Ricardo Japiassu wrote:
<Although he is right - in my oppinion - to say Psychology needs to become a
science or a hole (General Psychology) that can unify all psychological work
of the past in a new and unique ensemble under new basis, a "culture of
peace" or the cultural-historical approach to psyche, LSV seems to me,
somethimes, advocating a "culture of war" between psychological streams that
have different readings of reality, different ways of understanding
psychological phenomena and therefore that believe in different truths. >
I think Vygotsky's other work testifies to his willingness to take ideas
from a wide variety of sources, both inside and outside psychology. The
distinction I think he makes is between a genuine synthesis within an
integral conceptual framework and a sort of montage in which bits are cut
out of different theories and pasted together without underlying coherence.
Thus his objection to the Freud-Marx fusion is not that Freud has made no
discoveries of value to psychology (e.g. the unconscious) but that (a) the
two sets of ideas are incompatible at a fundamental level; (b) if Freud's
valid discoveries were to be incorporated into a LSV-approved synthesis,
their significance would be different from that attributed to them by Freud.
So I think you're right that there is both an openness to incorporating
other ideas that have a basis in 'empirical science' and a rejection of
'different readings of reality'.
I don't find this particularly worrying. The state of psychology as LSV
described it was already one of de facto 'war', as I assume it is today. You
seem to be saying that you accept the need for a synthesis but a humble one,
which doesn't make any too grandiose claims. Doesn't that miss the point?
<It is like he is saying there is only one truth - the cientifical truth.
And this contradicts - in my view - what he himself says about the complex
relation between science, knowledge and the words (number 9).>
Certainly he's saying that the fundamental viewpoint of psychology as a
discipline has to be that of scientific truth. And elsewhere he sees the
forms of scientific conceptualisation as the most advanced in terms of
individual psychological development. l don't know whether he expressed a
view on whether, for example, psychotherapeutic techniques that appear to
work on individuals despite having no scientific basis should be considered
valid. I suspect not.
Perhaps you could say more about why you consider this to be contradicted by
section 9. I'll post my reading of it in a while.
Bruce
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