[Xmca-l] new book of possible interest to Vygotskian people

[Peter Smagorinsky]

Vygotsky’s Notebooks: A Selection
Еkaterina Zavershneva, Rene van der Veer, Editors
Springer, 2018

Contents
1 A Tragicomedy of Strivings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Jewry and World History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3 The Book of Fragments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4 The Jewish Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
5 Genres of Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
6 The Trip to London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
7 From the Zakharino Hospital. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
8 Toward Cultural–Historical Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9 The Instrumental Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
10 Concepts and the Systemic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
11 The Anomalous Development of the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
12 From the EDI Clinic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
13 Spinoza and the Problem of Higher Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
14 Observing Asya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
15 The Study of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
16 From Sign to Meaning and Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
17 The Problem of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
18 The Semic Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
19 The Result of Many Years of Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
20 Disintegration and Schizophrenia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
21 Thinking and Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
22 Psychology as a Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
23 Dubious Moves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
24 The Conference of October 27–29, 1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
25 The Semantic Field: Sparring with Lewin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
26 Neuropsychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
27 Difficult Children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
28 The Playing Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
29 The Rest is Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
Author Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503
Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preface
It is ironic that Lev Vygotsky, who claimed for many years that mental development
is about the internalization of external signs and that external signs must be
replaced by inner ones during the course of such development, made notes
throughout his life. It seems he was always making notes on whatever was at hand
(e.g., cards, maps, pieces of paper, forms) and whatever he was doing (e.g., visiting
museums, attending lectures, reading books, examining patients). Subsequently,
these notes formed the basis of lectures, articles, and books. This book contains a
selection of these notes found in Vygotsky’s personal archive. They were meticulously
studied and deciphered by the first editor and, in cases of doubt, by both
editors. The second editor provided a first translation of the text, and together the
editors tried to solve the remaining linguistic and conceptual problems.
Elsewhere one of us has argued that the fact that Vygotsky became popular
long after his death causes problems for the modern reader (Van der Veer 2014,
p. 4). We know so little of the psychology of the early 20th century that it is easy
to attribute ideas to Vygotsky that were common at the time or fail to see the
novelty of the ideas he advanced. In the words of Boring (1950, p. ix): “Without
such knowledge he [the reader] sees the present in distorted perspective, he
mistakes old facts and old views for new, and he remains unable to evaluate the
significance of new movements and methods.” This is why the editors have
supplied introductions and what may seem an excessive number of notes to the
text. It is their hope that these will allow the reader to at least partially reconstruct
the historical context of Vygotsky’s ideas. In writing these introductions and notes,
they relied on the usual encyclopedias (notably, Wikipedia), read scores of articles
and books by Vygotsky and his contemporaries, and were especially pleased with
the existence of digitalized older books. The editors were also morally supported
by colleagues and friends (e.g., Tatyana Akhutina, Igor Arievitch, Irina Kazakova,
Peter Keiler, Alexandre Métraux, Maksim Osipov, Yakov Sinichkin, Natal’ya
Stoyukhina, Anton Yasnitsky) and felt free to bother them with silly or difficult
questions. In rare cases, they believed they knew something themselves. The result
of this effort is what Vygotsky regarded as typical for the modern Western person:
borrowed knowledge, e.g., knowledge that is transmitted from expert to novice.
Few readers have been in the Sahara; yet most of them believe it is a hot and
sandy place in the daytime.
Even with the introductions and the footnotes, this volume requires some hard
work by the reader, and the editors do not claim that they fully understand each and
every part of the text. After all, a large part of this text was written for private use,
and arguments were not spelled out. Moreover, sometimes is not even clear whether
Vygotsky gives his own point of view or summarizes the view of a colleague.
Hopefully, discussions of this volume in the scientific press and on the Internet will
help to solve the remaining problems of comprehension.
The publication of private notebooks always involves some modifications, and
we wish to explain the procedure we followed. First, the text was deciphered and
typed. This in itself is no easy task because Vygotsky’s handwriting was not always
clear, and he frequently used abbreviations of his own invention (e.g., “m.r.” for
“mental retardation” or “hndwrtng” for “handwriting”). One might say that his
notebooks have several of the properties that Vygotsky himself ascribed to inner
speech: abbreviations, references to things that are only clear to someone who has
the same knowledge (e.g., “See my talk”), etc. In typing the text of the notebooks,
we lost the typical typographical features of a manuscript, that is, the underlining,
the crossing out, the arrows, the writing upside down or backwards, the added
remarks in the margins, and so on. Rendering these features in the book would have
made it very unpleasant to read, but in the comments we have indicated what
readers cannot see for themselves. In addition, we have corrected the mistakes in
foreign words, expressions, citations, and names. Although Vygotsky read several
languages, his active use of them left much to be desired. Words underlined by
Vygotsky, book and journal titles, poetry lines, and foreign words are rendered in
italics. In the rare cases that Vygotsky himself used English words or expressions,
these are given in bold script. Punctuation has been mostly left intact—unless this
made the understanding difficult—and we added quotation marks when Vygotsky
was citing a poet or writer verbatim. Vygotsky was in the habit of repeatedly
writing up the outlines of the same talk or chapter and had a stock of pet expressions
and ideas to which he came back time and again, as the reader will see in the
present edition. For this reason, in rare cases, we left out part of the text when it
became excessively repetitive. These suppressed passages have been indicated with
angle brackets and ellipses. Insertions and comments by the editors are given in
square brackets (i.e., [ ]) and/or small script. Words that were difficult or impossible
to decipher are given in angle brackets (i.e., < >) with either our best guess or the
word “illegible.”
Finally, this book was edited by two authors who have never met each other and
communicated solely through email. There is no doubt that this caused some disadvantages—
e.g., written speech needs to be much more elaborate than oral speech
—and it is better not to speculate about the possible advantages. However, we
sincerely believe that the present result once more shows the truth of Feuerbach’s
dictum, that what is impossible for one person is possible for two.
Moscow, Russia Еkaterina Zavershneva
Leiden, The Netherlands René van der Veer
References
Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Van der Veer, R. (2014). Lev Vygotsky. London: Bloomsbury.