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Re: [xmca] The Problem of the environment



I don't know if I entirely understand you, Larry. I have benefited recently from reading this article, and reading this and a Lydia Bozhovich article from JREEP, together with Marilyn Fleer and her wonderful group of researchers at Monash Uni. (some of whom have attended the Golden Keys School courses in Russia over the past 2 years) and watching Peter Smaogorinsky's talk about Vygotsky's Psychology of Art, into which he trew some insights about /perezhivanija/ culled from conversations with Dot Robbins. All this has leant bucket loads of nuances to the word /perezhivanie/ for me.

At the moment, I think we have to take a /perezhivanie/ to be an emotion-laden experience, something which could be called a trauma or catharsis, though I am not sure that the strong and transformative associations of these words in English is essential, *and* "social situation of development." SSD, to us non-Russian speakers at least, has a strongly objectivist connotation. But it is not really necessarily so, is it? A situation is only a situation for you insofar as it impinges on your vital needs, within the horizons of your consciousness of those needs (a genetic diseaase you are unaware of may kill you but it cannot drive your psychological development until you learn of it). So a social situation is both subjective and objective. I believe the same is true of /perezhivanie/, normally translated as "lived experience" or "emotional experience." We non-Russian speakers tend to take this concept as subjective. "Experience" is subjective; it has almost always been taken that way in the history of philosophy. But when you think about it, it is not a different concept from "social situation." So I take /perezhivanie/ as meaning both: it is a social situation insofar as it exists within the horizon of your perception and impinges on your needs (it's not a situation if it has no significance for you).

So this is a discrete event, not something continuous, as is implied in the words /catharsis /and /trauma/,

So it functions as a unit of analysis ... and this is important ... for *consciousness as a whole*. That is, for the entirety of a person's relation to their environment, if we take, as we must, that we mean "consciousness" in the Marxist sense, as "all inclusive." The notion of social situation "connects up" with the experience with the larger social context, from which it is quite inseparable.

So I just don't see the place for ideal models here. The concepts above do not idealise in that sense.

Does this go to your question, Larry?

Andy

Larry Purss wrote:
Andy
Thanks for posting Vygotsky's article The Problem of the Environment" first
published in "Foundations of Paedlogy" (1935)
I want to bracket on e paragraph for further reflection.

".... the ESSENTIALfactors which explain the influence of environment on the
psychological development of children, and on the development of their
conscious PERSONALITIES, are made up of their emotional experiences
[petrezhivanija].  The emotional experience [perezhivane] ARISING from any
situation or from any aspect of this environment, DETERMINES what KIND of
influence this situation or this environment will have on the child.
Therefore, it is not any of the factors IN THEMSELVES (if taken without
reference to the child) which determines how they will influence the
future course of his development, but the SAME FACTORS REFRACTED through the
PRISM OF THE CHILD"S EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE [perezhivanie]...."

I recognize that perezhivanie and "ideal models" in the environment cannot
be analyzed separately as "units of analysis" BUT for heuristic reasons can
perezhivanie be braceted to elaborate the motivational "systems" that
dynamically interact with the ideal models??
The question that I'm asking is if it is appropriate to analyze the basic
primary emotions that interact with the ideal forms?  A new book is
elaborating a "motivational systems theory" based on dynamic systems theory
and the article just mentioned has me thinking.

Larry
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*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
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