Vygotskij

This fundamentally novel intellectual biography offers a 21st-century account of the life and times of Lev Vygotsky, who has long been considered a pioneer in the field of learning and human development. The diverse Vygotskian literature has created many distinct images of this influential scientist, which has led many researchers to attempt to unearth ‘the real Vygotsky’. Rather than join this quest to over-simplify Vygotsky’s legacy, this book attempts to understand the development of ‘the multiple Vygotksies’ by exploring a number of personae that Vygotsky assumed at different periods of his life. Based on the most recent archival, textological and historical investigations in original, uncensored Russian, the author presents a ground-breaking account that is far from the shiny success story that is typically associated with ‘the cult of Vygotsky’.

This book will be an essential contribution to Vygotskian scholarship and of interest to advanced students and researchers in history of psychology, history of science, Soviet/Russian history, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of science.

Sergej M. Ejzenštejn was very much involved with psychology and psychoanalysis. He
was an important friend of Lev Vygotskij, founder of cultural-historical psychology, and of
Aleksandr Lurija, father of modern neuropsychological assessment: both Vygotskij and Lurija in
the early 1920s were among the supporters of psychoanalysis in Russia and members of the
Moscow Psychoanalytic Society. In Ejzenštejn’s writings on film language we find psychological
concepts of Vygotskij, such as “agglutination” and “internal speech”, that were present in the
theory of film editing. As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, Ejzenštejn was very much interested
in the concept of regression: the art lover, including the movie spectator, must regress and at the
same time activate the most mature part of the psyche. Ejzenštejn was friend of Hanns Sachs and
knew Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander, and Wilhelm Reich. In 1929 he gave a
lecture at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In the USSR and in the USA he had two short
experiences of psychoanalytic therapy. [Keywords: Soviet cinema; Marxism and psychoanalysis;
Cinema and psychoanalysis; Lev Vygotskij; Aleksandr Lurija]