From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cultural-historical psychology (the school of Vygotsky) - a trend in psychological research founded by Lev Vygotsky in the end of the 1920s and developed by his students and followers in Eastern Europe and worldwide.

Cultural-historical psychology emerged as a response to Cartesian dualism between mind and body in psychology of that time as a deliberate attempt to establish a new paradigm in psychological resarch that would overcome the narrow objectivism of behaviourism and subjectivism of introspective psychology of Wundt, James, and others. It focuses on human development to make genetic claims about the function of mind in activity. These claims could be part of, or a basis for, a return to the unity of human sciences.

Vygotsky and his associates postulate in principle non-adaptive character and the mechanisms of higher psychical (mental) functions development. Defining the main goal of psychological inquiry as an objective study of human consciousness, the members of Vygotsky's school investigate the role of cultural mediation and such cultural mediators as word, sign (Vygotsky), symbol, myth (Losev, V. Zinchenko) in the development of human higher psychical functions, development of personality and its "top-most' phenomenology.

A basic distinguishing feature of cultural-historical psychology is that "the species-specific characteristic of human beings is their need and ability to inhabit an environment transformed by the activity of prior members of their species. Such transformations and the mechanism of the transfer of these transformations from one generation to the next are the result of the ability/procilivity of human beings to create and use artifacts - aspects of the material world that are taken up into human action as modes of coordinating with the physical and social environment." (Cole 1995, p. 190) In this way, research has been done into the effects of literacy (Cole & Scribner) and mathematics (Saxe) outside of traditional schooling to understand how cognition develops embedded in a given place and time.

Some of Vygotsky´s students who took up and developed his approach to psychology include Aleksey Leontyev (sometimes also spelled A.N. Leontev) and A.R. Luria in the Soviet Union, and Klaus Holzkamp in Germany. Holzkamp developed his own approach to cultural-historical psychology which he termed "critical psychology" mainly based on Leontev´s work, also making use of Merleau-Ponty´s Phenomenology^[1]

Other names for this psychology include: Socio-Historical psychology, Socio-Cultural Psychology, Activity theory, Cultural Psychology, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and Social Development Theory.

• Зинченко В. П. (1993). Культурно-историческая психология: опыт амплификации. Вопросы психологии, 1993, N 4.
• Культурно-историческая психология, [Cultural-historical psychology], International psychological journal (in Russian)
• Lev Vygotsky Archive at marxists.org
• A.N. Leontev Archive at marxists.org
• A.R Luria Archive at marxists.org
• Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: a once and future discipline. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Cole, M. (1995). "Socio-cultural historical psychology". in Sociocultural studies of mind. ed. Jim Wertsch et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Cole, M. & Scribner, Sylvia. (1981). The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press.
• Saxe, G. (1990) Culture and cognitive development : studies in mathematical understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Press.
• Wertsch, James. (1985). Mind as Action. New York: Oxford University Press.

This psychology-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.