Re: [xmca] Vygotsky reference to Lenin

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

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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*Andy Blunden*
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