Hyman Ludmila
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2012 Jun;43(2):473-82. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.11.007. Epub 2011 Nov 23.
Vygotsky's The Historical Significance of the Crisis in Psychology (1926-1927) is an important text in the history and philosophy of psychology that has only become available to scholars in 1982 in Russian, and in 1997 in English. The goal of this paper is to introduce Vygotsky's conception of psychology to a wider audience. I argue that Vygotsky's argument about the "crisis" in psychology and its resolution can be fully understood only in the context of his social and political thinking. Vygotsky shared the enthusiasm, widespread among Russian leftist intelligentsia in the 1920s, that Soviet society had launched an unprecedented social experiment: The socialist revolution opened the way for establishing social conditions that would let the individual flourish. For Vygotsky, this meant that "a new man" of the future would become "the first and only species in biology that would create itself." He envisioned psychology as a science that would serve this humanist teleology. I propose that The Crisis is relevant today insofar as it helps us define a fundamental problem: How can we systematically account for the development of knowledge in psychology? I evaluate how Vygotsky addresses this problem as a historian of the crisis.
维果茨基的《心理学危机的历史意义》（1926 - 1927）是心理学历史与哲学领域的一篇重要文献，直到1982年才有俄文版供学者使用，1997年才有英文版。本文的目的是向更广泛的读者介绍维果茨基的心理学概念。我认为，只有在维果茨基的社会和政治思想背景下，才能充分理解他关于心理学“危机”及其解决方法的论点。维果茨基与20世纪20年代俄罗斯左翼知识分子中普遍存在的热情一致，即苏联社会发起了一场前所未有的社会实验：社会主义革命为建立能让个人蓬勃发展的社会条件开辟了道路。对维果茨基来说，这意味着未来的“新人”将成为“生物学中第一个也是唯一能创造自身的物种”。他设想心理学是一门服务于这种人文主义目的论的科学。我认为《心理学危机》在今天仍然具有相关性，因为它有助于我们界定一个基本问题：我们如何能够系统地解释心理学中知识的发展？我将评估维果茨基作为危机史学家是如何解决这个问题的。
