Thing: psyche transformed by culture
Representatives: E. Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Pierre Janet, Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich
For the first time, the question of sociality as a system-forming factor of the psyche was raised by the French sociological school. Its founder E. Durkheim (1858-1917), using the term «social fact» or «collective representation», illustrated such concepts as «marriage», «childhood», «suicide». Social facts are different from their individual embodiments (there is no «family» at all, but there is an infinite number of specific families) and have an ideal character that affects all members of society.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, using ethnographic material, developed the thesis about a special type of «primitive» thinking, which is different from the thinking of a civilized person.
Pierre Janet further deepened the principle of social determination, suggesting that external relations between people gradually turn into features of the structure of the individual psyche. Thus, he showed that the phenomenon of memory consists in the appropriation of external actions of the execution of instructions and retelling.
The principle of the cultural-historical determination of the psyche was most fully disclosed in the works of L.S. Vygotsky, who developed the doctrine of higher mental functions. L.S. Vygotsky suggested the existence of two lines of development of the psyche:
- natural,
- culturally mediated.
In accordance with these two lines of development, «lower» and «higher» mental functions are distinguished.
Examples of the lower, or natural, mental functions are the child’s involuntary memory or involuntary attention. The child cannot control them: he pays attention to what is brightly unexpected; remembers what is accidentally remembered. Lower mental functions are a kind of rudiments from which higher mental functions grow in the process of upbringing (in this example, voluntary attention and voluntary memory).
The transformation of lower mental functions into higher ones occurs through the mastery of special tools of the psyche — signs and is of a cultural nature. The role of sign systems in the formation and functioning of the human psyche is, of course, fundamental — it defines a qualitatively new stage and a qualitatively different form of existence of the psyche. Imagine that a savage who does not own an account has to memorize a herd of cows in a meadow. How will he cope with this task? He needs to create an accurate visual image of what he saw, and then try to resurrect it before his eyes. Most likely, he will fail, miss something. You just need to count the cows and then say: «I saw seven cows.»
Many facts testify that the assimilation of sign systems by a child does not happen by itself. This is where the role of the adult comes into play. An adult, communicating with a child and teaching him, first «takes possession» of his psyche. For example, an adult shows him something, in his opinion, interesting, and the child, at the behest of an adult, pays attention to one or another object. Then the child begins to regulate his own mental functions with the help of the means that the adult used to apply to him. Also, as adults, we, tired, can say to ourselves: “Come on, look here!” and really «master» our elusive attention or activate the process of imagination. We create and analyze the rehearsals of a conversation that is important for us in advance, as if playing the acts of our thinking in the speech plan. Then there is the so-called rotation, or «internalization» — the transformation of the external means into the internal. As a result, from immediate, natural, involuntary mental functions become mediated sign systems, social and arbitrary.
The cultural-historical approach in psychology continues to fruitfully develop even now, both in our country and abroad. This approach turned out to be especially effective in solving the problems of pedagogy and defectology.