Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

 

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (according to the Cyrillic transliteration in Belarusian: Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, in Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский) (November 17, 1896, Orsha, Russian Empire, present-day Bi Elorrussia-June 10, 1934, Moscow, Soviet Union) or Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and epistemologist of Jewish origin, one of the most prominent theorists of developmental psychology, founder of cultural-historical psychology and a clear precursor of Soviet neuropsychology, of which the Russian doctor Aleksandr Lúriya would be the greatest exponent. .[1] His work was recognized and disclosed by the academic media of the Western world in the 1960s.

The prolific nature of his work and his early death made him known as "the Mozart of psychology" (characterization created by Stephen Toulmin). The fundamental idea of ​​his work is that the development of humans can only be explained in terms of social interaction. Development consists of the internalization of cultural instruments (such as language) that initially do not belong to us, but belong to the human group in which we are born, which transmits cultural products to us through social interaction. Culture, then, has a preponderant role in Vygotsky's theory: "individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social environment...in which the child is included (Tudge and Rogoff, 1989). The child uses some kind of 'tool' or 'sign' for converting social relations into psychological functions"

He was born into a prosperous Jewish family near Vitebsk, the second of a family of eight children. Before reaching his first year, his family moved to Gomel, where he grew up. In his teens he was a fan of theater and painting he decided to rewrite his last name Vygotsky, instead of Výgodskiy ("výgoda" means "benefit" in Russian), as it was originally. At just 19 years old, in 1915, he wrote an essay on Hamlet. His time at the university between 1913 and 1917 was not without its incidents: he enrolled in medicine and just a month later he switched to law at the University of Moscow. After a year he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Popular University, content that had already fascinated him as a high school student. The Popular Universities were part of the framework of liberal educational institutions parallel to the oldest and most prestigious institutions linked to Tsarism. In this university, for example, women and people of any religion were accepted.[3] He then returned to Gomel, with a difficult desire to fulfill: to teach psychology and literature. Precisely at that time, due to the October Revolution, all discrimination against Jews was abolished. From this fact, Vygotsky would begin to be linked to political activity. Its various activities would make it the center of Gomel's intellectual and cultural activity. He taught Russian grammar and literature at the Labor School for the workers; he taught psychology and logic at the Pedagogical Institute; aesthetics and art history at the Conservatory; he directed the theater section of a newspaper and founded a literary magazine. At this time he dedicated himself to reading Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov and Aleksandr Potebnyá (en: Alexander Potebnja, linguist in Kharkiv). In 1919, he contracted tuberculosis and in 1920 he was admitted to a sanatorium (it was considered, due to the danger of the bacteria, that the patient had to be isolated from all contact). Sensing that his life would be short, he intensified his spirit of work. At the Pedagogical Institute, he created a psychology laboratory to study kindergarten children with learning delays. From here he obtained fundamental material for his book Psicología pedagogica, published in 1926. In 1924, Vygotsky married Rosa Nóievna Sméjova (died 1979), from whose union two daughters were born: Guita Lvovna Vygódskaya and Ásya Lvovna Vygódskaya.

Its bibliography includes 180 titles. Eighty of them have not been published. His most important work is Thought and Language (1934). Its greatest specialist is James V. Wertsch; in Spain, Angel Riviere. He integrated the diversity of other fields of knowledge in a creative way: he explained with a novel meaning the role of society, culture and language in the development of the human being.[4]​Some of his works were cut by the censorship from 1936. They were considered anti-Marxist and anti-proletarian by the Stalinist authorities. He never ceased to be mentioned in public forums, except for the critiques of Kózyrev and Turko "Pedagogy at Professor Vygotsky's school" and Rudneva's "Vygotsky's Pedagogical Distortions", nor his contained and referenced theories. Proof of the latter are the thirty references to his work in the 1940 edition of Rubistein's "Foundations of General Psychology" or his presence in the suggestion "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" of 1940.