Vygotsky scientific biography

His lifestyle and education were common for a prosperous Jewish family of that time, and only by virtue of luck, the Jewish quota began to be taken through the lottery and his own abilities did he manage to enter the Moscow University. With enthusiasm, studying either medicine or jurisprudence, Vygotsky literally “swallowed” the books, read James and Freud, Russian and European literature.

After graduation, he returned to Gomel and taught at several institutes, playing an important role in the literary and cultural life of a provincial city. He organized a psychological laboratory at the pedagogical school and began working on the manuscript of a psychology textbook for secondary school teachers The first book published by him, pedagogical psychology.

In the Second Congress of Psychoneurologists in Leningrad, he presented three reports and arrived very well prepared. Vygotsky did not believe that the reflexology of Pavlov could explain the psychology of consciousness, and supported the less mechanistic “reactology” proposed by Kornilov, who was just appointed director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow. Therefore, the subsequent proposal of Kornilov was not a surprise to go to work at the institute for Vygotsky.

Despite the fact that he and his wife and daughter had to live in the Institute Library for some time, moving to Moscow gave Vygotsky the opportunity to cooperate with Luria, who was then engaged in psychoanalysis and other famous scientists. Vygotsky joined a number of studies, including became interested in "defectology", thanks to this interest he managed to go abroad to Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and London for the only time.

In the same year, his doctoral dissertation "Psychology of Art" was adopted for defense. Vygotsky in wide volume was engaged in pedagogy, consulting and research activities. He was a member of many editorials, and he wrote a lot. At this time, up to the psychology of Vygotsky, it was a humanistic reactology: a kind of learning theory, in which an attempt is made to recognize the social nature of human thinking and activity.

In conceptual issues, Vygotsky emphasized the fundamental role of a single methodology, for example, in his "historical meaning of the crisis of psychology" here he tried to give a scheme of truly Marxist psychology - the materialistic science of the social behavior of people. From the point of view of Vygotsky, neither the founders of Marxism Marx and Engels, nor Soviet psychologists - his contemporaries - did not advance in this area.

Despite the widespread distribution of quotes and slogans from the works of Marx and Engels, this unnatural fragmentary approach could not cover the Marx methodology as a whole. Vygotsky tried to give human psychology the status of science based on the laws of causal relationships but not mechanistic, and to determine the criteria in accordance with which one could describe human de.

According to Vygotsky himself, he set himself the task of creating his own capital. However, this task was never fulfilled by him, like no other Marxist-psychologist in the future. Despite the materialistic form of his theory, Vygotsky adhered to the empirical evolutionist direction in the study of cultural differences in thinking, creating a "cultural-historical" approach to psychology.

This work was greatly influenced by his cooperation with Luria. In Vygotsky, together with colleagues, Luria and Leontyev participated in experimental research at the Academy of Communist Education. Vygotsky headed the psychological laboratory, and Luria - the entire faculty. In Kharkov, the Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy was founded, where Leontiev and Luria were invited.

Vygotsky often visited them, but Moscow did not leave, as at that time his relationship with Leningrad University began to improve. However, at least in, Vygotsky had very close relations with Luria, and he in every possible way supported him in the implementation of his most ambitious project - to verify their joint hypothesis regarding the peasants of Uzbekistan and Central Asia, who recently exposed to collectivization, Vygotsky energetically supported Luria, who considered Uzbeks as an ideal example to prove that people of different cultures possess various forms processes.

Given that about 14 million people were exterminated during the period of collectivization, the scientific study of Uzbek experience seems to be, to put it mildly, not too successful, at least from the outside. The semi-term Islamic culture was forcibly transformed into Russian-communist peasant culture. This tragic episode is more consistent with the general views of Luria of a person who could construct a lie detector and apply it on his own students than with the less opportunistic position of Vygotsky.The latter remained away from this study, although he spent some time in Tashkent B, not far from the border of Kazakhstan with Uzbekistan.

Vygotsky welcomed the discoveries of Luria, who showed that, although mental processes, for example, susceptibility to illusion, according to Muller - Layer, all adult Uzbeks were identical, that is, “natural” or physiological, certain culturally mediated processes were noted only among well -educated representatives of the nation. In other words, only the Uzbeks who received Soviet education demonstrated the signs of higher mental processes characteristic of the Russians, but even these lucky ones retained the signs of lower or primitive thinking, which is characteristic of their uneducated brothers, while forcibly “enlightened”, tearing off the Islamic parranje from them.

It is sad that the only empirical study associated with the cultural theory of Vygotsky turned into an ethnocentrism monument. Paradoxically, Luria, as a result of this research project, suffered more than Vygotsky himself: “traces of primitive thinking” among Uzbeks - this turned out to be a politically unacceptable diagnosis. And Vygotsky barely escaped condemnation in this regard.

However, political pressure on Soviet psychology increased. At the beginning of X, ideological views concentrated on "pedology". Vygotsky at that time tried to give pedology the status of a separate discipline, which was supposed to serve as educational and pedagogical goals. At the conferences of the beginning of X, interdisciplinary discussions around psychology and education were increasingly determined by the requirements of a socialist orientation.

Vygotsky and Luria were criticized in print from ideological positions, although so far not so much with a shade of condemnation as encouraging reorientation. The Stalinist regime recognized only the communist kind of internationalism and encouraged Russian nationalism, which was suspicious of any mention of European science. The intellectual approach of Vygotsky always suggested a pan -European context.

It is not clear whether Vygotsky himself had to publicly make excuses; However, it is obvious that many of his closest colleagues were forced to “repent” in their “erroneous” views.

In recent years of life, Vygotsky began to formulate the theory of children's development. He intended to combine the cultural and historical approach the desired remnants of the reactology of his early studies with the requirements of socialism. This is not to say that he achieved his goal, but the results of his last works were productive in several respects. He created the theory of the "zone of proximal development." Vygotsky himself used it in a variety of directions, then using it as a quasi -paxchimetric measuring device, then seeing in it a quasiMistic confirmation of the individual potential in the social world.

Like many other ideas of Vygotsky, the theory of the zone of proximal development can be interpreted in thousands. In Vygotsky, there was an attack of chronic tuberculosis, he was hospitalized and soon died.