Chapter 1
The Problem of the Development of Higher Mental Functions

More and more eternal laws o f nature are turning into laws of history.
– F. Engels

The history of the development of the higher mental functions is a field in psychology that has never been explored. Despite the enormous importance of studying the processes in the development of higher mental functions for proper understanding and logical elucidation of all aspects of the child’s personality, no precise boundaries of this field have yet been established, neither has a formulation of basic problems or tasks confronting researchers been methodologically realized nor has an appropriate method of investigation been devised; no elements of a theory or at least of a working hypothesis, have been set up or developed that might aid a researcher in thinking through and tentatively explaining facts and observed patterns discovered in the process of his work.

Also, the very concept of development of higher mental functions as applied to child psychology -in our opinion, one of the central concepts of genetic psychology still remains vague and obscure. It is inadequately distinguished from other close and related concepts, the outlines of its sense are frequently diffuse, the content ascribed to it, inadequately defined.

It is very clear that with this state of the problem, we must begin by explaining the basic concepts from the standpoint of basic problems, from defining precisely the problem of the research. Just as exploring a new area is impossible without precisely and clearly stating the questions to which it must give an answer, a mono­ graph on the history of the development of higher mental functions of the child which marks a first attempt at a systematic presentation and theoretical bringing together of many individual studies in this area must start with a clear under­ standing of the subject whose study it must serve.

The question is also complicated by the fact that elucidation of this subject requires a basic change in the traditional view of the process of mental development of the child. A change in the usual aspect from which facts of mental development are regarded is an indispensable prerequisite without which a proper formulation of the problems that interest us is impossible. But it is easier to assimilate a thou­ sand new facts in any field than to assimilate a new point of view of a few already known facts. Moreover, many, many facts stably embedded in the system of child psychology are as if torn up by the roots from firmly established sites and appear in a completely new light when they are considered from the aspect of the development of higher mental functions of the child, but they are not yet recognized specifically from this aspect. The difficulty of our problem consists not so much in underdevelopment and novelty of the questions entering into it as in the one-sided and erroneous formulation of these questions, affected by all the factual material accumulated over the decades and by the inertia of erroneous interpretation which continues to have its effect to this day.

The one-sidedness and erroneousness of the traditional view of facts on development of higher mental functions consist primarily and mainly in an inability to look at these facts as facts of historical development, in the one-sided consideration of them as natural processes and formations, in merging and not distinguishing the natural and the cultural, the essential and the historical, the biological and the social in the mental development of the child; in sh o rt – in an incorrect basic understanding of the nature of the phenomena being studied.

There are many individual studies and beautiful monographs on separate as­ pects, problems and instances of the development of higher mental functions of the child. Children’s speech and drawing, mastery of reading and writing, logic and world outlook, development of number concepts and operations, even the psychology of algebra and the formation of concepts have been the subject of model studies many times. But all of these processes and phenomena, all mental functions and forms of behavior were studied mainly from the innate aspect, from the aspect of the natural processes that formed them and were a part of them.

Higher mental functions and complex cultural forms of behavior with all their specific features of functioning and structure, with all the uniqueness of their genetic path from inception to full maturity or death, with all the special laws to which they are subject usually remained outside the field of vision of the researcher.

Complex formations and processes were partitioned into component elements and no longer existed as wholes, as structures. They were reduced to processes of a more elementary order occupying a subordinate position and fulfilling a definite function with respect to the whole of which they were a part. As an organism partitioned into component elements discloses its composition but no longer exhibits specifically organic properties and patterns, in the same way these complex and integral mental formations lost their basic quality and stopped being themselves when reduced to processes of a more elementary order.

Such a formulation of the question had the most disastrous effect on the problem of the mental development of the child, for it is precisely the concept of d evelopment that is radically different from the mechanistic representation of the emergence of a complex mental process from separate parts or elements like a sum derived from an arithmetical addition of separate components.

As a rule, as a result of the dominance of this approach to the problems of the development of higher mental functions of the child, an analysis of a developed form o f behavior replaced explaining the genesis of this form. Frequently, genesis was replaced by an analysis of some complex form of behavior at various stages of its development so that a notion was formed that what was developing was not a form as a whole but its separate elements which, as a sum, produced at each given stage one phase or another in the development of the given form of behavior.

Putting it more simply, with this state of the matter, the very process of development of complex and higher forms of behavior remained unexplained and un­ realized methodologically. Data on genesis were usually replaced by purely external mechanical, chronological coincidence of the appearance of one higher mental proc­ ess or another at one age or another. For example, psychology informed us that formation of abstract concepts occurs in definite forms in a child at the age of fourteen approximately just as baby teeth are replaced by permanent teeth at the age of seven approximately. But psychology could not answer either the question as to why formation of abstract concepts occurs at just that age or the questions as to what gives rise to it and how it arises and develops.

Our comparison is not casual: it reflects the real state of the matter in child psychology. Psychology has not yet explained adequately the differences between organic and cultural processes of development and maturation, between two genetic orders different in essence and nature and, consequently, between two basically different orders of laws to which these two lines in the development of the child’s behavior are subject.

For child psychology – old and modern – an exactly opposite direction is characteristic: placing the facts of cultural and organic development of child behavior in one order and considering both as phenomena of one order, of one psychological nature that discloses basically identical laws.

We can close the circle of our critical description of the traditional perspective of cultural development by returning to the point with which we started, specifically, to indicating how and at what price such a reduction of two different orders of phenomena and laws to one order was attained in child psychology. It was at a cost of giving up the study of specific patterns of one order, at the cost of reducing mental processes from complex to elementary, at the cost of doing a one-sided study of mental functions from their innate aspect.

In separate chapters on analysis and elucidation of the functional structure and genesis of forms of human behavior, we will make a special study of the problem of the whole and parts as applied to the development of higher mental functions and the problem of reducing higher forms o f behavior to elementary forms. Then we will attempt to present theoretically the more important specific patterns of the process of mental development of the child as they are found in the study of the main mental functions. Our abstract discussion may then turn into something concrete and be clothed in the flesh and blood of scientific facts.

But now the proximate and only goal of our discussion is to compare the two principal perspectives of the process of mental development of the child. One was dominant during the whole period of existence of child psychology in the form of a silent premise not expressed or formulated by anyone, but nevertheless a directing and basic prerequisite of all research; in an almost unchanged form, it continues to exist even now in new studies and is silently present on every page of a psychology book or text dealing with facts of development of higher mental functions.

The second perspective was prepared by all the preceding development of the problem, all the accumulation of factual material, all the contradictions and blind alleys to which the old perspective led researchers, the whole enormous mass of questions unresolved in their old formulation, the whole mass which, together with the accumulation of facts, grew and accumulated for decades on an erroneous base, the whole course of the psychological crisis, successes in other areas of genetic psychology – animal psychology and the psychology of primitive peoples – and finally the introduction of the dialectical method into psychology.

But even this second perspective, as far as we know, has not yet been expressed or formulated at all precisely and fully by anyone. In the process of exposition, we will try to collect and present all these allusions to a new understanding of the history of the cultural development of the child, all those elements of the new m ethodological formula that are found dispersed among separate researchers. But even collected together, they still will not make up what we need, what might serve as a starting point for our research. For this reason we must try to determine more precisely the essence of both perspectives and mark the starting point of our own research as well.

As we have already indicated, the first perspective is characterized by three points: the study of higher mental functions from the aspect of the natural processes comprising them, reducing processes from higher and complex to elementary, and ignoring specific features and patterns of cultural behavioral development. These points are common to both the old subjective, empirical psychology and the new objective psychology – American behaviorism and Russian reflexology.

With all the major, basic differences between the old and the new psychology, which we must not lose sight for a moment, both perspectives are linked by one common formal methodological point which various authors have already indicated many times. This point is that in both perspectives, the purpose of analysis is to equate the problems of scientific study with decomposing higher forms and structures into primary elements and reducing them to lower forms while ignoring problems o f quality, which is not reducible to quantitative differences, th at is, to non-dialectical scientific thinking.

The old subjective psychology saw the basic problem of scientific research to be the isolation of primary, irreducible elements of experience that it found by abstraction in elementary mental phenomena such as sensation, feeling, pleasure- displeasure and voluntary effort, or in elementary mental processes and functions such as attention and association isolated in the same way. Higher and complex processes were decomposed into component parts and, without remainders, were reduced to combinations of these primary experiences or processes different in complexity and form. In this way, an enormous mosaic of mental life developed comprised o f sep arate pieces of experience, a grandiose atom istic picture of the dismembered human mind.

But even the new objective psychology knows no other way toward knowing the complex whole except for analysis and decomposition, except for elucidation of composition and reduction to elements. Reflexology closes its eyes to the qualitative uniqueness of higher forms of behavior; for it, there is no basic difference between these forms and lower elementary processes. In general, all behavioral processes can be decomposed into associative reflexes that vary according to length and number of links in the chain, inhibited in some cases and not manifested externally. Behaviorism operates in units of a somewhat different type, but if we replace one set of units in reflexological analysis of higher behavioral forms by another, if we use reactions instead of reflexes, then the picture will be remarkably similar to the analyses of objective psychology.

True, behaviorism – in its most consistent and extreme form – is inclined to emphasize the role and significance of the organism as a whole, inclined even to see, from the perspective of behavioral processes as a whole, the essence of the difference between psychological and physiological research. Sometimes it attempts to consider the complex wholes specifically as wholes. In these cases, it speaks of instinctive and emotional functions and, in contrast to these, about acquired functions, that is, systems of habits developed and ready for use in appropriate situations.

The concept of system and function differs basically, of course, from the con­ cept of an arithmetical sum and a mechanical chain of reactions. It assumes a certain regularity in the construction of a system, a unique role of the system as such, and finally, a history of development and formation of the system, whereas for a sum or chain of reactions nothing is assumed for its elucidation except a simple coincidence of external contiguity of known stimuli and reactions. In the same way, the concept of mental function – even in the sense in which it is used by extreme partisans of behaviorism who reject seeing in it anything beyond a system of previously developed habits – necessarily assumes and includes in itself, first, a relation to the whole with respect to which a certain function is carried out and, second, the idea of the integral character of the mental formation itself which is termed a function.

In this sense, introducing the concepts of system and function into behavioral psychology undoubtedly represents a step forward from the purely mechanistic conception of behavior. In scientific development, both of these concepts may sooner or later lead researchers who use them to rejecting this conception completely. But in the form in which the indicated concepts are developed in behavioral psychology now, they signify scarcely anything more than a timid hint o f the inadequacy of former terms and concepts and for this reason they have not produced and, at the present stage of development, cannot produce what is needed for a study of higher behavioral processes adequate to their psychological nature.

But this is exactly what we assert in bringing subjective and objective psychology together into one specific relation: only that the atomistic formulation of empirical and objective psychology makes the study o f higher mental processes commensurate with their psychological nature basically and factually impossible. In essence, each of the concepts is only a psychology of elementary processes.

For this reason, it is not by chance that in child psychology only chapters are written that pertain to the earliest age when predominantly elementary functions mature and develop but higher functions are still in a rudimentary state and are going through what is essentially their prehistoric period. In the future we will see that without a proper understanding of this prehistoric period in the development of higher mental functions a scientific development and tracing of the very history of their development will be impossible. But there is no doubt about one thing: specifically, during this period, the innate, natural aspect of the development of cultural higher forms of behavior predominates, specifically during this period, they are most accessible to elementary analysis.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the history of the development of children’s speech, for example, ends for most researchers with an early age when actually only the process of establishing speech-motor habits, the process of mastering the external, innate aspect of speech approaches completion, but when only the first steps have been taken along the path of development of speech as a complex and higher behavioral form.

Further, it is not accidental that child psychology as represented by its best exponents concludes that its main interest must always be concentrated around the first years of a child’s life. In the eyes of these researchers, child psychology is the psychology of early childhood when basic and elementary mental functions mature. These authors assume that a child takes great steps along the developmental path soon after birth and it is specifically the first steps (the only thing accessible to modern psychology) that the psychologist must study. This is like saying that in the study o f the development of the body in essence only embryos would be studied.

This comparison reflects the real state of the m atter in child psychology. All discussions of the central meaning of first steps of mental development and the main defense of the position that child psychology is essentially a psychology of the infantile and very early age agree as much as possible with what we have said above. In the very essence of its direction, modern psychology has access only to the study of the embryonal development of higher functions, only the embryology of the human mind, to which it consciously wants to turn, realizing more fully its own methodological limits. In child psychology also essentially only embryos are being studied.

But a comparison with embryology is not just objectively true; it is a traitorous comparison as well. It points up the weak situation of child psychology, gives it an Achilles heel, discloses the forced abstention and self-limitation which psychology wants to make into its own virtue.

Striving to know the basic laws of development in the simplest relations and comparing mental development of the child with embryonic development shows absolutely obviously that in traditional psychology, the development of behavior is regarded as being analogous to embryonal development of the body, that is, as a purely innate biological process. In essence, this situation is based on the well- known and undoubtedly fundamental fact of the coincidence of intensive develop­ m ent of the brain in the first three years of life, during which the principal increase in its weight is attained, with the development of basic elementary mental functions of the child in those years.

We are far from the thought of even slightly belittling the significance of the first steps of mental development for the whole history of the child’s personality or the significance of studying these steps. Both are indisputably very important not only because in itself the biological development of behavior that occurs with special intensity soon after birth is a most important subject for psychological study, but also because the history of the development of higher mental functions is im­ possible without a study of the prehistory of these functions, their biological roots, their organic properties. The genetic roots of two basic cultural forms of behavior are established at the infantile age: using tools and human speech ; this circumstance in itself places the infantile age at the center of the prehistory of cultural development.

We would wish at least to point out that striving to limit child psychology to the study of embryonic development of the higher functions indicates that the psychology of higher m ental functions itself is in an embryonic state; that the very concept of development of higher mental functions is foreign to child psychology; that because of necessity, it limits the concept of mental development of the child solely to the biological development of elementary functions that are directly d e­ pendent on maturation of the brain as a function of organic maturation of the child.

A similar situation also exists in objective psychology. It is no accident that the most developed, most consistent and methodologically rich section of reflexol­ ogy is the reflexology of the infantile age. Neither is it an accident that the best studies in behavioral psychology pertain to early childhood and to the elementary instinctive-emotional reactions of the child.

But the paths of objective and subjective psychology of cultural development of the child diverge when higher mental functions are approached. While objective psychology consistently rejects differentiating lower and higher mental functions and limits itself to dividing reactions into innate and acquired and to considering all acquired reactions as a single class of habits, empirical psychology, with magnificent consistency, exhausts the mental development of the child with the maturation of elementary functions on the one hand and, on the other, constructs a second story o f unknown origin above every elementary function.

Together with mechanical memory, logical memory was differentiated as its higher form, voluntary attention was added above involuntary attention, creative imagination was added above reproductive imagination, thinking in concepts rose as a second story above figurative thinking, lower feelings were symmetrically supplemented with higher feelings, impulsive volition, with foresight.

Thus, all studies of the principal psychological functions were constructed in two stories. But since child psychology dealt only with the lower story and the development and origin of higher functions was left completely unexplained, by the same token, a rupture developed between child psychology and general psychology.

What general psychology found and isolated under the name of voluntary attention, creative imagination, logical memory, foresight, etc., that is, higher form, higher function, remained terra incognita for child psychology.

The history of the development of will in the child has not yet been written.

In one of the concluding chapters of our monograph, we will try to show that, in essence, this is tantamount to an assertion that the history of the development of all higher mental functions has not yet been written or that the history of the cul­ tural development of the child has not yet been written. In essence, all three state­ ments are equivalent – they express one and the same idea. But now we will use this indisputable position as an example which, owing to the factual similarity of the scientific fate of many related problems, can be extended also to the remaining higher functions, leaving aside for the time being the complex course of further thought that would bring to our attention three basic concepts of our research: the concept of higher mental function, the concept of cultural development of behavior, and the concept of mastery of behavior by internal processes. Just as the history of the development of child volition has not yet been written, the history of the d evelopment of the remaining higher functions has not yet been written, of voluntary attention, logical memory, etc. This is a fundamental fact which we must not bypass. In essence, we know nothing about the development of these processes. Except for fragmentary observations frequently found in two or three lines of text, we may say that child psychology passes over these questions in silence.

The inexplicability of the genesis of higher functions leads inevitably to the essentially metaphysical conception: higher and lower forms of memory, attention, and thinking exist together with each other independently of each other, they are linked genetically, functionally, or structurally; indeed they were primordially cre­ ated in a double form just as the existence of various animal species was represented before Darwin.5 This closes the path to scientific study and elucidation of higher processes and to general psychology so that not only the history of development, but the theory of logical memory and voluntary attention is absent from modern psychology.

The dualism of lower and higher levels, a metaphysical division of psychology into two levels, has its most extreme expression in the idea of dividing psychology into two separate and independent sciences: into physiological, natural-science, explanatory or causal psychology on the one hand, and interpretive, descriptive or teleological psychology of the mind as a basis of all humanistic sciences on the other. This idea of W Dilthey, H. Munsterberg, E. Husserl, and many others, exceptionally widespread in our time with many supporters, exhibits in a pure form two heterogeneous and, in the ordinary sense, contradictory tendencies that clashed throughout the whole period of existence within empirical psychology.

As the historical and methodological study of the contemporary crisis in psychology shows, empirical psychology was never united. Under cover of empiricism, a secret dualism continued to exist that was finally formulated and crystallized in physiological psychology on the one hand and in psychology of the mind on the other. Psychology of the mind is derived from the completely correct position that empirical psychology cannot rise above a study of the elements of mental life, that it cannot become the basis for humanistic sciences: history, linguistics, art criticism, social sciences.

From this incontrovertible position idealistic philosophy reached a single conclusion: psychology of the mind in its essence cannot be a discipline of natural science; life of the mind requires understanding, not explanation; the experimental and inductive method of research must yield to an intuitive discretion and comprehension of the essentials, to analysis of direct data of consciousness; causal explanation must be replaced by teleological; the precisely defined materialism of explanatory psychology must be conclusively dismissed from higher psychology; in the study of the mind, all material ties and all methods of natural science of deterministic thinking must be renounced. Thus, the old psychology was restored, in the literal and precise sense of the word, in a new form as the science of the mind.

There can be no more convincing evidence of the insolubility of the problem of higher mental functions on the basis of empirical psychology than the historical fate of this science, which split in two before our eyes and, favoring natural science, aspired to sacrifice its lower part in order to save the higher in pure form and in this way to render to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. So the dilemma, recognized by empirical psychology as fatal and unavoidable, consists in choosing either physiology of the mind or metaphysics. Psychology as a science is impossible – such is the historical end of empirical psychology.

It is not difficult to be convinced that reestablishment of metaphysical psychology, complete rejection of the causal and materialistic consideration of psychological problems, a return to pure idealism in psychology, neo-Platonism – all of this comprises another pole of the non-dialectical, atomistic thinking about which we spoke previously in connection with the mechanical division of the mind into sepa­ rate elements and which is the beginning and end of empirical psychology. Higher behavioral forms, bound by their origin to historic development of man, may be placed on par with physiological, organic processes (in which case their development is limited to the first years of life during which the whole brain grows rapidly) or they give up everything material and begin a new, this time eternal, supratemporal and free life in the realm of ideas, open to intuitive cognition that takes the form of a timeless “mathematics of the mind.” Either-or. Physiology or mathematics of the mind, but not history of human behavior as part of the general history of man.

Psychology from the aspect of culture was based on the assumption o f purely innate, natural laws or laws purely of the mind with a strictly metaphysical character, but not on historical laws. We will repeat again: the eternal laws of nature or eternal laws of the mind, but not historical laws.

Even those modern researchers who attempt to find an escape from the blind alleys of empirical psychology in a structural theory of mental development or in a functional-genetic consideration of the problem of cultural psychology are affected by this anti-historical disease. True, these researchers know that the genetic laws of psychology that they have established and disclosed apply only to a specific child, a child of our era. It would seem that there would be a single step to admitting the historical character of these laws. But instead of a step forward, the researcher rapidly and boldly takes a step back – to zoology – and maintains, for example, that laws governing the development of speech at an early age are the same as the laws that appear in the behavior of a chimpanzee in mastering tools, that is, laws of a biological character. No room remains for the uniqueness of higher, specifically human forms of behavior.

The concept of structure is similarly dispersed over all forms of behavior and mind. Again, in the light, or more correctly, in the dusk of structure all cats are gray: the only difference is that one eternal law of nature, the law of association, was replaced by another, also an eternal law of nature, the law of structure. For the cultural, the historical in human behavior again there are no appropriate concepts. The concept of structure gradually penetrates the physiology of nervous ac tivity, then even lower and deeper, into physics, and the historical (everything cultural is by its nature a historical phenomenon) is again dissolved in the innate, the cultural in the natural.

The internal contradiction, the methodological illegality of approaching historical categories of psychology as if they were natural categories, appears especially clearly and sharply in studies that are so bold as to go beyond the limits of studying embryos of higher forms of behavior and leave the criteria that are safe and guiding but obviously inadequate for explaining higher behavior: the parallelism between mental development and increase in brain weight. These studies are based on the assumption that development of higher mental functions with its main traits does not end in the first three years of life; that it is not exhausted by the development of natural processes that form the structure of higher forms of behavior; that psychology can and must seek specific laws of cultural-psychological development.

But even in the best studies of this type devoted to the development of speech and thinking in the preschool and school child, the development of judgment and deduction in childhood, development of the child’s world view, concepts of the world and about the causality and development of other higher and more complex functions, formations and aspects of child personality, in relation to all these prob­ lems there is a peculiar methodological approach as if they were innate, natural categories of psychology. Everything is taken outside the historical aspect. The con­ cepts of the world and of causality of a modern European child from an educated milieu and the same concepts of a child of any primitive tribe, the world view of a child of the stone age, the middle ages and the 20th century, all of these are basically the same, identical, equivalent to each other.

Cultural development is as if isolated from history and considered as a self-satisfying process governed by internal, self-contained forces, subject to its own imm anent logic. Cultural development is considered to be self-development.

This is the source of the immovable, static, absolute character of all the laws governing the development of the child’s thinking and world view. Again we are confronted by the eternal laws of nature. Children’s animism and egocentrism, magic thinking based on participation (the concept of connection or identity of completely different phenomena) and artificialism (the concept of creation and p roduction of natural phenomena) and many other phenomena present themselves to us as some kind of psychological forms, primordial, always present in child devel­ opment, unavoidable, always the same. The child and the development of his higher mental functions are considered in abstracto – outside the social environment, out­ side the cultural environment and the forms of logical thinking, world view, and concepts on causality that govern these functions.

Actually we did gain a little from parting with the parallelism of development of higher mental functions and increase in brain size, and we have left the younger years. True, we have before us not embryos but developed and mature complex forms, but what is the use of that when now the realistic-naturalistic approach domi­ nant in child psychology is replaced by a conditional-naturalistic approach con­ firmed by new studies? There, facts of development of higher mental functions were considered from their innate aspect as natural processes; here, immeasurably more complex facts of the same order are considered from the cultural aspect, but completely as if they were natural facts.

This functionalism, now celebrating not just one victory, this triumphant a ls o b (“as if”),14 did not essentially improve the situation by an iota and did not bring us closer by even a step to an adequate comprehension of the psychological nature of the cultural development of behavior. The naturalistic approach to facts and phenomena of cultural development remains intact. The nature of the phenomena being studied remains completely dark and confused.

A step forward consists of approaching child psychology from a new perspective; the step includes introducing into child psychology new and profound problem: compared with traditional psychology and is balanced out by a serious shortcoming a great step back that must be made by anyone who wants to approach new phenomena from the new perspective while retaining the old perspective entire and whole. The naturalistic approach to cultural-psychological problems was inadequate one-sided, here and there incorrect, but to a certain extent, completely finished and tested in biologically oriented psychology of infants and of early childhood.

It is already vindicated by the fact that all problems of studies of this kind were on the plane o f biological psychology, that elucidation of the innate structure of any higher mental function or operation was a completely regular and indispensable link in the whole chain of the investigation. The error lay in something else. It consisted of the fact that one link was taken as the whole chain, that analysis of cultural forms of behavior from the aspect of their structure replaced elucidating the genesis of these forms and their structure.

In new studies in which the problems were transferred to a new plane, in which cultural forms of behavior are considered as such and the naturalistic approach is retained intact, there is a serious internal contradiction. In that case, if the naturalistic approach to higher mental functions was appropriate to research problems, then here, with changed problems, it came into irreconcilable contradiction with the problems. There it was insufficient and inadequate to the phenomenon studied; here it is simply false and contradicts the nature of what is being studied. The golden rule of psychological mechanics triumphs again: what we won in for­ mulating the problem, we lost in the basic approach to its solution. We played without a result. The matter remained at the same point at which we left it several pages ago. If we move yet another step and pass from school age to the period of sexual maturity, to the transitional age and the age of youth, we will again for a short time have to experience the illusion that we have just left behind. Again, as in the transition from early childhood to preschool and school age, it will become inescapably apparent to us that we are getting farther and farther away from em­ bryos not only chronologically, but also, in essence, factually. A minute of attentive scrutiny, and the illusion disappears. We are back again at the same point.

The illusion is created by the circumstance that problems of cultural psychology clearly begin to dominate in studies of the behavior of the juvenile and young p er­ son. Some researchers openly differentiate two forms of maturation: primitive and cultural. Others see the basic and more essential psychological mark of every age in the fact th at the juvenile grows into the culture. The problems themselves brought out by age are extremely complicated in comparison with problems of the behavior of the very young child. One can explain nothing here by the increase in size of the brain. In connection with this, the research plan becomes more complex. The impression arises that the genetic psychology of higher functions is generated and created here, the psychology of cultural development of the child and juvenile (these are synonyms in our eyes).

Careful study shows that even here we still meet with the same two basic for­ mulations of the problem of cultural-psychological development that we have known for a long time. Only the form and some details are new. The essence is the same.

The naturalistic approach proper to biologically oriented psychology is represented in this case by psychoanalytic theory, and the metaphysical approach – by an interpretative psychology oriented toward idealistic philosophy. For the one, all development of higher mental functions is nothing other than a study of the sexual instinct, a metamorphosis of erotic attraction, a masked and sublimated sexual development. For the other, the development of higher mental functions is a process purely of the mind about which it can only be said that it chronologically m ore or less coincides in time with certain processes maturing in the body, but which in itself does not admit causal consideration and requires not elucidation, but understanding.

For psychoanalysis, everything cultural in psychology of the personality is another aspect of sex, an indirect disclosure of tendencies. Exposure of masked biological tendencies, disclosing the innate nucleus that is contained in every cultural form of behavior, biological decoding of historical formations in human psychology, excavating the unconscious subsoil of the culture of the individual and society, reducing them to archaic, primitive, primordial forms of mental life, translation of culture into a language of nature, searching for an equivalent of cultural-psycho- logical functions, all of this taken as a whole is the very essence of the psychoanalytic approach to the problems of cultural psychology and, in questions related to higher mental functions, leads to limiting extremely one of the two trends in modern psychology.

Naturally, a basic ignoring of specific features of higher functions is combined with a fundamental aim toward a biological interpretation of all psychological formations generated by culture.

A high ideal of similar research is the attempt to present a Shakespearean tragedy, a Dostoevsky novel, or a Leonardo da Vinci painting from their psycho­ logical aspects as facts from the history of the sexual development of the author and as encoded artistic pictures of a sexual dream of the reader and viewer. From this aspect, cultural formations in human psychology seem to be only tertiary sexual signs produced in the mind. If above we characterized the general predominance of the biological point of view in problems of cultural psychology as the naturalistic approach, then the point of view of psychoanalysis with respect to this problem may justifiably be called ultranaturalistic.

A complete antithesis and paradoxical supplement of this theory of the development of higher mental functions is interpretive psychology of the transitional age. As enunciated by the brightest of its representatives, it shows irreconcilable contradiction as well as partial concurrence with both aspects.

They concur in that both derive methodologically from the requirements, advanced by E. Spranger in “Psychologica-psychological, “ requirements which d e­ mand that psychological phenomena and facts must be understood and explained from psychological facts, that is, psychologically. In the next chapter in discussing the method of our own studies, we will return to the criticism of this methodological position and will try to disclose two different and non-concurrent ideas contained in it. Now we will only say that for psychoanalysis and for interpretive psychology, in essence, the principle of approaching the psychological psychologically does not mean what is directly included in these two words. For both theories this means mental-psychological, that is, mental phenomena and facts must be explained on the basis of mental facts. When understood thus, this two-word formula becomes a device of idealistic psychology. Spranger also salutes S. Freud for overcoming the physiological materialism of earlier psychology.

But a very serious divergence of the two theories begins where the fateful problem of elucidation arises for all of empirical psychology, where psychology itself begins to split in two. It is true that psychoanalysis tries to explain the mind from the mental, and for this reason it introduces the concept of the unconscious and in this way reestablishes the continuousness of mental life, insures itself against the need to turn to physiological concepts. But in spite of all this, psychoanalysis did not manage to overcome the heavy biologism in psychology. For psychoanalysis, an organic tendency is primary: sex-the biological substrate of all subsequent metamorphoses. For psychoanalysis, the cultural in human psychology is a derivative, secondary phenomenon, always a product and never primary.

Here psychoanalytical theory, as has been indicated in its criticism, falls into irreconcilable internal contradiction with itself. Freudism explains the displacement of sexual tendencies and ideas related to this displacement, which lies at the base of all psychoanalytical teaching, through the action of those forces that, according to this theory, arise only as a result of the displacement: cultural requirements and motives are simultaneously both the cause and the result of the displacement. This contradiction is the basis of the whole doctrine, a glaring example produced by the naturalistic approach to the problem of cultural-psychological development and the attempt to explain, at any cost, everything in human psychology from a single starting point.

For interpretive psychology, mind is primary. Even the erotic and the sexual, since they are represented in experience and comprise the subject of psychological consideration, have nothing in common with the maturation of sex glands. The one and the other simply coincide in time. In an independent, self-contained ideal being, both natural and cultural beginnings of personality unfold equally.

And although interpretive psychology gives primacy to the problem of development of higher mental functions, although it-hardly the first in the history of our science – develops the historical aspect and realizes it in research, developing the psychology of the juvenile years from the historical aspect, as a matter of fact, hidden behind words, it too still stands completely on the old ground with no differentiation between the innate and the cultural in the psychology of child development.

The one and the other disappear in the mind, which does not know the difference between nature and culture. It would be more correct to say that this psychology stands on the far side of nature and history. It is metaphysical. A better illustration may be the circumstance that this theory recognizes no difference-nei­ ther functional nor structural nor genetic-between the psychology of sexual ten­ dencies and the psychology of formation of concepts or ethical functions: both are reduced to a common denominator, equated in interpretation, accepted in ideal essence.

We are least inclined to belittle the significance of this theory derived from the idea of the historical method, or, limine (in the final analysis), to reject it for the reason that it includes ideas of interpretive, essentially metaphysical, psychology in an idealistic system. We, on the other hand, believe this idea up to the limit to which idealistic psychology succeeded in rising with the working out of the problem of higher mental functions of the child. We want only to point out that this great and serious idea is presented metaphysically in interpretive psychology, that only from the formal-logical aspect, but not in essence, not in content and real meaning, does it approach the idea of forestalling the narrow biologism in psychology, of introducing the historical perspective into psychological research.

This theory frees psychology from the power of eternal laws of nature in order to confirm in their place eternal laws of the mind. As has been said already, it does not know the difference between the natural and the cultural in human psychology because it stands on the far side of nature and culture. It is asocial and, although it says much about history, it does not recognize the simple truth that historical development is development of human society and not only of the human mind, that the mind developed together with the development of society. Its conclusions and positions pertain only to German youth of a certain historical era and a certain social class: the youth of educated classes, the bourgeois youth of the historical type that appeared during the last 100 years.

But it does not so much introduce the mental development of a youth into a historical context as it discloses history as a realm of the mind. In essence, bringing a historical aspect into psychological science in the form in which it was done by Spranger includes nothing new, nothing revolutionary. More likely, it is a simple tautology, a simple equating, within the mind, of processes that are very different in cold reality such as the historical development of humanity and the mental development of juveniles. Not only the maturing youth’s growing into separate spheres of culture – law, ethics, art, religion, professional life – but these very cultural spheres arise due exclusively and purely to a mind process, an internal, self-powered mind. With this understanding o f history and culture and with this understanding of psychology, to say that psychology must be studied historically is to make a tau­ tological statement, to define idemper idem , that is, in essence, that the mind must be brought together with the mind. And not an iota more.

For this reason, formally bringing psychology close to history is still inadequate; we must also ask what kind of psychology and what kind of history we will bring together. Metaphysically, whatever one wants can be brought together with every­ thing else. The following circumstance may be better evidence of the fact that interpretive psychology more than any other is far from an adequate resolution of the problem of cultural development understood primarily as a real, causally stipulated process and not as an abstract equation from the “mathematics of the mind.” This psychology makes no basic distinction between biological and historical categories in the mental development of juveniles: as has already been said, from the psychological aspect, sexual instinct and formation of concepts are considered as processes of a single order: the difference in type of juveniles of different historical eras, social classes, nationalities, and differences in type of juveniles of different sex and age, that is, historical and biological determiners of mental development, form a single order.

We can apply the results to our delayed critical consideration of the formula­ tion of the problem of development of higher mental functions in the principal directions of modern psychology. We can summarize the results of our review and note the conclusions. But first we must say that our review pursued not only critical goals. No, we were guided only by trying to explain the point of view whose reject ion was the starting point of our research. We attempted to disclose the contemporary state of the problem of development of higher mental functions and those numerous blind alleys into which it was led in the major psychological systems of modern times in order, first, to note in basic lines the concrete content and subject of our research, to disclose the content of the concept “development of higher mental functions,” or “cultural development of the child”; second, to state the problem of development of higher mental functions as one of the basic problems of child psychology, and to show that the fate of the whole new system of child psychology which we are developing depends on proper solution of this problem; finally, to outline schematically the methodological comprehension of this very complex and exceptionally confused problem and to note the basic approach to it.

We tried to handle both tasks that confront us in the critical consideration of various methods of formulating the problem that interests us. In doing this, we noted the basic methodological difficulties that confront the researcher and make a proper formulation of this problem on the basis of all principal contemporary psychological systems practically impossible. Overcoming these difficulties is the first and indispensable condition for a new approach to the questions of the cultural development of the child. By the same token, we formulated – in a negative form, it is true-the basic methodological points that determine the plan and direction of all our research. In their positive form, these points must find their expression in the research itself.

We considered exactly this kind of concrete description of the major methodological difficulties to be most appropriate; we see overcoming them as the principal task of this book. We chose this way, which is perhaps less direct, in our opening chapter since it permits the closest merging of the methodological and experimental parts of our research. Determining our tasks by comparing them to the traditional understanding of the problem of cultural development in child psychology presented us with a formulation of the problem most appropriate to the present state of the problem itself.

There are two different methods for the methodological formulation of concrete psychological research. In one, the methodology of research is derived apart from the research itself; in the other, it permeates the whole exposition. We could name many examples of both. Some animals-mollusks-carry their skeleton externally, like a snail carries its shell; in others, the skeleton is within the organism and forms its internal framework. The second type of organization seems to us to be the higher not only for the animals, but also for psychological monographs. We selected it specifically for this reason.

Returning to the results of our critical review, we must first of all establish what the concrete content is concealed behind the words, “development of higher mental functions” and consequently, what is the immediate subject of our research.

The concept “development of higher mental functions” and the subject of our research encompass two groups of phenomena that seem, at first glance, to be completely unrelated, but in fact represent two basic branches, two streams of the development of higher forms of behavior inseparably connected, but never merging into one. These are, first, the processes of mastering external materials of cultural development and thinking: language, writing, arithmetic, drawing; second, the processes of development of special higher mental functions not delimited and not determined with any degree of precision and in traditional psychology termed voluntary attention, logical memory, formation of concepts, etc. Both of these taken together also form that which we conditionally call the process of development of higher forms of the child’s behavior.

Actually, as we have seen, in this perception, the problem of higher forms of behavior was not at all recognized by child psychology as a special problem. It is completely absent from the contemporary system of child psychology as a single and special area of research and study. It is dispersed in parts over the most various chapters of child psychology. But each of the two basic parts of our problems taken separately-development of speech, writing, and drawing by the child and development of higher mental functions in the true sense of this word-could not work out an adequate solution in child psychology, as we have seen.

Basically, this can be explained by the following. Child psychology has not yet mastered the incontrovertible truth that two essentially different lines in the mental life of the child must be differentiated. As far as the development of child behavior is concerned, child psychology does not yet know about which of two lines of de­velopment we are speaking and lumps together both lines, assuming this mixture ­ the product of non-differentiated scientific understanding of a complex process – to be the real unity and simplicity of the process itself. More simply, child psychology still continues to consider the process of behavioral development of the child as simple while actually it is complex. This is undoubtedly the source of all the prin­ cipal errors, wrong interpretations, and mistaken formulations of the problem of the development of higher mental functions. Elucidating the position of the two lines of mental development of the child is indispensable for all of our research and all further exposition.

If we leave aside the problem of ontogenesis, the problem of child development, the behavior of a modern, cultured adult is the result of two different processes of mental development. On the one hand, it is the process of biological evolution of animal species leading to the appearance of the species Homo sapiens; on the other, it is the process of historical development by means of which the primordial, primitive man became cultured. Both processes-biological and cultural development of behavior-are represented in phylogenesis separately as autonomous and independent lines of development comprising the substance of separate autonomous mental disciplines.

All originality, all difficulty of the problem of the development of higher mental functions of the child consists in that both these lines are merged in ontogenesis and actually form a single, although complex process. Specifically for this reason, child psychology has not yet become aware of the originality of higher forms of behavior while ethnic psychology (psychology of primitive peoples) and comparative psychology (biological evolutionary psychology), which deal with one of two lines of phylogenetic development of behavior, have both long been aware of their subject. The representatives of these sciences would never think of these processes as identical, or consider the development of man from primitive to cultured as a simple continuation of development from animal to man or reduce cultural development of behavior to biological. This is specifically what is done at each step in child psychology.

For this reason we must turn to phylogenesis, which does not recognize a union and merging of both lines in order to untangle the complicated knot that has formed in child psychology. We must say that we are doing this not only in the interests of a more precise and complete expression of the basic idea of our study, but also in the interests of research itself and even more in the interests of all teaching on the development of all higher forms of behavior from the ontogenetic aspect. Elucidation of basic concepts, which is indispensable for a formulation of the problem of development of higher mental functions in the child, a formulation adequate to the subject, must be based at the present level of our knowledge of this problem on an analysis of how the human mind developed at sequential steps of historical development.

It is understood that depending on these data does not at all mean transferring them directly into the teaching on ontogenesis: not for a minute must we forget the uniqueness that results from the merging of two different lines of development in ontogenesis. This is a central, all-determining fact. We must always keep it in mind even when we leave it aside for a time in order to discern separately and more clearly each of the lines in phylogenesis.

We cannot dwell now on biological development-from protozoa to man. The evolutionary idea in its application to psychology has been sufficiently assimilated and has become so generally recognized that it needs only to be mentioned rather than elucidated. Together with evolution of animal species, behavior also evolved; there is quite enough of this reminder in the subject that interests us now. True, there is much we do not yet know in the area of comparative psychology; many links in the evolutionary chain are still unknown in science, specifically, partly because links closest to man have disappeared, dropped out of the chain and partly because they have not been sufficiently studied for us to form a conclusively complete picture of the biological development of behavior. Nevertheless, we know the basic lines of this picture and recently, owing to the study of higher nervous activity by the method of conditioned reflexes and the discovery of rudiments of intellect and use of tools in humanoid simians, the biological roots of human behavior and genetic prerequisites have placed it before us in a new and quite clear light.

The matter is more complicated with the other line in the development of human behavior beginning where the line of biological evolution ends-the line of historical or cultural development corresponding to the whole historical path of humanity from the primordial, half-animal humanity to our contemporary culture. We will not even begin to treat in detail or completely this question which could be so instructive for our problem since this would lead us a bit far from the actual subject of our study-away from the child-and we will limit ourselves only to certain of the most important points that characterize the new and, for child psychology, completely unknown path and type of development.

The root and principal distinction of historical development of humanity from the biological evolution of animal species is sufficiently known, and we can again limit ourselves to just a mention in order to have the right to reach a completely clear and incontrovertible conclusion: to the extent that the historical development of humanity is different from the biological evolution of animal species, to that extent, obviously, cultural and biological types of development of behavior must differ from each other since each process is part of more general processes-history and evolution. Thus, we have before us a process of mental development sui generis, a process of a special type.

The basic and all-determining difference between this process and the evolutionary process must be the circumstance that development of higher mental functions occurs with a change in the biological type of man, while change in biological type is the base of the evolutionary type of development. As we know and as has been demonstrated many times, this characteristic is also the basic difference in the historical development of man. In a wholly different type of adaptation in man , the development of his artificial organs, tools, and not a change in the organs and structure of the body, is of primary importance.

This position on development without a change in biological type acquires a completely distinctive and exceptional significance in psychology because, on the one hand, no elucidation has been produced yet for the problem of what kind of direct dependence there is of higher forms of behavior, higher mental processes, on structures and functions of the nervous system and, therefore, to what extent and, what is most important, in what sense is a change and development of higher mental functions possible without a corresponding change or development of the nervous system and the brain. On the other hand, a completely new and, for psychology, still a fateful question arises: we usually say that in man, owing to the features of his adaptation (use of tools, work activity), the development of artificial organs replaced the development of natural organs; but what replaces the organic development of the nervous system in mental development, what in general do we have in mind when we speak of the development of higher mental functions without a change in biological type?

We know that every animal species has its own type of behavior that distinguishes it and corresponds to its organic structure and functions. We also know that every decisive step in biological development of behavior coincides with a change in structure and function of the nervous system. We know that development of the brain occurred, in general, by building on new stories above the older stories, that, therefore, the ancient brain in all lower animals was arranged in the same way, that every new degree in the development of higher mental functions occurred simultaneously with the building on of a new story in the central nervous system. It is enough to mention the role and significance of the cortex of the cerebral hemi­ spheres as an organ for closure of conditioned reflexes to illustrate the connection between every new step in the development of higher mental functions and a new stage in brain development. This is a basic fact.

But primitive man does not disclose any substantial differences in biological type, differences which might be responsible for the whole vast difference in behavior. As newer studies agree, this pertains as well to the most primitive man of the tribes now extant to whom, as one researcher put it, the full title of man must also be granted, and’ to prehistoric man of an era closer to ours of whom we know that he does not disclose such noticeable somatic differences as would justify placing him in a lower category of humanity. In both cases, we are dealing with, in the words of the same researcher, a fully human type, only more primitive.

All studies confirm this position and indicate that there are no substantial differences in the biological type of primitive man that might be responsible for a difference in the behavior of a primitive and a cultured man. All elementary mental and physiological functions-perceptions, movements, reactions, etc.-show no de­ viations in comparison with what we know of these same functions in cultured man.

This is as elementary a fact for the psychology of primitive man, for historical psychology, as the reverse position is for biological psychology.

Two assumptions arise that we must at once discard without consideration: on e-as clearly insupportable and rejected long ago by science, the other – as being generally outside the limits of science. The first is, as was assumed by followers of associative psychology21 working on problems of primitive culture, that the human mind is always one and the same, unchanging, that unchanging also are the basic psychological laws, laws of association, and that the uniqueness of behavior and thinking of primitive man can be explained exclusively by the poverty and limitations of his experience. As we have now said, this opinion is derived from the assumption that in the process of historical development of humanity, mental functions were unchanging, that only the content of the mind changed, the content and sum of experience, but methods of thinking themselves and the functions of mental processes are identical in primitive and in cultured man.

In essence this assumption continues to exist in a cryptic form in those systems of child psychology that do not recognize the difference between cultural and bio­ logical development of behavior, that is, in almost all of child psychology. For eth nic psychology, this theory now has only a historical significance. Two of its main errors are, first, in the attempt to find a base in the laws of individual psychology (laws of association) in elucidating the historical development of behavior and thinking (ignoring the social nature of this process) and, second, in an unsupported blindness to those deep changes in higher mental functions that actually create the content of the cultural development of behavior.

To the extent that elementary psychological functions have not changed in the process of historical development, to the same extent higher functions (verbal thinking, logical memory, formation of concepts, voluntary attention, will, etc.) have undergone a deep and thorough change.

The second assumption escapes more easily from its situation, solves the problem more simply. It simply eliminates the scientific problem by transferring its solution to the realm of the mind. Like other researchers of primordial culture, it believes that culture actually consists not of material facts and phenomena, but of those forces that elicit these phenomena-of the mind’s capabilities, of functions of consciousness that perfect themselves. From this perspective, mental develop­ ment without a change in biological type can be explained by the fact that the h uman mind develops of itself. Or, as one of the researchers expresses this idea, the history of culture can be called the history of the human mind.

We can dismiss both of these assumptions without further discussion; one eliminates the question we are interested in by simply rejecting the existence of cultural development of mental functions and the other dissolves culture and its develop­ m ent in the history of the human mind.

We are once again confronted with the former problem: what is the development of higher mental functions without a change in biological type?

In the first place, we would like to note that the content of the development of higher mental functions, as we attempted to determine it above, corresponds completely with what we know from the psychology of primitive man. The sphere of development of higher mental functions, which we first tried to define on the basis of purely negative characteristics – the gaps and problems in child psychology that have not been solved – is now delineated for us with adequately clear boundaries and delimitations.

According to one of the most serious researchers of primitive thinking, the idea is not new that higher mental functions cannot be understood without sociological study, that is, that they are a product not of biological but of social devel­ opm ent of behavior. But it was factually supported only in recent decades in studies on ethnic psychology and can now be considered an incontrovertible position of our science.

From the perspective that interests us, this means that development of higher mental functions comprises one of the most important aspects of cultural develop­ m ent of behavior. It scarcely needs special proof, and the idea that the second branch of cultural development that we noted, specifically mastery of external means of cultural behavior and thinking or development of language, arithmetic, writing, drawing, etc., also finds complete and incontrovertible confirmation in the data o f ethnic psychology. Thus, we can consider the concept of “cultural develop­ m ent of behavior” as adequately elucidated for preliminary orientation.

At this point, we could break off the requisite digression into other areas of genetic psychology, a digression that has diverted us for a time from our primary goal, and return again to ontogenesis. But first we must briefly formulate the con­ clusion which we might, it seems to us, justifiably reach on the basis of our digres­ sion. The conclusion is this: culture creates special forms of behavior, it modifies the activity of mental functions, it constructs new superstructures in the developing system of human behavior. This is a basic fact confirmed for us by every page of the psychology of primitive man, which studies cultural-psychological development in its pure, isolated form. In the process of historical development, social man changes the methods and devices of his behavior, transforms natural instincts and functions, and develops and creates new forms of behavior – specifically cultural.

We shall not now define the unique patterns of the appearance, functioning, and structures of higher forms of behavior. We must find the answer to these ques­ tions in our research. Now we can only formally answer the two questions posed above: speaking of the cultural development of the child, we have in mind the process corresponding to the mental development that occurs in the process of the historical development of mankind. Subsequently, we will try to answer these ques­ tions in detail in the language of research.

But we would find it difficult to reject a priori the idea that a unique form of human adaptation to nature, radically distinguishing man from animals and making infeasible a simple transfer of laws of animal life (struggle for existence) to a science on human society, the idea that this new form of adaptation, which lies at the base of all historical human life, would be impossible without new forms of behavior, without this basic mechanism for equilibrating the organism with the environment. The new forms of relating to the environment which arise in the presence of certain biological prerequisites, but themselves grow beyond the limits of biology, could not bring to life a principally different, qualitatively distinct, differently organized system of behavior.

It is difficult to propose beforehand that society does not create supraorganic forms of behavior. It is difficult to expect that the use of tools, differing in principle from organic adaptation, does not lead to the formation of new functions, new behavior. But this new behavior, arising in the historic period of mankind, this behavior which we conditionally call higher behavior as distinct from biologically developed forms, must certainly have had its own distinct process of development, its own roots and paths.

Thus, again we return to ontogenesis. In the development of the child, two types of mental development are represented (not repeated) which we find in an isolated form in phylogenesis: biological and historical, or natural and cultural de­velopment of behavior. In ontogenesis both processes have their analogs (not parallels). This is a basic and central fact, a point of departure for our research: differentiating two lines of mental development of the child corresponding to the two lines of phylogenetic development of behavior. This idea, as far as we know, bas never been expressed; nevertheless it seems to us to be completely obvious in the light of contemporary data from genetic psychology, and the circumstance that it bas thus far stubbornly escaped the attention of researchers seems completely incomprehensible.

By this, we do not mean to say that ontogenesis in any form or degree repeats or produces phylogenesis or is its parallel. We have in mind something completely d ifferent which only by lazy thinking could be taken to be a return to the reasoning of biogenetic law. In planning our research, we will turn occasionally for heuristic purposes to the data of phylogenesis in those cases where there is a need for a pure and clear determination of basic initial concepts of cultural development of behavior. In the following chapter, we will explain in detail the significance of such digressions. Now it is enough to say that speaking of the analogous nature of the two lines of child development through two lines of phylogenesis, we do not in any way include in our analogy the structure and content of either process. We limit it exclusively to one point: the presence of two lines in phyla- and ontogenesis.

Even with the initial step, we are forced to make the first and radical departure from biogenetic law. Both processes represented in separate forms in phylogenesis and combined with respect to continuity and succession are presented in a merged form and actually form a single process in ontogenesis. In this we are inclined to ee the greatest and most basic uniqueness in the mental development of the human offspring, which, with respect to structure, makes the development incomparable to any other similar process and is radically different from biogenetic parallelism. This is where the basic difficulty of the whole problems lies.

Let us elucidate this circumstance which is of central importance for us. If, as we have said above, cultural development of mankind occurred with the biological human type relatively unchanging during a period of relative immobility and a pause in evolutionary processes under conditions of known stability of the biological species Homo sapiens, cultural development of the child is still characterized primarily by the fact that it occurs under conditions of dynamic change in organic type. It is superimposed on processes of growth, maturation, and organic development of the child and forms a single whole with these. Only by abstraction can we separate some processes from others.

The growing of the normal child into civilization usually represents a single merging with processes of his organic maturation. Both plans of development—the natural and the cultural-coincide and merge. Both orders of changes mutually penetrate each other and form in essence a single order of social-biological formation of the child personality. To the extent that organic development occurs in a cultural environment, to that extent it is turned into a historically conditioned bio­ logical process. At the same time, cultural development acquires a completely unique and incomparable character since it occurs simultaneously and is merged with organic maturation, since its carrier is the growing, changing, maturing organ­ ism of the child. The development of speech in the child may serve as a good example of such a merging of two plans of development-the natural and the cul­ tural.

The uniqueness of cultural development superimposed on the processes of or­ ganic growth and maturation can be elucidated with a simple and obvious example from the sphere of problems that directly interest us in this book, specifically, with the example of the development of the use of tools during childhood. H. Jennings introduced into psychology the concept of systems of activity. This is the term he uses to designate the fact that the methods and forms of behavior (activities) which each animal has at its disposal represent a system conditioned by the organs and organization of the animal. For example, an amoeba cannot swim like an infusorian and an infusorian has no organ that would enable it to fly.

Undoubtedly, on the basis of this extremely important concept, researchers working on the psychology of the child’s first year of life came to establish a decisive critical moment in the development of the infant. Man is no exception to Jennings’ law. Man also has his system of activity that keeps his methods of behavior within limits. In his system, for example, flying is impossible. But man surpasses all animals because he can extend the radius of his activity limitlessly by using tools. His brain and hand made his system of activity, that is, the sphere of available and possible forms of behavior, infinitely broad. For this reason, the decisive moment in the development of the child in the sense of determining the circle of forms of behavior available to him is his first step on the way to independently finding and using tools, a step that the child makes at the end of the first year.

For this reason, an inventory of methods of child behavior may encompass only the behavior of the child up to that decisive moment if it must stop, it is understood, at the biological inventory compiled according to the established prin­ ciple of the system of activity. Research has shown that actually even in a six-month­ old infant there is a preliminary step in the development of using tools; of course, this is not using tools in the real sense of the word, but it is already a basic step beyond the limits of the system of activity that is a preparation for the first use of tools: the child acts on one object with another and makes attempts to get something with the help of some object. As observations show, at ten to twelve months, he demonstrates knowing how to use simple tools, solving problems similar to those that chimpanzees solve. K. Bühler proposed that this age be called the chimpanzee-like age, meaning that the child at this time reaches the method of using tools that we know from the behavior of higher humanoid simians.

In itself, the fact that use of tools creates a basically different condition in the system of human activity is not anything new, although thus far insufficient consideration has been given to biological psychology which tries to construct a system of human behavior based on Jennings’ formula. The new determination of the crucial moments in the development of a system of activity unknown in animals conditioned by the use of tools is what is new and decisive for all of infant and child psychology. Until recently, child psychology simply did not note this fundamental fact and could not realize its significance. The merit of the new studies is that they disclose and show the critical genetic process in all its true complexity while the old psychology either simply saw a flat plane or proposed an intellectualistic explanation instead of the genetic process.

But even the new studies did not clearly realize one point, since even they are still slaves to the old intellectualistic theories. Moreover, this point is of central significance for the whole problem and it is this point that is now the subject of our direct interest.

All the uniqueness of a transition from one system of activity (animal) to an­ other (human) made by a child consists in the fact that the one system does not simply replace the other, but both systems develop simultaneously and together: a fact which is unlike any other in the history of the development of animals or in the history of the development of man. The child does not move to a new system after the old, organically conditioned system of activity unfolds to its end. The child does not move to the use of tools like primitive man having finished his organic development. The child transcends the boundaries of Jennings’ system when that system itself is still at an initial stage o f development.

The brain and the hands of the child, the whole range of natural movements available to him have not yet matured when he goes beyond the limits of this range. A six-month-old infant is more helpless than a chick, at ten months he still cannot walk and feed himself independently; also, during these months, he passes through a chimpanzee-like age, taking up tools for the first time. This example most obviously shows the degree to which the whole order of phylogenetic development is confused in ontogenesis. We do not know a stronger or more powerful refutation of the theory o f biogenetic parallelism than the history of the first use of tools.

If in biological human development the o r g a n ic system of activity is dominant, and in historical development the t o o l system of activity is dominant, if, consequently, both systems are represented separately and developed separately from each other in phylogenesis, then in ontogenesis, and in this alone, the reduction of noth plans of development of behavior, the animal and the human, into one makes .he whole theory of biogenetic recapitulation completely insupportable – both systems develop simultaneously and together. This means that in ontogenesis, the development of the system of activity has a dual conditionality. Jennings’ formula continues to have its effect while the child has already entered a period of devel: pment in which completely new laws are dominant. This fact should be called the basic cultural-biological paradox of child development. Not only the use of tools is developing, but also a system of movement and perception, the brain and the hands, the whole organism of the child. Both processes merge into one, forming, as has been said, a completely unique process of development.

Consequently, the system of activity of the child is determined at each given step by both the degree of his organic development and the degree of his mastery of tools. The two different systems develop jointly, forming, in essence, a third system, a new system of a unique type. In phylogenesis, the system of human activity s determined by the development of natural or artificial organs. In ontogenesis, me system of activity of the child is determined by the one and by the other simultaneously.

We considered Jennings’ formula in detail because this example discloses both basic features of cultural-psychological development of the child: the main difference between this type of development and biological development and the merging f organic and cultural development into a single process. The process of cultural development of child behavior on the whole and development of each separate mental function is completely analogous to the example given in the sense that each mental function in its time goes beyond the limits of the organic system of activity proper to it and begins its cultural development with limits of a completely different system of activity, but both systems develop jointly and are merged to form an interlacing of two essentially different genetic processes.

The interlacing of the two processes must be strictly differentiated from the displacement of both lines in the development of behavior about which we spoke above as the distinguishing mark of the old psychology. The old psychology did not distinguish at all the two processes of development of child behavior and accepted child development not only as the only process, but also as a simple process. The new perspective in establishing the true unity of the process of child development does not for a minute forget the complexity of this process. If the old psychology considered it possible on the whole to build into one order all the phenomena of child development-the development of speech as well as the development of walk­ ing-then the new perspective is based on understanding child development as a dialectical unit of two essentially different orders, and it sees the basic problem of research to be a thorough study of the one order and the other and a study of the laws of their merging at each age level.

Research that understands development of higher mental functions in this way always tries to comprehend this process as part of a more complex and broad whole, in connection with biological development of behavior, against a background of an interlacing of both processes. For this reason, the subject of our research is the development that occurs in the process of biological development of the child and merges with it. For this reason, in our consideration, we strictly differentiate, but do not sharply separate the one process from the other. In our research, we are far from indifferent to the biological background against which cultural develop­ ment of the child occurs, or to which forms and at which level a merging of both processes occurs.

We assume- and all our research supports this assumption-that specifically different forms of merging of both processes determine the uniqueness of each age level in the development of behavior and the unique type of child development. For this reason, we can repeat after E. Kretschmer that contrasting “nature” and “culture” in human psychology is only theoretically correct. In contrast to Kretschmer, however, we assume that differentiating the one from the other is a completely indispensable prerequisite of any thorough study of human psychology.

In this connection, an exceptionally important methodological problem arises that consists, naturally, of basic points of formulating the problem we are interested in: how can we in the process of research differentiate cultural from biological de­velopment and isolate cultural development which, in fact, cannot be found in a pure and isolated form? Does not the requirement of differentiating both processes contradict recognizing their merging as a basic form of mental development of the child and is not their merging an obstacle that makes comprehending unique features of cultural development of the child impossible?

Outwardly the matter does seem to be so, but actually we have touched only an exceptionally serious difficulty, but not the impossibility of studying the development of higher mental functions in the child. Research uses two basic methods of avoiding this difficulty: first, genetic examination, and second, a comparative method of study. The merging of two heterogeneous developmental processes examined in a genetic section itself represents a changeable quantity. At each step of development of both processes, special laws are dominant, special forms of merging. Although both processes over the whole course of childhood are found in a complex synthesis, the character of merging of both processes, the law of constructing the synthesis does not remain one and the same.

The history of the development of higher mental functions is full of examples of what W Wundt, referring to speech, called premature development. Actually, it would be good to recall the example cited above of the merging of the first use of tools with an immature biological structure of a six- or ten-month-old infant or the example of Wundt in ord er to be completely convinced: child psychology abounds in cases of similar premature inadequate merging of biological and cultural processes of development.

In genetic consideration, the merging itself exhibits a series of shifts which, like geological fissures, disclose different strata of some complex formation. The development of higher forms of behavior requires a certain degree of biological maturity, a certain structure as a prerequisite. This closes the path to cultural development to even the highest animals closest to man. In the absence or inadequate development of this prerequisite, an inadequate, incomplete merging of the two systems of activity arises, a kind of displacement or shift of one form. As we have already said, over the whole course of the genetic line, these displacements or shifts, this incomplete merging and correspondence of the two systems themselves, change and as a result, we have before us not a single, unbroken, completely and tightly closed line, but a line of junctions that differ in kind, character, and degree.

The second basic means of research is a comparative study of the different types o f cultural development. In relation to our problem, a deviation from the normal type, a pathological change in processes of development, represents, as it does in general, or rather in relation to all problems of child psychology, a kind of specially managed natural experiment that discloses and exposes, frequently with tremendous force, the true nature and structure of the process which interests us.

It may seem a paradox that we are hoping to find the key to comprehending the development of higher mental functions in the history o f the development of the so-called defective, that is, biologically inferior child. An explanation of this paradox lies in the very nature of development of higher forms of behavior in the child burdened by some physical handicap.

We have already developed the idea that the basic uniqueness of child development consists in a merging of cultural and biological processes of development. In a handicapped child, this merging of both orders is not observed. Both plans of development usually deviate more or less sharply. The reason for the deviation is an organic defect. Human culture was formed and built up under conditions of a certain stability and constancy of the biological human type. For this reason, its material tools and adaptations, its social-psychological institutions and apparatus are calculated for a normal psychophysiological organization.

The use of tools and apparatus assumes as an obligatory prerequisite the presence of organs and functions proper to man. A child’s growing into civilization is conditioned by the maturing of corresponding functions and apparatus. At a certain stage of biological development, the child masters language if his brain and speech apparatus develop normally. At another, higher stage of development, the child masters the decimal system and written language, and still later, basic arithmetical operations.

This connection, the timing of one or another stage or form of development to certain points o f organic maturity, occurred over centuries and millennia and led to such a fusion of the one process and the other that child psychology stopped differentiating the one process from the other and became convinced that mastery of cultural forms of behavior is just as natural a symptom of organic maturity as of any bodily trait.

As a result, symptoms came to be taken for the content itself of organic d evelopment. For the first time it was noted that a delay in development of speech or inability to m aster written language at a certain age are frequently a symptom of mental dullness. The phenomena then were taken for the substance itself of the state of which they might be symptoms under certain conditions.

All traditional defectology, all teaching on development and peculiarities of the anomalous child, even more than child psychology, was permeated with the idea of homogeneity and unity of the process of child development and classified as a single order: the primary – biological – features of the handicapped child and the secondary – cultural – complications of the defect. This was evoked basically by the circumstance which we mentioned above: the gradualness and sequence of the process of growing into civilization conditioned by the gradualness of organic development.

The defect that creates a deviation from the stable biological human type, resulting in elimination of separate functions, an inadequacy or damage to organs, a more or less substantial reconstruction of all development on a new basis, according to a new type, of itself naturally disrupts the normal course of the process of the child’s growing into the culture. Of course, culture is adapted to the normal typical man, accommodated to his constitution, and atypical development due to a defect prevents spontaneous and direct growth into the culture such as that of a normal child.

The difficulty that an abnormal child faces in growing into culture will be defined more completely in the sphere which we termed above the sphere proper to cultural-psychological development of the child: in the sphere of higher mental functions and mastery of cultural means and methods of behavior. For their development, both of these, more than any other aspects and forms of cultural life, re­ quire intactness of the psychophysiological apparatus of the child, since both are the special forms of behavior arising in the process of historical development of humanity and the special forms produced by culture that are a kind of a cultural continuation of natural psychophysiological functions just as tools are a kind of extension of organs. Just as the use of tools assumes the development of the hand and the brain as a necessary biological prerequisite, so does the normal type of psychophysiological development of the child serve precisely as a necessary prerequisite of cultural-psychological development. For this reason the development of higher mental functions of an abnormal child takes a completely different course. Traditional defectology did not recognize the idea that a defect creates difficulties, a delay and deviation not only in the sphere and in the plan of biological development of behavior, but also in the sphere of cultural development of behavior. As a result of this, the cultural development of the abnormal child has scarcely been studied. Moreover, defectological practice, so-called medical pediatrics, was not developed on the basis of the most important principle realized thus far, which we might describe as the creation of circuitous paths of the cultural development of the abnormal child.

Let us explain by means of examples what it is that we have in mind when we speak of the circuitous path of cultural development. A blind child cannot mas­ ter written speech because writing is a system of graphic symbols or signs that re­ place the separate sounds of speech. Writing is based on a system of optical stimuli inaccessible to the blind. This form of behavior, this cultural function, which has an enormous significance for the development of internal speech and thinking (reading), the cultural forms of memory, etc., remained inaccessible for the blind child until the creation and introduction of a circuitous path of development of written speech, the so-called point script of Braille. The tactile alphabet replaced the optical, making reading and writing accessible to the blind. But this required the creation of a particular auxiliary, special, artificial system adapted to the peculiarities of the blind child. Medical pediatrics is full of examples of this kind. Without exaggerating, we can say that the alpha and omega of cultural development lies in creating circuitous paths.

In a similar way, together with the oral language of all mankind, a language of gestures was created for the deaf-mute, dactylology, that is, a hand alphabet that replaces oral speech by writing in the air. The processes of mastering these cultur­ ally auxiliary systems and using them differ in their exceptional uniqueness in com­ parison with the use of the ordinary materials of the culture. Reading with the hand as a blind child does and reading with the eye are different mental processes regardless of the fact that both fulfill one and the same cultural function in the behavior of the child and have a basically similar physiological mechanism.

Just as blindness results in a delay in the development of written speech and leads to a circuitous path of its development, deafness makes it impossible to master oral speech, creating one of the most difficult complications for all cultural development. All cultural development of the deaf child will take a different course than that of the normal child. The defect creates one set of difficulties for biological development and a completely different one for the cultural. Thus, deafness is not a particularly disruptive and serious inadequacy for organic development. A deaf animal is usually more adapted than a blind animal. But in cultural development, deafness is one of the most serious obstacles. Circuitous paths of speech development result in new, incomparable, and exceptional forms of behavior.

In conjunction with what has been said above about the development of the normal child, we might say: The basic differentiating characteristic of mental d evelopment of an abnormal child is divergence and nonconformity in the two plans of development, the merging of which is characteristic for the development of the normal child. The two lines do not coincide, but diverge; they do not form a merged, single process. Gaps and omissions in one line result in other gaps in the other line and at other places. Circuitous paths of cultural development create special forms of behavior as if they were constructed deliberately for experimental purposes.

For example, observing how rudiments of speech development found in the normal child at six months appear in the deaf child only at school age and then in a completely different form, we have the opportunity to study development of speech comparatively and thus obtain a key to comprehending the merging of cultural and biological development in the normal child. In a comparative study, di­ vergence and merging mutually illuminate and elucidate each other. This general position is true for all cultural development on the whole. Following it, we will study the history of cultural development of the normal and abnormal child as a process that is the same in kind, but different in the form of its course.

The concept of child primitiveness, developed comparatively recently, creates a ‘rid g e from one process to the other. Regardless of the fact that there is still something debatable in the definition of this concept, isolating a special type of mental development of the child, specifically, the child-primitive, it seems that there is now no objection on any o ne’s part. The sense of the concept consists in the opposition of primitiveness and culture. Just as a handicap is the negative pole of giftedness, primitiveness is, in the same way, the negative pole of the cultural. The child-primitive is a child who has not gone through cultural development or, more precisely, who is at the lowest step of cultural development.

For a very long time, primitivism of the child’s mentality was taken for a pathological form of development and confused with feeble-mindedness. Actually, the eternal manifestations o f both forms are frequently quite similar. Both exhibit identical symptoms. But actually these are phenomena of a different order. The primitive child under certain conditions exhibits normal cultural development, attaining intellectual level of a cultured person. This is what differentiates primitivism from feeble-mindedness. The latter is the result of an organic defect. The feeble-minded person is limited in his natural intellectual development, in the development of the brain, and a sa result of this , complete cultural development, such as occurs in normal children, becomes possible for him only along circuitous paths. The primitive, however, does not deviate from the norm in natural development; he only remains, for some reasons, mostly external, outside cultural development.

Clinical observations to isolate a special type of child underdevelopment, primitiveness, indicated that primitiveness may exist in itself as an isolated delay in cultural development. But it may be combined with the most various forms of child, abnor­ mality and talent. As important as isolating a pure type of the child-primitive and realizing how he differs from the mentally retarded, that is, feeble-minded child, may be in itself (undoubtedly demonstrating the existence of two heterogeneous processes of mental development in childhood from the aspect of underdevelopment), even more important is the next step, which has not yet been taken, but which without fail and inevitably will be taken in the study of child primitiveness as soon as cultural development of the normal and abnormal child is adequately studied.

This step consists of recognizing that every normal child exhibits to varying degrees at different ages the whole complex of symptoms of primitiveness, that primitiveness is a common and normal state of the child who is not yet culturally developed. This position applies even to a greater degree to the abnormal child whose organic inadequacy, as we have seen, always results in a delay in cultural development and, consequently, in primitiveness. A pure type of the child-primitive is simply a concentrated and emphasized, abnormally delayed and lingering state of normal child primitiveness.

Once again we can close the circle, this time finally. We began with differentiating two lines of mental development in childhood. The subsequent unfolding of this idea led us to establish two heterogeneous types of childhood underdevelopment- mental backwardness and primitivism, which are, of course, a dark reflection of both lines of normal development. But in both cases – in the normal and in the pathological – we had to establish yet another symmetrical position, specifically, a merging, an interlacing of two lines in both plans: the developed and the under­ developed. The biological and cultural in pathology and in normal conditions were heterogeneous, peculiar, specific forms of development which did not exist together with each other or one on top of the other and were not mechanically connected with each other, but were fused together into a higher synthesis, complex but still one. To establish the basic laws of the structure and development of this synthesis – this is the basic task of our research.

As we have seen, child psychology did not know the problem of higher mental functions or, what is the same, the problem of cultural development of the child. For this reason the central and greater problem of all psychology, the problem of personality and its development, still remains closed. Child psychology, according to its best representatives, comes to the conclusion that describing the inner life of man as a whole belongs to the art of the poet or the historian. Actually this implies a testimonium pauperitatis – evidence of the insupportability of child psychology, admitting the basic impossibility of studying the problem of personality within the limits of those methodological boundaries within which child psychology arose and developed. Only a decisive departure beyond the methodological limits o f traditional child psychology can bring us to a study of the development of that same higher mental synthesis that, on a solid basis, must be called the personality of the child. The history of the cultural development of the child brings us to the history of the development of personality.

Chapter 2 | Vygotky's Works