavlov does not take this “conservationist” view as far as urination and perspiration.
- 24.
Vygotsky appears to be referring to the literary critic Sergey Aleksandrovich Konovalov (1899–1982) who wrote a book about Tolstoy. At the time this correspondence course was being written, he had just become an Oxford professor and edited a book of Tolstoy’s writings.
Curiously, the Russian text says coциaльнoй индyкциeй oкpyжaющeгo кyльтypнoгo миpa, which is literally “social induction of the surrounding cultural world,” suggesting that it is the cultural world being inducted into the adolescent rather than vice versa. We have translated it as “social induction into the surrounding cultural world” so that it makes good sense in English.
- 25.
For a biographical note on Turmlirz, see Chap. 4, Footnote 3.
We know that Tolstoy's sexual longings sometimes took the form of self-mortification (beating himself with cords, etc.). From Tolstoy’s tale “Adolescence,” Chap. 19 (1854/1988).
Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that, provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need never be unhappy. To prove the latter hypothesis, I would (despite the horrible pain) hold out a Tatistchev’s dictionary at arm’s length for five minutes at a time, or else go into the store-room and scourge my back with cords until the tears involuntarily came to my eyes!
- 26.
Vygotsky writes “шкoльный кypc ecтecтвoзнaния,” which is literally, the school course of nature-knowledge.” This was a middle school subject that served as a general introduction to natural sciences: like primary school science classes today, it did not differentiate between physics, chemistry, and biology.
- 27.
Vygotsky mentions three science educators who took a biologistic view—that is, they support “sexual education” based on teaching the general anatomy and function of reproduction but not “sexual enlightenment” which includes socio-cultural maturation.
Constantine Pavlovich Yagodovsky (Кoнcтaнтин Пaвлoвич Ягoдoвcкий, 1877–1943) was a naturalist and explorer of the Arctic Ocean and the White and Black Seas. He became interested in science education when the new government introduced “natural knowledge” as a science of a natural whole–but not sex enlightenment.
Boris Evgenievich Raikov (Бopиc Eвгéньeвич Paйкóв, 1880–1966) was a biologist and historian of science, who wrote a number of textbooks on natural history. Vygotsky is probably referring to his 1927 book on sex education in school, which encouraged a kind of sex education without sex (i.e. one narrowly concerned with reproduction and health). On p. 36, he advocates “sex enculturation but not sex enlightenment.”
Albert Petrovich Pinkevich (Aльбepт Пeтpoвич Пинкeвич, 1883–1937) was a naturalist who explored the Volga River collecting plants and stones. He then joined the revolution and was expelled twice from Kazan University but readmitted because of his brilliant scientific work. After the revolution he became a party member and a pedologist. Pinkevich was a strong supporter of John Dewey; he was also Vygotsky’s immediate boss at the Second Moscow University. He was a founder and a leader of “кpaeвéдeниe,” kraevedenie, the idea that children should study the region where they live as a science of a natural whole. In 1937, he was shot.
- 28.
Vygotsky appears to be referring to Georgy Nikolaevich Sorokhtin (1894–1972) who was a neurophysiologist. Evacuated to Khabarovsk during the war, he did research on ginseng.
References
Bacon, F. (1620/1902). Novum Organum. P.F. Collier.
Scheler, M. (1923/1975). Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. A. Francke Verlag.
Spinoza, B. (1669/2017). Tractatus politicus, translated as “Treatise on Theology and Politics Showing that piety and civil peace are not harmed by allowing freedom of thought, but are destroyed by the abolition of freedom of thought” by Jonathan Bennett.
Tolstoy, L. (1854/1988). Childhood, adolescence, youth. Radoga.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. (Vol. 4). Plenum.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2022). The Psychology of Sexual Maturation. 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_7
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