On the Work of Meshcheryakov (Afterword and Notes

Abstract

In 1963, a children’s home for the deaf-mute was founded in Zagorsk, near Moscow. Alexander Meshcheryakov, the head of the laboratory at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, became its supervisor. Four years later, Evald Ilyenkov joined the experiment. The archival text “On the work of Meshcheryakov”, published now for the first time, was presented at the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in February 1973. In this paper, Ilyenkov briefly formulates his conception of psychical image as condensing of a temporal process of activity into a spatial form of object, and suggests a number of deep thoughts on connection of the psyche and language, sign and meaning, word and action, taking his stand on the data of the Zagorsk experiment. The process of image formation is demonstrated by the case “Julia and the ravine”. After a walk along the ravine, a deaf-blind girl was able to mould the contour of the ravine from plasticine. Without seeing the ravine, she reproduced the trajectory of her body’s motion as some spatial object. The formation of language in deaf-blind persons begins with gesture speech, which is gradually transformed into verbal speech — first in its dactyl, then written and, finally, sound form. The experimental study of this transformation helps to solve the question of how speech and language are connected to objective reality.