Mind in Society: Vygotsky's Book on Higher Psychological Processes

Who Lev Vygotsky Was Before This Book

Lev Vygotsky trained as a lawyer and philologist, and had already contributed to literary criticism, before he began his career as a psychologist after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The book’s introduction places among his scientific contemporaries Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Bekhterev, and John B. Watson, popularizers of the stimulus-response theories of behavior grouped today under behaviorism, alongside Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, and Kurt Lewin, founders of Gestalt psychology.

He died of tuberculosis on June 11, 1934. Shortly before, he had been invited to head the psychology department at the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, according to the biographical note signed by A. R. Luria in the book, which also places his birth on November 5, 1896.

A Book Born After His Death

Mind in Society, The Development of Higher Psychological Processes came out in 1978 through Harvard University Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The title page lists four editors and translators: Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman.

According to psychology historian Anton Yasnitsky, strange as it may sound, Vygotsky never wrote this book as a single work: it is a compilation and juxtaposition of fragments taken from different works, written during different periods of his career. Yasnitsky cites the editors’ preface (Cole et al., 1978, p. x), in which the editors themselves admit to having “constructed” some chapters, while others are summarized or based on Vygotsky’s writings: “We realize that in tampering with the original we may have distorted history; however, we hope that by stating our procedures and by adhering as closely as possible to the principles and content of the work, we have not distorted Vygotsky’s meaning,” they write, according to the quote reported by Yasnitsky.

The editors give a different reason for choosing to publish these texts. In the book’s introduction they write that the essays “are certainly of interest from the perspective of intellectual history, but they are not historical relics,” offering them instead as a contribution to questions still open in contemporary psychology.

The Eight Chapters

The book opens with a first part, titled “Mind in Society, Basic Theory and Data,” followed by eight thematic chapters:

1. Tool and Symbol in Child Development
2. The Development of Perception and Attention
3. Mastery of Memory and Thinking
4. Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions
5. Problems of Method
6. Interaction between Learning and Development
7. The Role of Play in Development
8. The Prehistory of Written Language

The chapter on the interaction between learning and development is where the zone of proximal development appears; readers who want the concept in full can turn to the Recap on Vygotsky and the Zone of Proximal Development. It is also the chapter closest to a student’s daily work, which is why it can interest anyone looking for an effective study method.

Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions, another chapter in the volume, looks at how processes shared between people become individual capacities — a different model from the one cognitivism would later use, decades on, to describe the mind as an information processor.

Method, From the Unpublished Notebooks

In the introduction, the editors quote from Vygotsky’s unpublished notebooks on research method: “I don’t want to discover the nature of mind by patching together a lot of quotations. I want to find out how science has to be built, to approach the study of the mind having learned the whole of Marx’s method.” He adds that anyone who could discover what a “psychological” cell is — the mechanism producing even a single response — would thereby find the key to psychology as a whole.

This idea of method is also the subject of the chapter Problems of Method, one of the book’s eight, and touches a question psychology as a scientific discipline has long faced: how to measure processes that cannot be observed directly.

From Publication to Vygotsky’s Western “Boom”

According to Yasnitsky, 1978 marks the beginning of what he calls the “cult” of Vygotsky, the “boom” still underway as he writes: that same year, Mind in Society came out under Vygotsky’s name, and Stephen Toulmin published his review, titled “The Mozart of Psychology.” After the book’s publication, Yasnitsky writes, the notion of the zone of proximal development “became synonymous” with Vygotsky’s name.

Quote: “After the publication of Mind in Society, the celebrated notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’ became synonymous with Vygotsky’s name” (Yasnitsky, 2011).

Even before his death, according to the book’s introduction, Vygotsky and his students had established a laboratory in Kharkov, headed by A. N. Leontiev, then also dean of the psychology faculty at Moscow University, and later by A. V. Zaporozhets, director of the Institute of Preschool Education.

An Overshadowed Legacy, Censorship Among the Factors

The spread of Vygotsky’s ideas at home was not straightforward. Among the factors Yasnitsky points to are the limited public access to manuscripts and documents held in the Vygotsky archives, and the difficulties surrounding the posthumous editing of his writings. On top of this, in 1936, the Communist Party’s Central Committee banned pedology, a discipline Vygotsky was associated with, and its condemnation helped obscure his legacy in the USSR.

Why It Remains the English-Language Reference Text

Harvard University Press presents the book as Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development “in his own words, collected and translated by an outstanding group of scholars,” edited by “a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars” and made up of a selection of essays “most of which have previously been unavailable in English.” According to the publisher, the book’s underlying thesis is that the mind cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society.

On the cover, the publisher also carries a third-party judgment, “a landmark book,” attributed to the magazine Contemporary Psychology: a quote gathered on the back cover, not verified for this piece directly against the original source.

A paperback reprint dated October 15, 1980, tracked by some booksellers, should not be confused with the first edition: that one, from 1978, is confirmed independently by the book’s title page, the University of North Texas Libraries catalog, and the Google Books listing.