Vygotsky's Psychology1990

Alex Kozulin, translator of Vygotsky's work and distinguished Russian-American psychologist, has written the first major intellectual biography about Vygotsky's theories and their relationship to twentieth-century Russian and Western intellectual culture. He traces Vygotsky's ideas to their origins in his early essays on literary criticism, Jewish culture, and the psychology of art, and he explicates brilliantly his psychological theory of language, thought, and development. Kozulin's biography of Vygotsky also reflects many of the conflicts of twentieth-century psychology--from the early battles between introspectionists and reflexologists to the current argument concerning the cultural and social, rather than natural, construction of the human mind. Vygotsky was a contemporary of Freud...