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Re: [xmca] Vygotsky reference to Lenin



It's gotta be somewhere in here Steve:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/five2.htm

Andy

Steve Gabosch wrote:
Can anyone with a Russian edition of a book by Lenin help? I am having difficulty locating a passage Vygotsky refers to. It is an interesting quote from the LSV CW, Vol 3, pg 114, in the 1930 article Mind, Consciousness and the Unconscious.

Vygotsky's publishers give a reference to a 1984 Russian edition of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (p 143), for which I am looking for the corresponding text in English.

Vygotsky:

"Dialectical psychology's whole uniqueness precisely resides in the attempt to define the subject matter of its study in a completely novel way. This subject matter is the integral process of behavior which is characterized by the fact that it has its mental and its physiological side. [Dialectical] psychology studies it as a unitary and integral process and only in this way tries to find a way out of the blind alley that was created [by the old psychology]. We remind you here of the warning that Lenin [1909/1984, p 143] gave in his book "Materialism and empiriocriticism" against the incorrect understanding of this formula. He said that contrasting the mental with the physical is absolutely necessary within the strict confines of the statement of our epistemological goals, but that beyond these confines such a contrast would be a gross mistake.

Vygotsky's main points in this article include, by the way, that human psychology is a dialectical unity (and not identity) of the mental and physiological, and that psychology studies "psycho-physiological unitary integral" processes. That last one is new for me - I hadn't seen that particular formulation before. As we all know, he liked to experiment with words. Vygotsky continues:

"It is indeed a methodological difficulty of psychology that its viewpoint is a genuinely scientific, ontological one and that here this contrast would be a mistake. Whereas in epistemological analysis we must strictly oppose sensation and object, we must not oppose the mental and physiological processes in psychological analysis."

biblio reference:
Lenin, V.I. (1909/1984). Materialismus i empiriokriticism. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoj Literatury

Lenin's book in Russian online (no page numbers, but this is the 1984 edition)
http://www.psylib.ukrweb.net/books/lenin01/index.htm
Lenin's book in English
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/volume14.htm

Thanks,
- Steve
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