Andy Blunden. March 2008
Mephistopheles: “I am the spirit which negates.”
(Goethe, Faust)
Lev Vygotsky developed his psychology using the same approach to the science that Marx had used in his critique of political economy. He worked through the various competing theories which had arisen in the history of psychology, critically appropriating them. This entailed grasping the problems to which each theory addressed itself, reformulating its key insights and tracing the contradictions into which they led. The aim was to arrive at a new concept of psychology, which responded to the problems manifested in the history of the science to date. Such a concept was not a “synthesis,” but would be a complete break from the historically preceding theories of psychology, making a new starting point to be concretized in a reconstructed, truly scientific psychology. This is the method of research which Marx developed in his critique of political economy, on the foundation of the approach laid out formally by Hegel in his Logic. So Vygotsky’s psychology drew on the entire range of contemporary and preceding scientific investigations into psychology, within a methodological framework appropriated from Marx and Hegel.
One of the key theories which drew Vygotsky’s attention in the 1920s was Gestalt psychology, which presented itself as the left-wing of psychology at the time, with a critique of the dominant associationist psychology. However, a concept of Gestalt[1] had already made its way into Vygotsky’s thinking, from its origins with Goethe more than a century earlier, by an entirely different route.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was an acclaimed poet before Immanuel Kant had made his name with The Critique of Pure Reason in 1787; he towered over the world of Hegel and Schopenhauer and even after his death, oversaw the education of German-speakers from Marx and Wundt to Freud and Jung and had a huge impact in Russia as well. In his natural scientific work, Goethe challenged the Newtonian orthodoxy of 19th century science, exerting his influence not only through his writings, but through personal example. As a critic of analytical, mechanistic science he anticipated many ideas associated with the late 20th century.
Throughout his life, Goethe fought against the kind of mindless positivism which led, for example, to attempts to understand language by analysing the physiological effects of a succession of sound vibrations on the ear.
Whilst the impact of sensations as a source of knowledge of the objective world seemed clear enough, the source of conceptual knowledge had troubled philosophers since antiquity. Kant, for example, had proposed a separate faculty of reason with access to the logical categories, working side by side with a faculty of intuition accessing the data of sensation. Late 19th century scientists wanted to resolve these problems by finding the source of concepts, or at least form, in sensation itself. In his influential Analysis of Sensations, Ernst Mach went so far as to hypothesise additional sense organs which could acquire visual or auditory forms, alongside “elements” like colour, pitch and so on. Faced with this absurdity, Christian von Ehrenfels proposed that the whole form of a thing could be represented to consciousness, not just separately and alongside its elements, but prior to its elements. Ehrenfels credited Goethe for the idea that the senses could acquire the whole shape or figure – Gestalt, but for Gestalt Psychology the problem remained within the framework of an object stimulating the senses of an individual organism, and the problem of the source of conceptual knowledge had been quietly reduced to that of form, or associations between sensuous stimuli. As Vygotsky put it, “having smashed atomism, [they] replaced the atom by the independent and isolated molecule.” (Preface to Koffka, 1934, LSV CW v. 3, p230)
Goethe was the foremost advocate of the primacy of the whole over the parts, and of the environment over the individual organism, but beginning from perception of a Gestalt, the direction taken by Gestalt psychology was the opposite of the direction in which Goethe took it. In the context of development, Goethe explained Gestalt as follows:
“The Germans have a word for the complex of existence presented by a physical organism: Gestalt. With this expression they exclude what is changeable and assume that an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character.
“But if we look at all these Gestalten, especially the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is at rest or defined – everything is in a flux of continual motion. This is why German frequently and fittingly makes use of the word Bildung[2] to describe the end product and what is in process of production as well.
“Thus in setting forth a morphology we should not speak of Gestalt, or if we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea, the concept, or to an empirical element held fast for a mere moment of time.” (The purpose is set forth, Goethe 1817)
So, Gestalt is an ephemeral form; the real whole is the idea, the whole process of development. But Goethe vigorously denied that the truth of a phenomena could be some non-phenomenal formula or hypothetical mechanism ‘behind’ phenomena, and at the same time, he understood that all perceptions were ‘theory laden’. In his words:
“The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. ... Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena – they themselves are the theory.” (Maxims and Reflections)
So what was necessary was to hold off so far as possible from making hypotheses, whilst expanding so far as possible the field of phenomena, and then using intuitive perception [Anschauung[3]], attempt see the simple, archetypal form, the Urphänomenon[4], which united all of the phenomena, not by means of an abstract general pseudo-concept, a common attribute shared by all, but a genuine generative principle, simultaneously conceptual and phenomenal:
“The Urphänomenon is not to be regarded as a basic theorem leading to a variety of consequences, but rather as a basic manifestation enveloping the specifications of form for the beholder.” (Letter to von Buttel, 3 May 1827)
It must be granted that Goethe did not fully work out this idea, but his claim that phenomena could be understood only by means of a simple prototypical phenomena which captures the properties of the whole process, was to be taken up by Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky, each in turn giving it a more definite worked-out formulation. Meanwhile, Goethe’s insistence that forms could be perceived by human beings, because their thinking was part of the same whole which generated those forms, and that things, human beings included, must be known by their deeds, was taken up by Hegel.
In the late 18th century, a number of philosophers, including Kant and Herder as well as Hegel, were trying to work out the conditions which went into the formation of the national character or ‘spirit of a nation’. Although these investigations led to a dead end, they provided the basis for a psychology which approached the individual as a product of society, rather than seeing society as a collection of individuals.
In his 1804 manuscript, System of Ethical Life, Hegel proposed a solution to the problem of the source of conceptual knowledge, posed by Kant in terms of a faculty of Reason, separate from Intuition (i.e., sensation). Hegel proposed that knowledge was reconstructed by individuals’ use of artefacts fashioned as objectifications of the inherited knowledge of a community. This would explain how practical, sensuous perception already included forms of conceptual knowledge and how thinking and perception developed along with social and cultural change. The paradigmatic activities which Hegel saw as constructing the universal ‘spirit’ of a community were: the labour process, using tools and means of production; communication, using words and other symbols; and the raising of children. The consciousness entailed in these activities, the artefacts being used and the collaborative forms of activity formed a single whole, i.e., a Gestalt. Each aspect of this trichotomy constituted the others: consciousness was the individual’s orientation to use of the artefact, the artefact was what it was only in and through its use in the particular activity for which it was intended, and an activity was constituted by people’s motives and the artefacts they used to construct it.
Subsequently, this relation was taken for granted by Hegel; this is what constituted consciousness, but for Hegel it was all the work of thought, and the arcane mode of exposition of his later works obscured what it was he was talking about. His attention in later works was on the development of these forms of consciousness and he never took the trouble to make distinctions between the material objectifications of thought, the internalisations of the use of such thought objects and the forms of collaborative activity in which subjectivity and objectivity mutually constitute one another; it was all the work of thought, and the individual psyches, the particular activities and the artefacts being used were simply different logical aspects of a single substance – thought, not something originating in people’s heads, but a spirit which finds expression in consciousness, social practice and material culture.
Furthermore, although consciousness is produced in the same labour process in which the community’s material needs are produced, Hegel held that it was not the subject-object relation, but the subject-subject relation which was the basis for self-consciousness, and the real motor for the development of culture, so for Hegel, the labour process disappeared into the background of a narrative about thought-forms.
What Hegel was dealing with was a Gestalten, sometimes translated as ‘configuration’ or ‘shape of consciousness’ [Gestalten des Bewusstseins]. A Gestalt for Hegel was simultaneously a social formation or ‘way of life’ (including both labour processes and superstructure), a ‘way of thinking’ or spiritual culture/ideology of a community, and a material culture, including spoken words and human body forms as well as means of production, land, etc.,.
Children had to be raised into the culture of a community, but the kind of conundrums which scientists later posed for themselves in terms of how sensuous perception of forms was possible, simply did not arise for Hegel. The following excerpt from the Preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit shows how Hegel saw the individual appropriating the culture of his or her community:
“The particular individual, so far as content is concerned, has also to go through the stages through which the general mind has passed, but as shapes once assumed by mind and now laid aside, as stages of a road which has been worked over and levelled out. Hence it is that, in the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes, for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world’s culture delineated in faint outline. This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In this respect culture or development of mind (Bildung), regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. Looked at, however, from the side of universal mind qua general spiritual substance, culture means nothing else than that this substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, brings about its own inherent process and its own reflection into self.”
Hegel did not and could not, at the beginning of the 19th century, solve the problem of exactly how individuals learn, but he set the terms in which this problem could be solved. Learning entailed the individual moving through a series of Gestalten leading up to that of the general spiritual culture of the wider community.
In his Logic, where Hegel developed the general rules exhibited in the movement, change and interaction of Gestalten, we see that a Gestalt is built up of notions or concepts, understood as finite systems of practical activity, nodes in the infinite web of social interconnections, reflecting the entire shape of consciousness in just one simple, unique set of relationships, very similar to Goethe’s notion of Urphänomenon. To use a phrase coined by Vygotsky, a concept is the ‘unit of analysis’ for understanding a Gestalt. Thus, we can also use the term ‘Gestalt’ to represent a finite system of social practice, not just a whole social formation.
Hegel had produced a foundation for a socio-cultural theory of the mind in an idealist form. The Gestalt was simultaneously way of life, way of thinking and inherited culture, but for Hegel it was contradictions in the way of thinking which was in the last instance what generated the dynamism and eventual crisis in a social formation, not whether the social formation managed to ‘earn its keep’, so to speak, by producing the means of satisfying its material needs. So Hegel gave priority to thought over nature and labour. But we can adopt his idea of Gestalt whilst rejecting the location of the dynamism of a Gestalt in logical deficits in its concept.
In his appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy, Karl Marx made a number of important modifications relevant to the question of how the idea of Gestalt was received in the twentieth century. In his own words:
“The premises from which we begin are ... the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.” (The German Ideology §I.1a, 1845)
So Marx makes it quite explicit: what constitutes a Gestalt is “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions” – not ‘thought-forms’.
“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” (Theses on Feuerbach 8)
Marx makes practical human activity the key category; Gestalt is not a thought-form, but a system of social practices.
“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” (The German Ideology §I.1b, 1845)
Marx explicitly makes the material production of people’s needs the primary activity, determinant in relation to the spiritual life of the community in general. What is more, whereas Hegel never knew a social movement or emancipatory class struggle, the principle at the heart of a Gestalt is not, as it was for Hegel, a ‘criterion of truth’ buried in ideology; for Marx it is an antagonistic social relation arising in the labour process, encapsulated in the archetypal relation of bourgeois society, the commodity relation. Historically speaking, every social formation produces and meets people’s needs in and through some definite system of social relations which, for the majority, constitute a form of oppression, and as the productive forces develop, the system of relations in which these forces are activated become an actual fetter on production and impede development., and have to be overthrown. Thus, Marx makes the struggle of people to emancipate themselves from the very system of relations whereby their needs are met, the motor force of development.
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” [Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859]
Like Hegel, Marx saw individual psychology as a product of social conditions, and he was not troubled by the kind of problems which tortured the minds of later positivist natural scientists looking for the source of mind inside the head.
When Vygotsky and his colleagues in the early USSR began their systematic critique of the psychology of the day, they inherited from Marx this concept of Gestalt as consciousness inseparable from social practice. But the construction of a science of psychology meant going beyond generalised notions of social consciousness to the instantiation of consciousness in individual organisms. For this task, Hegel’s description of how a child may ‘take possession’ of the ‘general mind’, in the excerpt from the Preface to the Phenomenology, is crucial. Every individual in fact participates in only a fraction of the universe of social practice and what is more, does so from the standpoint of some particular social position. And yet, a human being, as a living, self-conscious being in their own right, must constitute along with their social situation, a living whole, a Gestalt. The child, together with the more limited sphere of practical activity through which the child’s needs are met, must progress through a series of Gestalten, each of which is at every stage, a functional living system in which the child’s needs are met in a manner consistent with both the child’s limited functional ability and the general system of social production.
Almost everything about how Vygotsky appropriated these ideas flows from his situation in the young Soviet Union, in the wake of the greatest social revolution of our time, saturated with Marxism and with a mandate to work towards fostering a new, higher type of human being, ‘socialist man’.
This situation made it possible for Vygotsky to draw on the insights of Marx and Hegel which had been lost as a result of the analytical kind of science preferred by dominant positivist ideology of the late 19th/early 20th century. Like Marx, Vygotsky conceived of the Gestalt, not just as a brain structure or scheme of perception, but as a system of social relationships and activity, which included the child in the social situation through which the child’s needs are met.
The key concept that Vygotsky presented in his unfinished work on child development is the social situation of development. In the context of cultural psychology it would be a truism to state that the social situation determines the course of child’s development, but what does this mean? what aspects of the social situation are important, how do these aspects intervene in development? and is the process of development determined solely by the social situation or does the child herself determine the course of development in some way? Vygotsky resolves this problem brilliantly and in the spirit of Marx and Hegel as follows.
The social situation in which the child finds herself constitutes a predicament, a predicament from which the child can only emancipate herself by making a development, that is to say, by a qualitative transformation of their own psychological structure and the structure of her relationship with those who are providing for her needs, a transformation which frees her from the constraints in which she was trapped. The new type of psychological functioning which the child attains is not implicit in the (former) social situation of development; on the contrary, development towards the new formation is actually an escape from the social situation of development, a negation of it. This self-emancipation is only possible if the child manifests a drive which transcends the limits of her situation; absent this drive, and there can be no development.
This is the basic concept of the social situation of development: a predicament from which the child emancipates herself by developing.
At any given point in the child’s development, the child’s needs are met in and through a system of social relations and activity, a Gestalt: a concept of the child which is embedded in both the expectations of the adults around the child and the level of development of the child’s physical and psychological functions.
For any society, reproduction of its culture and institutions down the generations is an imperative and historical experience ensures that the norms to which a child is subject are to some degree rational with respect to the developmental capacities of a child of the given age. All societies to some degree build age-level expectations into their institutional practices, and the children of a society are motivated to conform to these yardsticks. So the development process is conditioned by these cultural-historically inherited expectations which the adults bring to the social situation of development.
The fact of development of infants into adult citizens can be made intelligible only by the fact that beginning with birth itself, individuals strive to emancipate themselves from barriers to their self-determination, barriers which bar them from full participation within the horizons of their own expectations. Although this drive takes on uniquely human forms which are culturally constructed, it is reasonable to presume the existence of a drive of this kind even in a newborn child. That is to say, at any stage in development, the child will normally strive to emancipate itself from anything which frustrates their control over their own conditions of existence insofar as they are capable of perceiving them.
Broadly, Vygotsky’s approach to development is that any given social situation of development, which meets the child’s needs in a manner consonant with the level of development of the various physical and psychological functions of the child, is also a constraint on the child’s self-determination and may be described as a kind of circle in which the child is trapped. Once a key psychological function has developed within this social situation of development beyond a certain limit, the child finds that she has outgrown the social situation of development and the role she is obliged to play in that situation. This faces the child with a kind of predicament: she does not yet have the capacity to adopt a different role, nor in fact can she even conceive of such a role, but she finds her present position a continual insult and offence. The result is period of crisis where by an exercise of will, at whatever stage of its development, the child refuses the role in the only way open to her and thereby creates conditions for a new social situation of development in which her needs can be met in a way, freed of the former constraint and free of the threats suffered during the transitional period of crisis, thus opening up a new period of stable development. The period of crisis is often traumatic for both the child and her carers; the child has no aim in mind, just a blind refusal, or rebellion against the confinement of her activity within oppressive bounds; her carers have to construct a new concept of the child and accommodate themselves and the child to a new set of relationships. If the adult carers fail to make an appropriate adjustment, then there may be a developmental pathology.
The child starts life with very little of what she needs to become a fully participating citizen of the society into which she has been born. Each of the Gestalten through which the child and their social situation pass constitutes a viable form of life, and at each step along the way different psychological functions develop in response to the social situation of development, building on what has been constructed in previous phases of development and each with different psychological functions playing a central role
Vygotsky used the Russian word, novo-obrazovaniye[5], usually translated as ‘neoformation’, to refer to the unique mode of socio-psychological functioning, which plays a central or leading role in development at some stage. So for Vygotsky, following Hegel and Marx, the basic unit of development is not the structure of the individual organism (‘Gestalt’), but the novo-obrazovaniye, the psychological function which is simultaneously a social function, embedded in the relation between a child and its social situation of development.
The child’s mental and physical life entails numerous psychological functions which are differentiated from one another and gain increasing independence from each other in the course of development; likewise the child’s needs are diverse. Nevertheless, the social situation of development is generally unitary; the child is treated by adults as a single, unitary individual and the social arrangements through which the child’s needs are met are normally though not necessarily integral. (As the child’s horizons broaden, such as when the child attends school, there is a possibility for the social situation of development to be internally differentiated, but this is not generally the case.) The child’s development takes place along a number of different lines of development at any given age, all within a single system of relations through which the child’s needs are met, and in which one lines of development is central to the process of development, that is, central to the completion of one stage of development and the initiation of the next.
The child develops in a specific way in and through the exercise of the physical and psychological functions through which their needs are being met, development which in general is gradual and focused on the neoformation which plays the key role in development at this stage, though it is not necessarily crucial to meeting the child’s basic needs at the time.
In general, the social situation of development presupposes a certain mode of dependence of the child, in the way the child’s needs are being met. During a period of stable development the central neoformation develops to a point where the child senses that it is capable of transcending this mode of dependence; but the mode in which their needs are being met entails restrictions presaged on the immaturity of the given function. So it is the child, by an act of will, who responds to their frustration by refusing the existing relations of dependence, often displaying a characteristic kind of negativism. There is no intention on the part of the child to change the social situation; it is just that the child now finds the situation insufferable.
The general schema of development from newborn to adult is that the child begins life physically, biologically, psychologically, materially, socially and culturally dependent on their immediate system of support, and in that sense they are an undifferentiated and subordinate part of the Gestalt. Equally, the child’s psychological structure begins as an undifferentiated whole, and in passing through a series of Gestalten, the psychological structure of the child undergoes a series of differentiations in which a given psychological function differentiates itself and gives rise to a new formation, a ‘neoformation’. This process continues up to adulthood, in which, if the process of development has been successfully completed, the person is now fully socialized and qualifies as a free agent operating within the norms of the culture. Only as a fully independent citizen does she become a fully integrated member of the society. Internally, this process of socialization corresponds to the successive differentiation of psychological functions, articulated within the individual’s psychological structure: perception is freed from handling, thinking is freed from remembering and vice versa, intelligence is freed from speech, and so on.
The neoformation, that is to say mode of social interaction and the corresponding mode of psychological functioning, created by the child’s exercise of will during the period of critical development, reshapes the relationships of the social situation of development and normally the child demonstrates to her carers and herself her capacity to play a different role, around which a new social situation of development is constructed, and entirely new kind of development ensue.
What is not immediately clear is the specific functions which underlie each such transformation and what is the relationship between the mode of activity through which the child’s needs are being met and the central line of development which eventually leads to the social situation of development becoming inadequate and being challenged by the child.
What is meant by ‘central line of development’ is the following. Each stable period of development takes place within a social situation of development, created by the child’s forceful breaking of the former situation and the carers’ responsive adjustment of their relationships with the child. The period begins with a still immature central neoformation, whose activity is made possible by the new social situation of development, but not yet fully differentiated and still bearing the hallmarks of the former relationships. Strengthening under the influence of the activities which are enabled by the social situation, the central neoformation begins to reorganise other psychological functions, which gradually realign themselves around the central neoformation in the leading developmental role. Subsequently, in the latter phase of the age period, the central neoformation begins to come into conflict with the social situation of development. Having opened up new possibilities, the central neoformation discloses possibilities beyond the confines of the social situation of development and a period of crisis begins.
The above ‘story’ Vygotsky called the ‘central line of development’. There are other lines of development unfolding at the same time, but they are peripheral, that is to say they are secondary at this stage in that they do not contribute to the building up of the specific predicament which characterises this period of development. In subsequent periods of development, the line of development which was at a certain stage central, continues, but is no longer central, and plays a peripheral role. Likewise, a line of development which was formerly in the background, may step forward into the central role.
So during the stable periods of development it is the growth of the one, central neoformation which constitutes development, i.e., ultimately creates the predicament which forces the child to transform itself. During crisis periods on the other hand, it is the transformation of relationships and the mode of the child’s activity which drives the changes in all the psychological functions and their rearrangement in a new structure.
Vygotsky was formulating a completely new vision of the structure of the human personality, a structure for which there were few satisfactory existing concepts, but there can be no doubt that he drew on Marx’s conception of the forms of movement of social formations. Marx remarked:
“There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features.” (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx 1859)
The main activity in a given complex whole usually gives its name to the whole corresponding stage of development, e.g., commodity production, the pre-condition for the accumulation of capital, is the main activity in a capitalist society. Capital does not arise spontaneously when its conditions for exist have come about, but actually reorganizes production and distribution so as to secure its own preconditions, and can only be initiated by ‘primitive accumulation’, basically large-scale robbery. The market opens the way for a huge development in the forces of production, but at just that time when the market becomes a fetter on production, the proletariat, itself a product of capitalist development, endeavours to break from its position as an exploited class and overthrow these relations and establish new systems of production and distribution in which the workers have a new social position and their needs are met in new ways. This was Marx’s idea of the dynamics of social life under capitalism.
It was this same conception of the development of a complex whole or Gestalt which characterised Vygotsky’s conception of personality and a person’s relation to their social situation. Just as Marx and Hegel had conceived of history in terms of periods of gradual change punctuated by periods of crisis and transformation, Vygotsky conceived of child development in the same way. Talking of these developmental crises, Vygotsky noted:
“The age levels represent the integral, dynamic formation, the structure, which defines the role and relative significance of each partial line of development. At each given age period, development occurs in such a way that separate aspects of the child’s personality change and as a result of this, there is a reconstruction of the personality as a whole - in development [i.e., the critical periods] there is just exactly a reverse dependence: the child’s personality changes as a whole in its internal structure and the movement of each of its parts is determined by the laws of change of this whole.” (The Problem of age, §2, 1934)
In the early phase of stable periods of development, development consists in consolidating the immature central neoformation characteristic of this period; in the later phase, development consists in preparing the child for a new social situation transcending the bounds of the central neoformation. During critical periods, development consists in facilitating a total rearrangement of the relationships and modes of activity under conditions when the child is not yet ready but is nonetheless striving to break through.
In his unfinished draft (LSV CW v. 5) Vygotsky named 6 stable periods of development, punctuated by 7 crisis periods from birth to age 17. Social conditions in 1930s USSR were very different to the conditions in which children grow up today. Although Vygotsky named the various periods of development according to age or attendance at school, his periodisation essentially depended on the occurrence of specific structural transformations in the child’s relation to their social environment and correspondingly in their mental life. He claimed that under different social conditions these transformations will still take place, but will happen “differently,” and up to a point, presumably at different ages. For example, referring to the crisis at age 7, he says:
“Facts show that in other conditions of rearing, the crisis occurs differently. In children who go from nursery school to kindergarten, the crisis occurs differently than it does in children who go into kindergarten from the family. However, this crisis occurs in all normally proceeding child development. ...” (p. 295)
Investigation of the scope and nature of the variability of this periodisation is beyond the scope of this study. But according to Vygotsky, there is a period of crisis at about the age of 7, the age at which almost all societies either send children off to school or otherwise begin the child’s formal preparation for adulthood, outside the immediate security of the home. Vygotsky characterises this crisis as the differentiation of the internal and external life of the child. By this age, the child has learnt to control their behaviour, including to some extent also their psychological activity. For example, in middle childhood, they will be expected to run messages and not be distracted or become lost in fantasy. They will also be able to engage in a limited range of strategic behaviours such as politeness or deception. But on the whole, their inner life is wholly manifested in their behaviour and vice versa. This is the mode of behaviour which Vygotsky calls ‘childlike directness’. Although politeness and deception and other forms of strategic behaviour appear to us to demonstrate the separation of internal and external life – otherwise how is it possible for the child to not betray their real feelings? – in fact, these forms of behaviour are simply special forms of behaviour that the child learns. The true marker of the separation of internal and external life is the development of ‘metacognition’, that is to say, the ability of the child to make an object of their own mental life, to remember what they were thinking 5 minutes ago, for example, or what mental processes led them to this or that belief. These abilities are known to undergo a rapid growth around the age of 6 or 7.
It is the differentiation between mental life and behaviour which is the pre-condition for the development of metacognitive abilities in the child, and also the precondition for learning to use concepts which originate from the wider culture and which cannot be arrived at by generalization from their own experience, as well as for mastering the kind of strategic behaviour necessary for survival in the cut-throat world of their peers, and for participating in rule based games.
According to Vygotsky
“the loss of childlike directness distinguishes the child at seven years of age. The proximate cause of childlike directness is an inadequate differentiation of internal and external life. The experiences of the child, his desires and expressed desires, that is, behaviour and activity, usually are an inadequately differentiated whole in the preschooler.” (LSV CW vol 5, p. 289)
The symptoms of the crisis, Vygotsky describes as “playing the fool”:
“two traits... especially those who have a difficult childhood and experience the crisis in a concentrated form. The child begins to behave affectedly and capriciously ... Something deliberate, ridiculous, and artificial, some kind of frivolousness, clownishness, and playing the fool appears in his behaviour; the child makes himself a jester ... makes a fool of himself and elicits censure not laughter, this leaves the impression of unmotivated behaviour ... behaviour that is somewhat fanciful, artificial mannered, and forced.” (LSV CW vol 5, p. 289)
The gap between experience and action is bridged by the intellect:
“The loss of directness signifies the introduction of the intellectual factor into our acts, and this wedges itself between experience and the direct act, ... a certain intellectual factor appears in each experience, in each of its manifestations.” (LSV CW vol 5, p. 290)
Little material is available in respect of Vygotsky’s conception of the crisis at age 13 which he mentions in the same volume. It is this writer’s surmise that this crisis of development, which is well known across a wide variety of cultures, is in our society at least, constituted in the child taking up a critical or sceptical attitude to the knowledge of the society into which they have just been inducted. But at this age they are not equipped for a genuinely critical stance, having no point of support outside the culture, consequently the crisis manifests itself in the form of an unreasonable rejectionism, and through this unreasonable rejectionism, the child distances themselves from their ‘inherited’ social position, and thereby takes the final step towards qualifying for adult membership of the society at large, which presupposes not just knowledge of the culture, but the capacity to critically appropriate that knowledge and creatively modify it as part of the new generation of adults.
This brings us to the implication of this for the design of social arrangements which condition the child’s experiences during these critical years, generally occupied by attendance at elementary and middle school. The child ought to be able to take an intellectual attitude towards their own activity and engage in metacognitive activity. The early phase of formal education then needs to foster and consolidate this function, which rests on the differentiation of the internal and external life of the child.
The latter phase of this period ought to be preparing the child for the critical period to come; if they are to successfully negotiate the crisis at age 13 (or thereabouts) despite the fact that at an earlier age they cannot and must not be expected to take a critical attitude to what they are being taught – that would be ridiculous – they must be prepared for becoming critics, the critical attitude must be fostered, without encouraging destructive skepticism in relation to the knowledge of their times, which is still developing.
All societies make some kind of arrangement to prepare their 6-13 year-olds (or thereabouts) for adult citizenship. If they are to succeed and become the next generation of young adults, then children must successfully negotiate these psychological transformations and modes of participation in social life..
It is to the art of the teacher, that the problem of exactly what activities will best consolidate the intellectual factor implied in the differentiation of internal and external life of the child, and lay the groundwork for the teenager to develop the critical functions of the intellect.
1. Gestalt is an untranslatable German word that has been imported into other languages. However, the normal meaning of Gestalt in German is ‘figure’ as in “what a fine figure of a man,” referring to the overall dynamic configuration of a living thing. In other languages it is used only in the sense given to the word by Gestalt Psychology, as an integral structure or indivisible whole.
2. Bildung is another uniquely German word meaning the process of acquiring the culture of one’s times, becoming a cultured person. Originally, Bildung referred only to the shaping, forming, cultivating of objects, but took on the meaning of ‘education’ in the 18th century; Goethe is renowned for his Bildungsroman, novels narrating the personal development of the central character, and it became a central concept for Herder, Hegel, Schiller and & c.
3. Anschauung is usually translated as ‘intuition’. The verb schauen means to see or view as in Weltanschauung = worldview, and entered philosophy when Meister Eckhart translated the Latin contemplatio, the activity of contemplating something, especially the divine. Kant however took Anschauung to be exclusively sensory, rejecting the possibility of intellectual intuition, so the senses were the only source of form or shape.
4. Urphänomenon is unique to Goethe; the prefix ‘ur’ means primitive, original or earliest, and is usually translated as “archetypal.” Phänomenon means phenomenon, that is appearance. I take it that it is represented as ‘abstract notion’ in Hegel’s Logic, exemplified by the ‘commodity relation’ in Marx’s critique of political economy, and ‘word meaning’ in Vygotsky.
5. Novo-obrazovaniye is usually rendered as ‘neoformation’. novo- means new; obraz means ‘picture’ (as does the German Bild) and obrazovaniye or ‘picturing’, is usually translated as ‘education’, but seems to have a similar meaning to the German Bildung. So according to its etymology, novo-obrazovaniye means a new ‘accomplishment’ or unique mode of social functioning.