Vygotsky > East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy

About ESI

Introducing the Institute

Our Lineage
—Vygotsky
—Wittgenstein

Development & Performance

Social Therapy

Who We Are
Fred Newman, Co-Founder
Lois Holzman, Co-Founder
Faculty

A Brief History of the ESI

Lev Vygotsky

In the 1980s when the social therapy movement and our practice of revolutionary dialectics was young, we came to realize the relevance of Lev Vygotsky's writings on child development in the early part of the century to the emotional problems of adults and children living at the end of the century.

Vygotsky was searching for the "proper unit of study" for psychology, trying to free himself from both the linear, causal, dualistic Western psychological paradigm that was emerging and also from fastly-rigidifying Marxist dialectics. He was taking Marx's new conception of change (dialectic materialism) and new unit of change (the social totality, revolutionary activity) into the study of human psychology.

For Vygotsky, development does not happen to us – from the inside, from the outside, or from any combination of inside and outside. He rejected the inside-outside dichotomy that has been a part of psychology since its beginnings. He also rejected the linear conception of progress and dynamic conception of process necessary to explain the 'relationship' between inside and outside. He gave us a radically new conception of growth and psychological change, one based in Marx's dialectical conception of revolutionary activity.

VYGOTSKY'S METHOD:
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

1. Tool-and-result methodology

The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 65).

Vygotsky understood that a new unit of study required a new method of study, more precisely, a new conception of method. Here he tells us that this new method is not something to be applied as it is in the scientific paradigm, but something to be practiced (Newman and Holzman, 1993). Neither tool nor result is the cause of nor comes before the other; neither is comprehensible apart from the other. They come into existence together, influencing each other in complex and changing ways as the totality tool-and-result develops. Vygotsky wants us to see the totality, the whole, the unity, tool-and-result, because it is only from that vantage point that we can come to understand anything about process and function. Seeing particulars, seeing parts as making up the whole – rather than seeing the whole and the inter-relationships within it – we neither see nor understand very much.

2. Completion

Vygotsky introduced the dialectical notion of completion as a challenge to the traditional ways of understanding language (speaking) and its relationship to thought (thinking), namely, that when we speak we are expressing our thoughts. Not so for Vygotsky. Here is how he put it:

The structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought. It cannot, therefore, be placed on thought like clothes off a rack. Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word. Therefore, precisely because of the contrasting directions of the movement, the development of the internal and external aspects of speech form a true unity. (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 251)

Vygotsky helps us understand conscious human activity in a way that does not rest on the dualistic dichotomy between inner and outer reality. For if we accept Vygotsky's picture, then we also must recognize as fruitless psychology's countless efforts to discern and depict the mediated relationship between 'inner' thoughts and their 'expression' as language in the 'outer' society – if the mediation presumes two different things. There are not two things requiring connection (explanation) but, Vygotsky discovered, one process, one activity, requiring study (explication). Human activity in all of its varied organized forms cries out for a dialectical explicative understanding, not a causal explanatory characterization.

3. Learning Leads Development

Another of Vygotsky's methodological breakthroughs was positing the relationship between learning and development as one of dialectical unity, where learning "leads" and "is ahead of" development (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987). He saw learning/instruction (in Russian, there is but one word) as "completely unnecessary if it merely utilized what had already matured in the developmental process, if it were not itself a source of development" (1987, p. 212). Not the reverse of the dominant view that learning depends on developmental level, learning leading development is a relationship of completion. Learning and development are activistically inseparable; learning 'completes' development, while development 'completes' learning although, of course, they do not complete each other in the same way (Newman and Holzman, 1993).

4. The Zone of Proximal Development

How learning and development complete each other is clarified by what is perhaps Vygotsky's most well-known conceptual and methodological discovery – the zone of proximal development (zpd). Development is not 'a solo act' but a joint/social activity that occurs in the ever emergent and continuously changing 'distance' between being and becoming, between what you can do 'by yourself' and with others. The zpd is a reminder that we must study not only the mature features of human activity but the totality, including those aspects which are barely developed and still to become.

In our varied work with children and adults in therapeutic, educational and cultural settings, we have come to understand the zpd as the socially-historically-culturally produced environment in which and how human beings organize and reorganize their relationships to each other and to nature, that is, the elements of social life. It is where human beings – determined, to be sure, by sometimes empirically observable circumstances – totally transform these very circumstances (making something new). Not a zone at all, but the 'life space' in which the so-called higher psychological processes human beings engage in (such as speaking, thinking, problem solving and so on) emerge and develop, the zpd is the "location" of human (revolutionary) activity (Newman and Holzman, 1996, p. 180). The critical feature of the zpd as life space/activity is that it is inseparable from the we who produce it. It is and is produced through tool-and-result methodology – the revolutionary activity of human beings creating their lives.

– Lois Holzman

REFERENCES

Baker, G.P. (1992). Some remarks on "language" and "grammar." Grazer Philosophische Studien, 42.

Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. New York: Penguin.

Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1993). Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist. London: Routledge.

Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1996. ) Unscientific psychology: A cultural-performatory approach to understanding human life. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol 1. New York: Plenum.

Van der Merwe, W.L. and Voestermans, P.P. (1995). Wittgenstein's legacy and the challenge to psychology. Theory & Psychology, 5(1).

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1965). The blue and brown books. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel. Oxford: Blackwell.