[Xmca-l] Re: Soviet Psychology Overview Article

[Huw Lloyd]

It seems completely nuts to describe the soviet research program as a
failure.  They demonstrated far more success than any other endeavour in
scientific psychology that I have studied.  Most psychology projects can't
even establish a coherent theory, let alone apply it.  They are forever
wading around in hypotheses and impressions, or focusing upon incoherent
slices of phenomena without regard to its origins.

"Psychology today is undergoing a transformation. It is becoming an
international science, which aspires to uncover universal laws of human
behavior and cognition as well as to account for their cultural variation.
How can we understand the transformation of concepts, ideas, and approaches
involved in this process? In this chapter, I examine a historical precedent
for the globalization of psychology. In the 1920s–1930s, a group of Soviet
researchers led by L.S. Vygotsky proposed a new kind of scientific
psychology that would be international in scope. It was revolutionary in
its assumption that the study of mind and behavior, in phylo- and ontogenesis,
had to be grounded in the study of the cultural and material conditions in
which people live. Although this research program as such largely failed,
the Soviet psychologists contributed much of value, and their ideas were
taken up—and transformed—by Western psychologists. These ideas form the
basis of the genuinely international psychology that is only just emerging
today, and to which the “cultural-historical” psychology of the Soviets was
a precursor."

http://www.edition-open-access.de/studies/1/30/index.html#2

Best,
Huw





On 6 December 2015 at 19:45, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> This morning I stumbled over the attached historical overview of Soviet
> Psychology in relation to international psychology that I thought would be
> of interest to MCA-o-philes.
>
> http://www.edition-open-sources.org/studies/1/30/index.html
>
> fyi
> mike
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>