[xmca] Vygotsky reference to Lenin

[Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>]

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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