Cultural-historical psychology

Cultural-historical psychology (the school of Vygotsky) - a trend in psychological research founded by Lev Vygotsky in the end of the 1920s and developed by his students and followers in Eastern Europe and worldwide.

Cultural-historical psychology emerged as a response to Cartesian dualism between mind and body in psychology of that time as a deliberate attempt to establish a new paradigm in psychological resarch that would overcome the narrow objectivism of behaviourism and subjectivism of introspective psychology of Wundt, James, and others.

Vygotsky and his associates postulate in principle non-adaptive character and the mechanisms of higher psychical (mental) functions development. Defining the main goal of psychological inquiry as an objective study of human consciousness, the members of Vygotsky's school investigate the role of cultural mediation and such cultural mediators as word, sign (Vygotsky), symbol, myth (Losev, V. Zinchenko) in the development of human higher psychical functions, development of personality and its "top-most' phenomenology.

Some of Vygotsky´s students who took up and developed his approach to psychology include Aleksey Leontyev (sometimes also spelled A.N. Leontev) and A.R. Luria in the Soviet Union, and Klaus Holzkamp in Germany. Holzkamp developed his own approach to cultural-historical psychology which he termed "critical psychology" mainly based on Leontev´s work, also making use of Merleau-Ponty´s Phenomenology

External resources

 * Зинченко В. П. (1993). Культурно-историческая психология: опыт амплификации. Вопросы психологии, 1993, N 4.
 * Культурно-историческая психология, [Cultural-historical psychology], International psychological journal (in Russian)
 * Lev Vygotsky Archive at marxists.org
 * A.N. Leontev Archive at marxists.org
 * A.R Luria Archive at marxists.org


 * de:Kulturhistorische Schule
 * fi:Kulttuurihistoriallinen psykologia
 * ru:Культурно-историческая психология