Personal development in cultural and historical psychology. Cultural-historical psychology L.S. Vygotsky. Cultural-historical psychology - "The science of freedom"

According to L. S. Vygotsky, the author of the cultural-historical theory, the assimilation of social experience not only changes the essence of mental development, but also contributes to the emergence of new forms of mental processes that become the highest mental functions that distinguish humans from animals. Specific forms of socio-historical activity are dominant in the scientific understanding of the formation of mental functions, the natural laws of the functioning of the brain acquire new properties when entering the system of socio-historical relations. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the environment is a source of development of higher mental functions. Attitude towards the environment changes as they grow older, and consequently, the role of the environment in the development of the psyche also changes. The influence of the environment should be considered not absolutely, but relatively, since it is due to the experiences of the child. A person lacks only innate forms of behavior in the environment. Mental development occurs in the process of appropriation of historically developed forms and methods of activity. The most important conditions for mental development are the morphophysiological features of the brain and communication, and the driving force behind the development of the psyche is training.

The main provisions of the cultural-historical theory of L. S. Vygotsky can be represented as follows.

• 1. In the process of cultural and historical development, man created a large number of different tools and sign systems, the most important of which are tools, language and number systems, and learned to use them. People throughout the historical period of existence have created two types of tools. With the help of some they were able to influence nature (tools), with the help of others - on themselves (sign systems).
• 2. Thanks to the use of tools and sign systems, especially writing, all mental functions (perception, attention, memory, thinking, etc.) have been rebuilt in a person. A transition has begun from direct to indirect mental functions, where tools and signs become the means of controlling them. As a result of this, all human mental activity is rebuilt, rising to a higher level compared to animals.
• 3. Education is the transfer to the child of the experience of using tools and signs to control their behavior (activity) and mental processes (writing as a means of increasing memory productivity, pointing gesture and word as ways to control perception and attention).
• 4. The psychological make-up of a modern cultured and educated person is the result of the interaction of two interrelated processes - biological maturation and learning. Both processes begin immediately after the birth of a child and are practically connected in one line of development.
• 5. Each mental function in its development has two forms - innate and acquired. The first is due to biological factors, and the second is characterized by cultural and historical conditioning and is mediated, associated with the use of tools and signs as a means of controlling it.
• 6. Initially, the way of using signs and tools is shown to the child by an adult in the process of communication and joint activities. At first, tools and signs are a means of controlling the behavior of other people, later they are transformed into means of controlling oneself. This is carried out in the process of internalization, i.e. transformation of the interpersonal function of management into an intrapersonal one.

From the standpoint of the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, the main pattern of mental development lies in the child's internalization of the structure of his external activity with adults, which is mediated by signs. As a result, the original structure of mental functions as "natural" is transformed - mediated by internalized signs and symbols, mental functions gradually become culturally conditioned. Outwardly, this is expressed in the acquisition of awareness and arbitrariness by them. In the process of internalization, external activity is transformed and "folded", subsequently it is transformed and unfolded in the process of exteriorization, when an external plan of activity is built on the basis of an intrapersonal function. L. S. Vygotsky formulated the law of the development of higher mental functions, according to which each mental function in the cultural development of the child manifests itself in two planes: first, in the social, between people (interpsychically), then in the psychological, inside the child (intrapsychically).

Practical example

Maxim (4 years old) is in a situation of practical difficulty: he wants to get a ball that has rolled under the sofa. The child stretches, sighs, and says to himself in a barely audible voice: “I can’t, I can’t. I can make an airplane... but I can make an airplane and a tractor." Maxim's speech in this case is egocentric speech, i.e. addressed to himself. At previous stages of development, the child used only the external form of speech as a means of communication with adults and peers. Soon, Maxim's egocentric speech will pass into the inner plane (intrapsychic form), with the help of speech he will be able to think to himself. This process is internalization.

L. S. Vygotsky pointed out that the process of mental development consists in the restructuring of the systemic structure of consciousness, which is determined by the transformation of its semantic structure, i.e. level of development of generalizations. Entry into consciousness is possible due to speech activity, and the transition from one structure of consciousness to another occurs through the development of the meaning of the word, generalization. Education does not have a direct impact on the systemic development of consciousness, but has a significant direct impact on the development of generalization, the semantic structure of consciousness. Education changes the entire system of consciousness by forming generalizations, facilitating its transition to a higher level. Creating his concept, L. S. Vygotsky, first of all, had in mind the process of development of human cognitive processes - perception, attention, memory, thinking and imagination. But the main provisions of this theory can be applied to the personal development of the child.

The activity approach focuses on the principle of unity of activity and consciousness, a category of activity is being developed, which is considered as a subject of research, an explanatory principle, a condition for occurrence, a developmental determinant and an object of application of the psyche, a form of consciousness activity and as a means of regulating human behavior. Objectivity is an integral characteristic of activity. The object of activity is its real motive. There is no activity without a motive. The structure of activity includes the following levels: activity - action - operation, which correlate with the psychological series motive - goal - task. These levels of the activity structure are not rigidly fixed and immutable. In the process of activity itself, new motives and goals appear, under the influence of which an action can be transformed into an activity or an operation, and thus the development of activity is carried out. Representatives of the activity approach in Russian psychology include A. N. Leontiev, S. L. Rubinshtein, B. G. Ananiev, D. B. Elkonin and others.

Alexey Nikolaevich Leontiev(1903-1979) calls activity only those processes that express any relation of a person to the world around him, meet a certain need. A. N. Leontiev notes the dependence of the development of functions on the specific process in which they are included. At the same time, the development of mental functions contributes to a more perfect implementation of certain activities; any conscious action is formed in the formed circle of relations, within the framework of this or that activity, which determines psychological characteristics.

Practical example

The study of biology by a student is not an activity if the motive for such study is only the desire to pass the exam. The study of biology will be an activity only if the student wants to know the biological science itself as such.

A. N. Leontiev calls the leading activity an activity characterized by the following three features:

• firstly, it is an activity within the framework of which other, new types of activity arise and differentiate;
• secondly, it is an activity within the framework of which the formation and transformation of mental processes (thinking, perception, memory, etc.) take place;
• thirdly, it is an activity that to the greatest extent ensures the formation of basic psychological neoplasms in the structure of the child's psyche.

The mechanism for changing the leading activity in a child during the transition from one age stage to another is the shift of the motive to the goal. This mechanism is based on really acting and conscious motives, which, under certain conditions, become effective motives. It is in this way that new motives appear, and, consequently, new types of activity. Under certain conditions, the result of an action turns out to be more significant and important than the motive that prompted this action. When the leading activity changes, the perceived motives are not in the sphere of actual relations in which the child is included, but in the sphere of potential relations in which the child can be included at the next, higher level of development. Preparation for such transitions is carried out gradually and for a long time, since they are more complex than changing activities.

Within the framework of the activity approach, consciousness and activity are considered as a unit. Sergei Leonidovich Rubinshtein(1889-1960) for the first time put forward the position of the unity of consciousness and activity. He noted that activity and consciousness form an organic whole, but not an identity. This position is of great methodological significance, since it affirmed the possibility through the child's activity to study its psychological characteristics and opened the way for an objective study of the psyche and consciousness of children: from activity, its products, to the mental processes that are revealed in it. In addition to this important principle, S. L. Rubinshtein formulated an important proposition for child psychology that the child does not first develop and then is brought up and trained; it develops by learning and learns by developing.

Boris Gerasimovich Ananiev(1907-1972) names only two types of activity - cognition and communication, which are most important for the mental development of a person at all age stages. Cognition is the main form of human activity, since it is a world-historical process of a purposeful and generalized reflection by a person of the objective laws of the surrounding reality and consciousness itself. B. G. Ananiev argued that communication is as social as it is individual. Based on the development of various types of cognition and communication, which constantly interact in the process of education, play arises as a "synthetic" form of a child's activity. All forms of the game, according to B. G. Ananiev, are one or another integration of the components of cognition and communication.

Activity was understood by D. B. Elkonin as the reconstruction of existing forms, the construction of new ones and the overcoming of existing forms, and, first of all, forms of one’s own behavior. Only in activity is it possible to develop a personality and form an activity type of personality. Child development is understood as a change in the forms of community between children and adults. In fact, it is not the individual - the child that develops, but the child-adult reciprocity in the process of joint activity. The leading activity has the greatest influence on the mental development of children. The types of leading activities are reflected in the periodization of the development of D. B. Elkonin (see paragraph 1.4): direct-emotional communication in infancy, object-manipulative activity in early childhood, role-playing game of preschool children, educational activities of children of primary school age, intimate and personal communication in adolescence, educational and professional activities of a high school student. This sequence of changing the leading types of activity does not mean that when the child moves to the next age stage, the previous types of activity completely disappear. This means that a new one is added to the former types of activity and at the same time each type of activity is restructured, their hierarchy changes.

Subject: psyche transformed by culture

Representatives: E. Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Pierre Janet, Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich

For the first time, the question of sociality as a system-forming factor of the psyche was raised by the French sociological school. Its founder E. Durkheim (1858-1917), using the term "social fact" or "collective representation", illustrated such concepts as "marriage", "childhood", "suicide". Social facts are different from their individual embodiments (there is no "family" at all, but there is an infinite number of specific families) and have an ideal character that affects all members of society.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, using ethnographic material, developed the thesis about a special type of "primitive" thinking, which is different from the thinking of a civilized person.

Pierre Janet further deepened the principle of social determination, suggesting that external relations between people gradually turn into features of the structure of the individual psyche. So, he showed that the phenomenon of memory consists in the assignment of external actions of the execution of instructions and retelling.

The principle of the cultural-historical psyche was revealed most fully in the works of L.S. Vygotsky, who developed the doctrine of higher mental functions. L.S. Vygotsky suggested the existence of two lines of development of the psyche:

• natural,
• culturally mediated.

In accordance with these two lines of development, "lower" and "higher" mental functions are distinguished.

Examples of lower, or natural, mental functions are the involuntary or involuntary child. The child cannot control them: he pays attention to what is brightly unexpected; remembers what is accidentally remembered. Lower mental functions are a kind of rudiments from which higher mental functions grow in the process of upbringing (in this example, voluntary attention and voluntary memory).

The transformation of lower mental functions into higher ones occurs through the mastery of special tools of the psyche - signs and is of a cultural nature. The role of sign systems in the formation and functioning of the human psyche is, of course, fundamental - it defines a qualitatively new stage and a qualitatively different form of existence of the psyche. Imagine that a savage who does not own an account has to memorize a herd of cows in a meadow. How will he cope with this task? He needs to create an accurate visual image of what he saw, and then try to resurrect it before his eyes. Most likely, he will fail, miss something. You just need to count the cows and then say: "I saw seven cows."

Many facts testify that the assimilation of sign systems by a child does not happen by itself. This is where the role of the adult comes into play. An adult, communicating with a child and teaching him, first "takes possession" of his psyche. For example, an adult shows him something, in his opinion, interesting, and the child, at the behest of an adult, pays attention to one or another object. Then the child begins to regulate his own mental functions with the help of the means that the adult used to apply to him. Also, as adults, we, tired, can say to ourselves: “Come on, look here!” and really “master” our elusive attention or activate the process of imagination. We create and analyze the rehearsals of a conversation that is important for us in advance, as if playing the acts of our thinking in the speech plan. Then there is the so-called rotation, or "interiorization" - the transformation of an external tool into an internal one. As a result, from immediate, natural, involuntary mental functions become mediated sign systems, social and arbitrary.

The cultural-historical approach in psychology continues to fruitfully develop even now, both in our country and abroad. This approach proved to be especially effective in solving the problems of pedagogy and defectology.

It is no news to anyone that research methods, techniques, scientific disputes have their own historical origins and explanations. But it is often worth looking for them not in the history of a given science, be it linguistics, psychology, philosophy of knowledge, or even physics or chemistry, but in general - as they would say before - spiritual history. Spiritual history can be likened not to a planar projection of the "pure" history of science, but to the three-dimensional space of the stage, in which the multi-figured "drama of ideas" (Einstein) unfolds.

The conflicts of their carriers are not reducible to clashes of theories or points of view: it is always also the interaction of individuals. And the personality is somehow determined by time and place: existing in historical time and space, it has the appropriate mentality - it shares not only specific ideas, but also the ways of thinking and feeling that dominate in its environment, understand the world and evaluate people. In this sense, it is customary to speak, for example, about the mentality of medieval chivalry or the mentality of a man of the Renaissance. But the specific ideas and representations that make up the content of mentality are not those ideas that are generated by individual consciousness, and not reflected spiritual constructions.

Rather, it is the life of such ideas and constructions in a certain social environment. Despite the fact that for the carriers of ideas themselves they remain unconscious. In order to enter into the mentality of wide circles - those whom historians, following the medieval intellectuals, call "simple" - these ideas must be simplified. And sometimes profanity. Otherwise, they are doomed to remain the intellectual property of a highly educated minority.

One way or another, the collective mentality includes a set of certain ideas in an unconscious or incompletely conscious form. A scientist can be ahead of his time precisely as a researcher, but whatever the depth of his personal reflection, in the core aspects of his personality, the scientist inevitably shares the mentality of his time. And new ideas, born on historically changing soil, to one degree or another feed on the already formed common mentality. This means that cultural innovation does not appear out of nowhere. They are always a response to the spiritual challenge of an era, and an era is a set of deeds and thoughts of many, and by no means only the elite. Therefore, the history of ideas, as studied by philosophy and sociology, does not coincide with the "social" history of ideas - i.e. the history of the reception of ideas in the mind. It is useful to think about how the history of the development of certain scientific theories and schools correlates with the general atmosphere of the life of society in certain historical periods. The key mediating link here is precisely the types of mentality that dominate in society - the recognition of this fact distinguishes serious intellectual history from various versions of the so often vilified "vulgar sociologism". There are periods when the state of science and the state of society develop into a very special configuration. This configuration is characterized by explicit or relatively hidden philosophical and social throwing; erosion of the usual structures of social and cultural life, including the structures of science itself. An important feature of this configuration is also that sharply contrasting cultural stereotypes coexist within a relatively narrow circle of "leaders", "generators of ideas", people whom we call "cult figures", "iconic characters". These contrasts, already in a reduced, vulgarized form, are transmitted "down", becoming the property of the "simple". Then there are cultural disputes and conflicts, the essence of which is vague for the next generation. Their analysis is instructive for understanding further ways of emergence and development of scientific trends and clashes of minds.

An amazing example of such a configuration of ideas and social demands is the scientific and intellectual life of Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. It was during these years that the flowering (and defeat) of the "formal method" in the science of literature, the flowering (and defeat) of attempts to create a historical psychology, the flowering - and again the defeat - of the Russian psychoanalytic school. The biographies of scientists of this period are striking inconsistencies: it seems that many people from relatively close academic circles, from practically the same cultural environment, lived in parallel worlds. I do not mean the social exclusion and poverty of some compared to the well-being of others. More productive is the analysis of not so catchy, but at the same time typical cases that reveal the types of mentalities of that era as an important factor in the history of science. Why is this especially important for the cognitive cycle sciences?

Perhaps, in sciences that are completely established, well-established, and it is possible without great loss to neglect the history of the formation of basic ideas and ideas. On the contrary, for sciences that are in a state of paradigm shift, experiencing serious intrascientific conflicts, it is extremely important to understand the genesis of ideas, methods, and assessments. And then much of what seems to us illogical or, conversely, taken for granted, will appear in a different light. In this perspective, we will consider some of the ideological and personal conflicts associated with the fate of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, who considered himself a student of Vygotsky. For Soviet psychology, Vygotsky's name is still significant, although Vygotsky died in 1934. However, between 1936 and 1956 little was said about Vygotsky; he, unlike many, did not even try to "expose". It was simply not published and seemed not to be remembered. The situation changed dramatically during the heyday of structural linguistics and semiotics in the USSR, i.e. since the beginning of the 60s.

It was then that Vygotsky finally entered a number of major cultural figures. Note that in the short term this "sign set" includes completely different characters: Propp with a structural-functional analysis and "Morphology of a Fairy Tale"; Tynyanov and other "senior" formalists with their motto "How is it done?"; Bakhtin with his dialogue and carnivalization; the mystic Florensky - at first mainly with the "Iconostasis"; Eisenstein, in whom from now on one should see not so much a major film director as an original theoretician of the humanities, and Vygotsky with his completely Marxist-oriented historical psychology. Looking at this "carousel" from today, the generation of beginners in the humanities cannot understand where the juxtaposition of researchers with such different and often opposite positions came from.

We have to remind you that in the early 60s these were, first of all, "returned names" and carriers of a different mentality. Going into the nuances and specifics then was, as it were, "out of hand." But, indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the reception of the ideological richness of the 1920s and 1930s proceeded so hastily that much was assimilated, to use the terms of Levi-Strauss' well-known opposition, rather "raw" than "cooked." When the aforementioned persons (as, indeed, many others) finally became "cult figures", genuine involvement in their theories gradually began to be replaced, first by excessive citation of their works, and later by authoritarian, and even purely ritual references. Therefore, it is worth rethinking some of the details of the life and work of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, especially since their biographies are more mythologized than understood.

Cultural-historical psychology L.S. Vygotsky was born at Moscow University in collaboration with A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev. The semantic content of L.S. Vygotsky made up the following ideas: the methodology of a systematic historical and genetic analysis of various mental phenomena in the context of biogenesis, anthropogenesis, sociogenesis and personogenesis, the search for mutual transitions between these vectors of historical and evolutionary development; the idea of ​​signs invented in the history of culture (primarily language) as means ("psychological tools") of mastering the behavior of a person and social groups; the hypothesis of internalization as a constructive mechanism of human socialization occurring in the course of cooperation, joint activities of the child with other people and leading to the transformation of the world of culture /the world of "meanings"/ into the world of personality /the world of "meanings"/; the concept of a systematic analysis of the development and decay of the higher mental functions of a person as social in origin, culturally mediated by various signs in structure and arbitrarily regulated by the method of control forms of behavior; historical-genetic systemic concept of thinking and speech as a key to understanding the semantic dialogic nature of consciousness; the idea of ​​dynamic semantic systems as a special unity of affect and intellect and units of personality analysis; the concept of the "zone of proximal development" of the child's higher mental functions as a product of the child's cooperation with adults and peers in solving problems and substantiating the idea of ​​learning as the driving force of the child's mental development. The subject of Vygotsky's psychology was consciousness. However, on this basis, it would be wrong to reject Vygotsky from the PDD, which has become a leader since the 1940s. XX century., the core of all scientific schools of university psychology. An analysis of Vygotsky's psychological system allows us to assert that he recognized activity as a form of human existence. Activity is a whole in which behavior and consciousness exist in unity. “The psyche without behavior does not exist just as well as behavior without the psyche, because at least they are one and the same,” he said in his speech at the II All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in 1924. Subsequently, in works in which some results of the research done were summed up (“Tool and sign in the development of the child”, 1930), in working discussions with employees, known as the “Problem of Consciousness”, L.S. Vygotsky noted: “In the beginning there was a deed (...), in the end there was a word, and this is the most important.” Considering the question of the relationship between words and deeds in the process of child development, he wrote: “... the word does not stand at the beginning of the development of the child's mind ... Practical intelligence is genetically older than verbal: action is more original than the word, even smart action is more original than the smart word.” The final provisions of the work “Tool and sign in the development of a child” are remarkable: “... if at the beginning of development there is a deed independent of the word, then at the end of it there is a word that becomes a deed. The word that makes human action free.

The central fact of his psychology L.S. Vygotsky called the fact of mediation. Revealing its content, he turned to the analogy between the sign as a tool for mediation and the formation of higher mental functions and technical tools in human labor operations. In doing so, two issues of major importance are considered. Firstly, in the instrumental nature of labor and mental activity lies the qualitative difference between man and animals. Secondly, the psychological tool is compared with the tools of labor activity. According to L.S. Vygotsky, this comparison goes back to the ideas of F. Bacon, whose words (“Neither the bare hand, nor the mind left to itself, have great power. The work is done by tools and aids that the mind needs no less than the hand.” - are quoted by Vygotsky repeatedly. They express his main idea about the deep connection between the structure of human consciousness and the structure of labor activity. The concept of an instrumental act is introduced, which, unlike a natural process, is mediated by a tool. "In an instrumental act ... between an object and a mental operation directed at it, a new middle member - a psychological tool that becomes a structural center or focus, i.e. the moment that functionally determines all the processes that form an instrumental act. Any act of behavior then becomes an intellectual operation. "This is how the highest historically established mental functions are characterized - the highest forms of memory, attention, verbal or mathematical thinking, as well as the process behavior.

Thus, mental activity (Vygotsky uses this term repeatedly) is akin to man's external activity: it is also mediated by its own (psychological) tools. Various forms of mental activity were studied, in particular, play. Analyzing the relation of play to development, L.S. Vygotsky introduced the concept of leading activity: “In essence, the child moves through play activity. Only in this sense can play be called a leading activity, i. defining the development of the child. Later D.B. Elkonin, one of the students of Lev Semenovich and a colleague of his other students, used his understanding, as well as that developed by A.N. Leontiev in the context of the activity approach, the concept of leading activity as a key one in his concept of periodization of mental development. He substantiated the proposition that each stage of development has its own leading activity: it is in it that the development and preparation of the next stage takes place.