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Re: [xmca] Fwd: Perezhivanie citations



I want to ask: is there any real reason to suppose that Vygotsky meant something different by perezhivanie than he meant by "social situation of development"? If so, then do we have to take these as units of analysis of quite different theories of development?

Andy

mike cole wrote:
Further reflections on perezhivanie that pick up current themes including
thoughts posted a few hours ago by Volker.
mike

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: robert lecusay <rlecusay@ucsd.edu>


Beth Ferholt on Vasilyuk:

Fyodor Vasilyuk (1988) adapts Vygotsky’s use of the term perezhivanie
to describe a form of inter-subjectivity in which we insert ourselves
into the stories of others in order to gain the foresight that allows
us to proceed. He describes perezhivanie as an internal and subjective
labor of “entering into” which is not done by the mind alone, but
rather involves the whole of life or a state of consciousness. And
although, for Vasilyuk, perezhivanie is the direct sensation or
experience of mental states and processes, another person is needed
for this experience. It is this inclusion of another that allows a
person to overcome and conquer despair through perezhivanie.

Vasilyuk (1988), who is working from within the framework of cultural
historical activity theory, gives us at once a broader and more
specific definition of perezhivanie than does Vygotsky. But he has not
actually moved further from the non-technical definition of the word
“perezhivanie.” As Robbins explains:

“(P)erezhivat” means, if you look at it closely, that you have passed
as if above something that had made you feel pain ... There, inside of
a recollection that we call an “again living” –lives your pain. It is
the pain that doesn’t let you forget what has happened. And you keep
on coming back to it in your memory, keep living through it over and
over again, until you discover that you have passed through it, and
have survived. (2007a, no page number)

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 3:09 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
It would be good to have beth on Vasilyuk.
mike


Below I paste portions of text concerning perezhivanie from the piece
we wrote with Sonja and fron Beth's diss. Beth also writes about
Vasilyuk adoption/adaptation of the term. Let me know if you want that
as well.

from our article with Sonja:

"Hakkarainen (2004) uses the concept of “lived-through” experience to
discuss the develop- mental impact of the playworld practice.
“Lived-through” experience, a descriptive translation of the Russian
term perezhivanie introduced by Vygotsky (1999) and Stanslavski
(1981), refers to the direct experience of another person’s mental
state. According to Hakkarainen (2004), it is the lived-through
experience with the characters of the story that enables children to
better compre- hend the story. Stanslavski (1981) developed a method
of acting in which he required actors to live through the role by
utilizing their autobiographical emotional memory. In order to
naturally portray the character, the actor is required to think of a
moment in her own life when she felt a par- ticular emotion and then
relive the emotion while in character. Lived-through experience can be
enhanced by multiple sensory and kinesthetic experiences. Therefore,
acting or pretending (rather than just watching and listening) can
yield possibilities for intense lived-through experiences."

From Beth's diss:

"The concept of perezhivanie has the potential to be a powerful tool
in the project of reintegrating the subjects of emotion and cognition
in psychological and educational studies of development and learning.
Unlike any terms with roots in the English language, the term
perezhivanie encompasses the dynamic relations of imagination and
creativity, emotion and cognition. Translation of “perezhivanie” is
difficult because the English language itself separates emotion and
cognitionii, but I hope both to strengthen the concept by discussing
it in English, and also to minimize its dilution by turning to
technical uses of “perezhivanie” within the disciplines of theater
(Stanislavski, 1949) and psychology (Bozhovich, 1977; Vasilyuk, 1988;
Vygotsky, 1994).

Perezhivanie was first used as more than an everyday word in the
dramatic system of Constantin Stanislavski (1949). For Stanislavski
(1949) perezhivanie is a tool that enables actors to create characters
from their own re-lived, past lived- through experiences. Actors
create a character by revitalizing their autobiographical emotional
memories and, as emotions are aroused by physical action, it is by
imitating another’s, or a past self’s, physical actions, that these
emotional memories are re-lived.

Vygotsky himself described perezhivanie thus:

The emotional experience [perezhivanie] arising from any situation or
from any aspect of his environment, determines what kind of influence
this situation or this environment will have on the child. Therefore,
it is not any of the factors themselves (if taken without the
reference of 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].
(1994, pp. 338-339)

In this way Vygotsky (1994) explains, generally, how cognition and
emotion are dynamically related. And he follows this statement with
two mandates that describe the import of this observation. The first
makes more explicit the fact that, for Vygotsky, perezhivanie is the
relationship between individual and environment, and therefore that
this phenomenon is central to his theory of development:

“It (Psychology) ought to be able to find the relationship which
exists between the child and its environment, the child’s emotional
experience [perezhivanie]” (p. 341). The second states that
perezhivanie avoids the loss of those properties that are
characteristic of the whole, that perezhivanie retains the properties
inherent in the whole, thus allowing analysis through units rather
than elements: In an emotional experience [perezhivanie] we are always
dealing with an indivisible unity of personal characteristics and
situational characteristics, which are represented in the emotional
experience [perezhivanie]. That is why from the methodological point
of view it seems convenient to carry out an analysis when we study the
role the environment plays in the development of a child, an analysis
from the point of view of the child’s emotional experiences
[perezhivanie]. (p. 342)

Van der Veer adds that the concept of perezhivanie “also captures the
idea of development by insisting on the ever-changing character of
interpretations or emotional experiences (which are also dependent on
changing word meaning, another of Vygotsky’s units of analysis)”
(Chaiklin, 2001, p. 103 as cited in Robbins, 2007a, no page number).
And L. I. Bozhovich (a follower of Vygotsky’s who focused on the
relation of his theories of higher mental functions to the affective
sphere of personality (Robbins, 2004)), argued that “for a short
period of time Vygotsky considered perezhivanie as the “unity” of
psychological development in the study of the social situation of
development” (Gonzalez-Rey 2002, p. 136 as cited in Robbins, 2004).

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 2:48 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
Not your most important mission and it does not get in the ecological
settings
idea. I would stick with what you have until you have more time.
Can we do this at lab together? for fun?

Separately, is it possible to clip some defintions of perezhivanie from
your
and beths writings and send? I am about send to xmca and will bcc you to
see
context.
mike

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 2:44 PM, robert lecusay <rlecusay@ucsd.edu> wrote:
removed creepy image of person sitting and replaced with spiral. Not
prefect . . .

http://communication.ucsd.edu/rlecusay/

thoughts
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--
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*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857

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