[Xmca-l] Re: Resending LSV/ANL on crisis in ontogengy

[Huw Lloyd]

Mike,

In the paragraph you provide, ANL doesn't say that the development is
continuous: "the turning points or breaks, the qualitative shifts in
development".  The assertion that the crisis can be avoided isn't the same
thing as saying that there will not be a fundamental change.

In my recollection, we did not have any issues at 2.  We did have some
interesting 'negation experimentation', but those 'no's seemed to have a
special meaning, so it simply required a bit more attention.  That seems to
support ANL's assertion.

Huw




On 20 March 2015 at 15:55, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Thanks for pointing out my error in using color to code the part of the
> text I was trying to draw attention to, Andy. I will repeat here using
> *italics.*
>
> You ask in a follow up note why I suggest that perhaps a return to LSV's
> theory of alternating crises and lithic (relatively stable) periods of
> development might be worth returning to investigate again after a few years
> of the topic having been subsumed or scattered among
> other topics: Because last time around we foundered for lack of clarity and
> several issues and because my focal long term interest in the role of
> culture in human development has not abated in the interim.
>
> No problem if its not interesting or potentially useful for xmca members.
> mike
>
> --------------------
> David ---
> Picking on just one thread from your multiplex comments in the context of
> the discussion on printing presses and digital computer
> ​technologies, i would like to thank you for juxtaposing these​ two
> paragraphs, one from LSV on crises in development, the other
> from Leontiev. I have made a separate header because I am not agile or
> learned enough to keep track of both at the same time,
> the ontogenetic level of analysis is plenty enough for me to try to think
> systematically about in a single message..
>
> \Vygotsky, (could you give pages in current English version so we enter the
> relevant portion of the text?):
>
> These ages (i.e. stable ages--DK) and this type of child development have
> been studied more completely than ages characterized by a different course
> of child development (i.e.the crisis--DK). These latter were discovered by
> empirical paths, one by one, in a haphazard manner, and many have still not
> been shown by the majority of investigators in systems and are not included
> in the general periodization of child development. Many authors have even
> doubted the evidence of the inner necessity of their existence. Many are
> inclined to take them more as “maladies” of development, as deviations of
> the process fromthe normal path, than as internally necessary periods of
> child development. Almost none of the bourgeois investigators have realized
> their theoretical signfiicance, and the attempt in our book at their
> systematization, at their theoretical interpretation, and at their
> inclusion in the general scheme of child development for this reason should
> be seen as perhaps the first attempt of this kind."
>
> Compare:
>
>   “These crises—the three year old crisis, the seven year old crisis, the
> adolescent crisis, the youth crisis—are always associated with a change of
> stage. They indicate in clear, obvious form that these changes, these
> transitions from one stage to another have an inner necessity of their
> own. The existence of development of crises has long been known and their
> ‘classic’ interpretation is that they are caused by the child’s maturing
> inner characteristics and the contradictions that arise on that soil
> between it andthe environment. From the standpoint of that interpretation
> the crises are, of course, inevitable, because these contradictions are
> inevitable in any conditions. There is nothing more false, however, in the
> theory of the development of the child’s psyche than this idea. In fact,
> crises are not at all inevitable accomplishments of psychic development. It
> is not the crises which are inevitable, but the turning points or breaks,
> the qualitative shifts in development. T*he crisis, on the contrary, is*
>
>
>
> *evidence that a turning point or shift has not been made in time.
> Thereneed by no crises at all if the child’s psychic development does not
> takeshape spontaneously but in a rationally controlled process,
> controlledupbringing.”  (pp. 398-399)*
>
> Leontiev, A.N. (1981). Problems of the Development of the Mind. Progress:
> Moscow
>
> ​I take the *marked​* text to be the crux of the argument, and the kind of
> difference we see in the two men's articles about the "problem of the
> environment."
>
> In American developmental psychology the issue of continuities and
> discontinuities in ontogenetic development
> continues today the discussion taking place in the 1920's and 1930's. But I
> have never seen anyone argue that (say) the syndrome
> of behaviors identified as "the terrible twos" occurs because a turning
> point has not happened in time, nor that ontogeny is rendered continuous by
> rational control of parents/society. That, it seems, is the red thread of
> Stalinism that is so offputting in ANL.
>
> I do not love LSV's characterization of non-Soviet psychologists  treating
> such periods "as deviations of the process from the normal path." I am not
> sure who he is referring to, and perhaps he is right and I just need to dig
> deeper into the history of European and American developmental psychology.
> Piaget and Erikson,  two Europeans whose work was influential from the
> 1950/60's don't, at least on the surface, fit this discussion. Maybe they
> do below the surface, or there are other, allied issue to raised.
>
> --
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
> that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>