Customer Reviews

Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes

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This is one of the earliest and still one of the best introductions to socio-historical psychology, the study of how individual human intelligence develops in interaction with people and the environment. In concert with many contemporary approaches in cognitive science today, Lev Vygotsky, A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev argued that human intelligence is characteristically mediated through objects and social activity. Humans think through tools. Talking to oneself, for example, is not an irrelevant activity. Putting one's actions into speech is a way of focusing one's consciousness on the problem. This kind of speech is not pointless, but rather a cognitive tool that gives one a greater awareness of one's own actions and makes it easier to modify these actions--a point that Vygotsky proved with research on how children solved problems. Much of human activity involves making use of tools, signs, and activities, the kinetic melodies of action and conceptualization that make us smart, and through which we are able to accomplish the uniquely human feats of complex intellectual action. This is an excellent place to begin studying Vygotsky and activity theory. If you like this you will also like A.R. Luria's *The Making of Mind*, and the classics *The Man With A Shattered World* and *The Mind of a Mnemonist*, the books that inspired Oliver Sacks' writing.

This reissue of a 1978 reprint is supposedly a collection of Russian psychologist Vygotsky's essays (he died in 1934) as translated from the Russian by A.R. Luria, one of his students.
The "editors" claim that after a cursory study of Luria's translations "we came to believe that the image of Vygotsky as a sort of early neobehaviorist of cognitive development - an impression held by many of our colleagues- was strongly belied by these two works." Nice. A cursory study is able to strong belie widely held impressions that are based on decades of studying Vygotsky's own 1934 book Thought and Language, among his other works.
One has to wonder at the degree to which revisionism is taking place when the editors state in the preface:
"In putting separate essays together we have taken significant liberties. The reader will encounter here not a literal translation of Vygotsky but rather our edited translation of Vygotsky from which we have omitted material that seemed redundant and to which we have added material that seemed to make his points clearer."
Hmmmm. Will the real Vygotsky please stand up!
Save your money and first get Kozulin's version of "Thought and Language." One must question the amount of trustworthy scholarship in "Mind in Society."

Vygotsky's Mind in Society is a book that will never be outdated. The insights that Vygotsky describe can be applied nowadays in the classrooms.

the book is in great condition and it came on time! :) this was great for me because i needed this book for class and i needed it in a hurry :)

The item is as described. It arrived before the expected time. Overall it is a good shopping place. I recommend it.

While the book is full of theory that might discourage someone from reading it, it has an absolutly fantastic practical implacation worth the effort! The second half of this book, "Educational Implications" discusses the Zone of Proximal Development. Learning about this "Zone" plus the discussion regarding how children learn to read and write, tells those of us who really want to help children learn, ways to set-up an environment and activities to do it!!
Don't let the theory scare you away, this is a MUST READ!

This is a good start to understanding the researh and theories of Lev Vygotsky.