Tools, Thoughts, and Signs: Sociocultural Perspectives on Mind and Occupation

In 1926, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a young Soviet psychologist, completed The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation. At the time, there were a number of schools of thought in psychology, such as Pavlovian reflexology, Gestalt psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, personalism, and more. Vygotsky analyzed these different schools and found that not only were they incompatible methodologically and theoretically, but also that they differed on what constituted the basic facts of psychology. The question of what unites psychological phenomena as disparate as a mathematician’s computations or a person enjoying a tragic play would be answered differently by t hese different schools (Vygotsky, 1986a). To psychoanalysts, the uniting factor is the unconscious mind; to reflexologists, it would be conditioned responses to stimuli. Within a certain limit, each of these core concepts provide explanatory value. However, to gain methodological hegemony, those core concepts were each expanded to explain all human thought and behavior, and reached a point where they failed to hold up their ideological weight (Vygotsky, 1986b).