Concrete Human Psychology

For L. S. Vygotsky the end of the '20s was a time of intensive theoretical and experimental work in developing the basic postulates of his cultural-historical theory of the human mind. The relatively calm and, in spite of everything, happy first five years of his life in Moscow, after moving there in 1924 from Gomel', lay behind him. This was a period of his development as a psychologist when his star was in the ascendancy; when within a few years, this still quite young man was transformed from a provincial teacher, known to no one, into one of the leading and most outstanding figures in young Soviet psychology, a scholar with an inviolable scientific authority, surrounded by a group of young, also talented, and solemnly dedicated disciples; a man with a deep awareness of his mission in the development of science, full of ideas, intentions, and plans, most of which, unfortunately, were destined to remain unrealized because of Vygotsky's premature death. Vygotsky worked all these years rapidly and intensively, as if he had a presentiment of his death. One after the other, great works, which today constitute the body of the cultural-historical concept, and have long since become part of the treasures of Soviet and world psychological literature, flowed from his pen. Almost every one of them was prepared by degrees, in preliminary sketches and notes Vygotsky had made mostly for himself, not intending them for print. But even this special "inner speech" of Vygotsky's is usually in the form of independent, coherent, and sometimes fully finished texts, thanks to his generally striking capacity to live and do everything in his life immediately "from scratch," without any "rough drafts." Such is the manuscript published below, which Vygotsky wrote in 1929; it is from his family archives, kindly provided by his daughter, G. L. Vygotskaya. This work gives us a glimpse into the creative laboratory of this extraordinary thinker, enabling us, with almost visual clarity, to view the process of crystallization of some of the basic postulates of his cultural-historical theory, which we know well from Vygotsky's classical works of the early '30s. Moreover, it also contains a number of original ideas and reflections that were not dealt with further in his later works. In this sense, Vygotsky's notes published here should shed new light on some of the fundamental postulates of his concept, sometimes within a context that makes them extremely timely for contemporary psychology as well.