Journal of Russian & East European Psychology最新文献

{"title":"Commemorating the 125th Anniversary of the Birth of L.S. Vygotsky (1896–1934): L.S. Vygotsky as an Expert on Handicapped Children","authors":"M. Stepanova","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2165843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2165843","url":null,"abstract":"The 125th anniversary of L.S. Vygotsky’s birth, which was marked in 2021, was commemorated by various events in the scientific and cultural life of Russia and other countries. A major example is this issue of the journal, which is devoted to Vygotsky’s creation of a new school in the field of children with handicaps (corrective pedagogy) — a cultural-historical theory of children’s handicaps. As A.N. Leontiev aptly put it, Vygotsky was a psychologist, a pedologist, an expert on children’s handicaps, an expert on children’s handicaps, an educator, and a psychopathologist, while remaining a psychologist and merely contributing to these disciplines his own invigorating flow of psychological theory. The cultural-historical approach that Vygotsky devised in psychology, on the one hand, was based on research in the field of abnormal childhood, and on the other hand, helped to generalize it and make it into a well-organized theoretical system. This volume includes works by Vygotsky in the field of children’s handicaps as well as the results of research aimed at analyzing his contribution to the theory and practice of teaching and educating children with developmental deviations. The issue opens with Vygotsky’s article “On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children [K psikhologii i pedagogike detskoi defektivnosti],” published in 1924 in the anthology Questions in the Education of Blind, Deaf-Mute, and Mentally Retarded Children [Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvenno otstalykh detei]. This was Vygotsky’s first work on problems related to handicapped children. As Vygotsky writes in the foreword, the purpose of the anthology was to frame the problem of special schools for handicapped children as a problem of social education.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124307013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Handicaps and Overcompensation","authors":"L. Vygotsky","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2165847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2165847","url":null,"abstract":"In psychological systems that give primacy to the concept of an integrated personality, the idea of overcompensation plays a dominant role. “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger” is the way W. Stern formulates this idea, pointing out that strength is born from weakness, and abilities from deficiencies (W. Stern 1923, p. 145). The school of the Austrian psychiatrist Adler, which is widely popular and very influential in Europe and America and calls itself individual psychology, that is, personality psychology, developed this idea into an entire system, into a complete theory of the psyche. Overcompensation is not some rare or exceptional phenomenon in the life of an organism. An infinite multitude of examples of it can be cited. This is more an extremely common and very widespread feature of organic processes related to the basic laws of living matter. Granted, to this day we do not have any kind of exhaustive and all-inclusive biological theory of overcompensation, but in a number of specific fields of organic life these phenomena have been studied so thoroughly, and their practical use is so substantial, that we can quite rightly talk about overcompensation as a scientifically established, fundamental fact of an organism’s life. We vaccinate healthy children with smallpox toxin. The children experience a mild illness and upon recovering become protected against smallpox for many years. Their organism has acquired immunity, that is, it has not only overcome the mild illness that we caused with the inoculation but has come out of the illness healthier than before. The organism has succeeded in developing an antitoxin in much larger quantities than was required by the dose of the toxin that was injected in it. If we now compare our children with others who have not been vaccinated, we will see that they are exceedingly healthy with respect to this horrible disease: they are not merely not ill now, similar to other healthy children, but they also cannot get sick, they will remain healthy even when the toxin gets into their bloodstream.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115233682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children","authors":"L. Vygotsky","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2165845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2165845","url":null,"abstract":"Any physical handicap — be it blindness, deafness, or congenital feeblemindedness — not only alters a person’s relation to the world but above all affects relationships with people. An organic handicap or deficiency is actualized as socially abnormal behavior. Even in their own family, blind or deaf children are above all special children, and an exceptional, unusual relationship with them is formed, unlike their other children. Their misfortune alters their social position in the family before anywhere else. And this is true not only in regard to families where such children are viewed as an onerous burden and punishment but also where blind children are surrounded by twice as much love and ten times as much solicitude and tenderness — in these latter families, these increased doses of attention and pity add up to a heavy burden for the child and a barrier around him that separates him from other children. In his famous story, Korolenko accurately showed about the blind musician how the blind child became “the center of the family, an unconscious despot, where everything in the home conformed to his slightest whim.” As a child’s life goes on, the physical handicap produces a completely different social attitude in their environment than is the case with normal people. The abnormality in the “relational activity” between the individual and the world, as V.M. Bekhterev put it, turns out in practice to be a severe dysfunction of the whole system of social relations. All connections with people, every factor that determines the person’s geometric place in the social milieu, their role and fate as a participant in real life, all of the functions of social existence are restructured from a new perspective. The physical handicap causes a kind of social dislocation, very much like a physical dislocation, when an injured limb — an arm or leg — comes out","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133664690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Diagnostics of Development and Pedological Clinical Care for Difficult Children","authors":"L. Vygotsky","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2165850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2165850","url":null,"abstract":"The article “The Diagnostics of Development and Pedological Clinical Care for Difficult Children” was written by L.S. Vygotsky in 1931 for the anthology Voprosy pedologii trudnogo detstva [Issues in the Pedology of Difficult children]. It has not been published before for technical reasons and is now being issued as a separate booklet. This article presents a new interpretation of the problem of difficult children and develops principles and a theoretically grounded program for the examination of difficult children. The theoretical and methodological postulates set forth in this work represent one of the stages in Vygotsky’s scientific journey. He began to work in the field of special-needs children and the pedology of difficult children from his very first steps in scientific activity. And right away in his first articles dealing with special-needs problems, Vygotsky displayed his characteristic depth of theoretical thought and a fresh, original approach to fields that had been covered in the dust of age-old traditions. The paper he read at the Second Congress on the Social and Legal Protection of Minors opened a new phase in special-needs theory and practice and displayed the extremely broad prospects for work on educating and teaching physically handicapped and mentally retarded children. The principles of the pedagogy of handicapped children set out by Vygotsky in the paper formed the basis for the construction of special-needs schools in the Soviet Union. To counterbalance the primitive, elementary treatment of the problem of handicapped children, Vygotsky put forth a number of postulates that showed the entire complexity and depth of the problems of the psychology of handicapped children and transferred the solution of these problems from a narrowly biological context to the social-psychological realm. The psyche of physically handicapped and mentally retarded children had been previously viewed in its static state, as the mechanical difference","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115620825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Principles of Working with Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped Children","authors":"L. Vygotsky","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2165848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2165848","url":null,"abstract":"Any handicap, that is, any physical deficiency, confronts the organism with the task of overcoming this handicap, making up for the deficiency, and compensating for the harm it causes. Therefore, the impact of the handicap is always twofold and contradictory: on the one hand, it weakens the organism, undermines its activity, and is a drawback; on the other, precisely because it hampers and disrupts the organism’s activity, it serves as a stimulus for greater development of other functions of the organism, prodding and impelling the organism to more intensive activity, which can compensate for the deficiency and overcome the difficulties. This is a general rule that is equally applicable to the organism’s biology and psychology: the minus of the handicap turns into the plus of the compensation, that is, the deficiency proves to be a stimulus for intensified development and activity. Two principal types of compensation are defined: direct, or organic, and indirect, or psychological. The former occurs mostly when one of the paired organs is damaged or removed. For example, when a kidney, a lung or the like is removed, the other, remaining paired organ compensatorily develops and assumes the functions of the diseased organ. Where direct compensation is impossible, the task is taken on by the central nervous system and the person’s psychic apparatus, creating over the diseased or deficient organ a protective superstructure of the higher functions that support the apparatus’s operation. In the view of A. Adler, sensing the deficiency of organs serves as a constant stimulus for the individual to develop his psychology. The education of a child with a physical handicap usually relies on indirect, psychological compensation, since direct, organic compensation of blindness, deafness, and similar deficiencies is not feasible.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121949904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “Word” and “Deed”: Toward a History of the Academic Relationship Between Aleksei Leont’ev and Lev Vygotskii","authors":"B. Bratus","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2115784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2115784","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the academic relationship between two leading Russian psychologists, Aleksei Leont’ev and Lev Vygotskii. The initial relationship between the teacher (Vygotskii) and the attentive student and follower (Leont’ev) changed, such that the two scholars eventually sought to differentiate themselves from each other and to seek out and defend their own approaches. The author describes how the psychological ideas of these two scholars changed over time. The two scholars pursued different approaches to the problem of activity and personality over their careers. The article devotes particular attention to the academic work of Leont’ev, which was produced under socialism and thus was subjected to certain ideological pressures. Leont’ev, the founder of activity theory, came to realize that personality needed to be studied across its moral and value dimensions despite working in an environment that frowned upon this approach. Other Soviet scholars gave no place for moral principles, since a person was equated to being a “product.” By citing specific works by Leont’ev, the author shows how the ideas of the “leader of Marxist psychology” evolved and sheds light on the internal context of his scientific investigations. We see that he eventually resolved a question of fundamental disagreement with Vygotskii concerning the problem of experiences and activity. During the last years of his life, Aleksei Leont’ev approached the late Vygotskii in his views, taking the side of his teacher, old friend and, at the same time, main internal opponent, which is not all that uncommon a phenomenon in academic circles. This can be seen by the fact that two years before his death (in 1977), Leont’ev actually resolved a fundamental disagreement he had with Vygotskii concerning the problem of experiences and activity.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121069462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Historical Meaning of the Crisis of Cultural Activity Psychology","authors":"A. Asmolov","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2115783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2115783","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper, we discuss the past, present, and future of the cultural activity approach as a methodology that aims to integrate the humanities and the natural sciences, psychotechnical and theoretical knowledge. An attempt has been made to conceptualize another crisis in cultural activity psychology. The meaning of the historical crisis of cultural activity psychology is reflected in the future prospects of its development, bridging the gap between classical and contemporary approaches. Reflection on the crisis of cultural activity psychology allows us to underline the following axioms: the need for dialogue with different variants of the cultural activity movement in modern psychology; the need for reflection on the myths and dangers of canonizing certain thinkers; the presumption of decency among professionals who are attracted to the school of Leo Vygotsky, and understanding of their motivation in developing his ideas. In addition to the axioms required for an appropriate dialogue with researchers who are interested in L.S. Vygotsky, there are risks that restrict the understanding and development of his legacy: the risk of science-policy isolationism, the risk of sectarianism, the risk of “jubilee” historicism, the risk of reducing monism to monotheism. These axioms and risks are aspects of the cognitive situation that are important for further development of the research program of cultural activity psychology. Discussing cultural activity psychology as a methodology and a special intellectual movement allows us to emphasize a number of meta-features of cultural activity psychology as a world-view. On the level of specific scientific methodology, we can consider the relationship of cultural activity psychology to other sciences in which the category of “activity” is the key one. Summing up, we refer to the cultural activity approach to social and cultural practices, which expresses the methodological approach of social constructivism.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130209400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward the Problem of Reconciling Lev Vygotskii’s Cultural Historical Psychology with Aleksei Leont’ev’s Activity Theory","authors":"N. N. Nechaev","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2115787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2115787","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article considers the problem of the relationship between Lev Vygotskii’s cultural historical theory and Aleksei Leont’ev’s activity theory. Starting from the idea that one scholar is considered the successor of the other, the author analyzes the crux of the fundamental differences in the approaches of the two outstanding psychologists. The author draws on materials from scientific publications by Lev Vygotskii and Aleksei Leont’ev, including those that are not as widely known to the psychological community, as well as the facts from their academic biographies. Of central concern is the problem of how to interpret the tool and the sign, since Vygotskii and Leont’ev have offered competing explanations. This problem can be resolved if they are considered in light of the paradigm of joint activity. This is where the subject (child) learns modes of activity within a certain system of relations with other participants in the activity (adults). The main mechanism that the subject relies upon to develop is the method they learn to resolve these contradictions that arise in the course of such a joint activity and result from the changing modes of activity and the transforming system of relations. Thus, objective activity and communication, which condition each other, can be best understood in light of the solution to the problems of joint activity, which allows us to talk about opportunities for reconciling Vygotskii’s cultural-historical theory with Leont’ev’s activity theory.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130664244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Overcoming the Two-Factor Approach to Determination of the Psyche as a Key Problem in A.N. Leontiev’s Activity Theory: Psychic Determination and Human Freedom","authors":"A. N. Romashchuk","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2022.2115788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2022.2115788","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers A.N. Leontiev’s activity theory through the prism of the scientific problem that gave rise to it. This problem is often described as the need to go beyond L.S. Vygotsky’s “word-centrism,” but it seems more reasonable to argue that the problem addressed by activity theory had already been posed by Vygotsky himself as the need to overcome the two-factor approach to determination of the psyche, which for cultural-historical theory meant a transition from social to psychological determination and from there to human freedom. This problem caused Vygotsky to change his theory many times and, in particular, led to a transition from the theory of higher mental functions (“instrumental theory”) to the theory of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness (“cultural-historical theory”). This problem was taken up by [Leontiev’s] “Kharkov School” directly from Vygotsky, and the difference between their activity theory and Vygotsky’s theory was only in the proposed solutions. Whereas Vygotsky proposed a solution that viewed “the personalized emotional experience of events” [perezhivanie]1 as a unit of the psyche, the Kharkovites proposed what seemed to them a more materialistic version, the concept of activity as a mediator refracting the influence of two factors, the social and the physiological, on the psyche. Understanding the genuine problem that Leontiev created his activity theory to solve, affects our understanding of the main theses of activity theory as well as the research carried out from its perspective. From analysis of some of these studies, we derive and emphasize such characteristics of activity as holism/integrality and supra-individuality.","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132901179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"G. Zuckerman","doi":"10.1080/10610405.2021.2066938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2021.2066938","url":null,"abstract":"It is a banal fact of life that children at the beginning of their education need the help of adults. When dogmatic psychologists cite this truism and use Vygotsky’s term “interpsychological action,” they conjure up the illusion of understanding the phenomenon of the joint action. But in fact no one has yet answered the question of what the interpsychological action between a child and an adult is; what is its objectification; and how it differs from intrapsychological, totally individualized action. We have tried to answer these questions with regard to the initial stage of development of learning activity by early-grade schoolchildren. What do we mean when we say: a teacher is introducing a child into the realm of theoretical concepts; schoolchildren, with the teacher’s help, identify in the teaching material a certain basic relation, establish it in a symbolic form, etc. If a child entering a classroom were a tabula rasa, and the teacher were Pygmalion, then we could take the above literally. But the child, from the very first moment of interaction with a teacher, is active; in response to the teacher’s action he begins energetically to develop his own action. In the process children, of course, merely enter into the kind of relationship with the adult that they are already familiar with: a relationship of uncritical trust that they assimilated already in the infantile activities of direct, emotional interaction; a relationship of imitating models, which they assimilated in concrete, manipulative activities; and a role-playing relationship, which they assimilated in play. In these noneducational forms of responsive action by the child the theoretical content proffered by a teacher inevitably degenerates: in direct, emotional contacts all objectification is lost (except signs of mutual affection); in play-based relations the productivity of action disappears; and in imitative relationships the reflective content is eviscerated. Consequently, in order to transmit to children the conceptual content of educational activities, an adult must teach them a specific form of receiving this content—the form of educational collaboration. What is that?","PeriodicalId":308330,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Russian & East European Psychology","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130449262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}