Re: [xmca] Vygotsky on Identity? - LSV never wrote on Identity :)

David, you are right!
this is a mistranslation. Here is my translation:
"Spranger was the first to pay attention to an interesting fact that is
important for understanding of the personality structure and the dynamic in
the transition age. No other period of our life is FORGOTTEN THE SAME WAY AS
THE PERIOD OF SEXUAL MATURATION."
Bella Kotik-Friedgut

On 11/29/07, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This morning I DID find a place where Vygotsky (or his translators) uses
> the word "identity". (I'd love to know the Russian for it!)
>
> It's Volume Five, the very last page of his book on the pedology of the
> adolescent (p. 184). First, there is (apparently) a really TERRIBLE
> mistranslation of something LSV writes about Spranger:
>
> "He points out that no period in our life is remembered as are the years
> of sexual maturation."
>
> In English, this means that we remember these years well. But LSV
> apparently means to say exactly the opposite: "In recollections,
> significantly less is retained of the real rhythm of internal life during
> these years than of internal life at other age levels."
>
> Then he equates "memory" and "identity", which confirms what I was
> arguing: LSV has little use for the concept of identity because for him it
> means "self-identicalness", and he is a militant developmentalist.
>
> "We know that memory is the basis of what psychologists usually call unity
> and identity of the personality. Memory is the basis of self-consciousness.
> Disruption of memory usually indicates a transition from one state to
> another, from one structure of the personality to another. For this reason
> it is typical that we do not remember our sickly conditions and our dreams
> very well."
>
> It seems to me that he's using "identity" the same way that Volosinov uses
> it: he means a largely imaginary monolithic, monologic, self-similarity. For
> the revolutionary LSV, it is not necessarily a desideratum, despite the
> implied contrast with dreams, adolescence, and the deliriums of TB!
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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-- 
Sincerely yours Bella Kotik-Friedgut
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