Development of Mind - Marxists Internet Archive

428 Pages·2009·3.67 MB·English

by  Andy Blunden

The
Development
of Mind

Selected Works of Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontyev
with a preface by Mike Cole
Marxists Internet Archive
P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA.
Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontyev (1904-1979)
1. Psychology, 2. Activity Theory, 3. Marxism
ISBN 978-0-9805428-6-8
CC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0)
2009 by Marxists Internet Archive.
Cover design by Joan Levinson.
Set by Andy Blunden in Garamond.
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Distributed exclusively by Erythrós Press and Media.
Table of Contents

Note on the Work of A. N. Leonteyv.....................................................vi
Preface by Mike Cole.................................................................................vii
1. The Problem of the Origin of Sensation.............................................1
I. The Problem.............................................................................1
II. Hypothesis...........................................................................19
III. The Functional Evolution of Sensitivity.........................44
IV. Discussion of the Results and Certain Conclusions...103
2. The Biological and Social in Man’s Psyche.....................................115
3. An Outline of the Evolution of the Psyche....................................137
I. The Evolution of the Psyche in Animals.........................137
II. The Origin of Human Consciousness............................181
III. The Historical Development of Consciousness..........198
4. The Historical Approach to Study of the Human Psyche............245
5. The Development of Higher Forms of Memory...........................295
6. The Psychological Principles of Preschool Play.............................331
7. The Theory of the Development of the Child’s Psyche...............355
8. Child Development and the Problem of Mental Deficiency........379
9. Activity and Consciousness ..............................................................395
Note on the work of A N Leontyev
The selected papers of A. N. Leontyev published in this edition
express the main line of his theoretical and experimental research.
After his first work, devoted to an experimental study of affective
responses – An Investigation into the Objective Symptoms of Affec-
tive Responses (jointly with A. R. Luriya) in Sovremennye problemy psik-
hologii (Moscow, 1926); Experience of the Structural Analysis of
Associative Chain Series, Russko-Nemetsky meditsinsky zhurnal, 1928, 1
and 2; Ekzamen i psikhika (Examination and the Mind) (jointly with A.
R. Luriya Moscow, 1929, he began to work under L. S. Vygotsky
within the context of the latter’s conception of research into the on-
togenetic development of the psyche – Mediated Remembering in
Children with a Deficient or Morbidly Altered Intellect, Voprosy defek-
tologii, 1928, 4; Development of the Internal Structure of Higher Be-
haviour in Psikhonevrologicheskaya nauka (Leningrad, 1930); Razvitie
proizvol’nogo vnimania u detei (The Development of Voluntary Attention
in Children), Moscow, 1930. In this period he also published his first
major monograph Razvitie pamyati (The Development of Memory),
Moscow, 1931.
From 1932 Prof. Leontyev’s work took a new path. Heading a
group of young psychologists in Kharkov (V. I. Asnin, L. I.
Bozhovich, P. J. Halperin, A. V. Zaporozhets, P. I. Zinchenko, O. M.
Kontsevaya, G. D. Lukov, V. V. Mistyuk, K. E. Khomenko, and oth-
ers), he directed research into the development of the child’s practical
intellectual activity and consciousness. On this basis he and his asso-
ciates worked on the problem of relating the structure of activity to
forms of psychic reflection. Several of the theoretical problems that
arose in this connection, prompted Prof. Leontyev to start research in
the field of various psychophysiological and zoopsychic problems. At
the same time at the suggestion of the Kharkov Polygraphic Institute,
he organised and directed a cycle of work of a primarily practical na-
ture on children’s perception of illustrations. A number of papers
were prepared under his direction in this period and published in
Nauchnye zapiski Khar’kovskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta (Vol. I, X, 1939;
Vol. II, X, 1941), Nauchnye zapiski Khar’kovskogo instituta inostrannykh
yazyko v (Vol. II, X, 1939), Trudy konferentsii po psikhologii, Vol. I (Kiev,
1941), and in a number of later works, some of which appear in the
present volume.
After resuming work in Moscow in 1935, Prof. Leontyev devoted
his main attention to the problem of the origin of sensitivity and the
general theory of the evolution of the psyche, completing his experi-
mental genetic research into the origin of sensation in 1940.
During World War II Leontyev devoted his efforts to the urgent
problem of restoring motor functions damaged by gunshot wounds.
For that purpose he organised a rehabilitation hospital, of which he
became scientific head. (The results of this work were published in A.
N. Leontyev and A. V. Zaporozhets. Vosstanovlenie dvizheniya (The
Restoration of Movement), Moscow, 1945, and in a number of spe-
cial papers by Leontyev and his colleagues in Uchonye zapiski MGU,
1947, 3.
Apart from its practical value this experimental research into the
restoration of motor processes also played an important role in elabo-
ration of the theory of functional development, enabling the author
later to advance a hypothesis of the systemic structure of psychic
functions (1954).
In the postwar years the author again returned to the problem of
child and educational psychology. At the same time he worked on
several questions of general psychology. The joint session of the
USSR Academy of Sciences and RSFSR Academy of Pedagogical Sci-
ences held in 1951 on Pavlov’s physiological teaching, turned his at-
tention to study of the psyche’s reflex mechanisms, which found
reflection in his work: in the following period – On the Materialist
and Subjective Idealist Reflex Conceptions of the Psyche, Sovetskaya
pedagogika, 1951, 10; The Dependence of Associative Connections on
the Content of Action (jointly with T. V. Rozanova), Sovetskaya peda-
gogika, 1951, 10; On the Systemic Nature of Mental Functions. In:
Tezisy doklado v na yubileinoi sessii Moskovskogo Universiteta (Moscow,
1955); On an Effect of the Forming of a Motor Chain Habit (jointly
with M. I. Bobneva). Doklady APN RSFSR, 1958, 1; and the work
cited below on analysis of the systemic structure of aural perception.
His work on educational psychology, and problems of general psy-
chology are not included in the present volume.
* * *
The Progress Publishers edition, published in the USSR in 1981
has been reproduced with the addition of “Activity and Conscious-
ness,” published by Progress Publishers in 1977, with corrections and
some changes to section numbering not affecting the content, by the
Marxists Internet Archive, with a preface by Mike Cole.
References to Marx and Engels have been amended so as to ref-
erence the corresponding passage in Marx Engels Collected Works
(MECW) published by Lawrence & Wishart (London) and Interna-
tional Publishers (New York) 1975-2005. Other references have been
left as per the Progress Publishers edition.
Preface
Alexei Leontyev must be counted among the most influential So-
viet psychologists of the 20th century. As a student/colleague of Lev
Vygotsky, he helped to form what he referred to as a “socio-
historical” approach to psychology which famously features the cen-
trality of the category of human activity as its central concept. As he
put it in a widely read article on this topic,
Human psychology is concerned with the activity of con-
crete individuals, which takes place either in a collective –
i.e., jointly with other people – or in a situation in which
the subject deals directly with the surrounding world of
objects – e.g., at the potter’s wheel or the writer’s desk. ...
With all its varied forms, the human individual’s activity is a sys-
tem in the system of social relations. It does not exist without these
relations. The specific form in which it exists is determined by the
forms and means of material and mental social interaction that are
created by the development of production and that can not be real-
ised in any way other than in the activity of concrete people. It turns
out that the activity of separate individuals depends on their place in
society, on the conditions that fall to their lot, and on idiosyncratic,
individual factors.
The work contained in this volume emphasises both the central-
ity of human activity as cause and consequence of specifically human
higher psychological processes, but also emblemises a central theo-
retical tenet of the entire line of psychology derived from Vygotsky’s
ideas, captured in the aphorism that “to understand behaviour, one
must know the history of behaviour.” Leontyev, more than any of
Vygotsky’s colleagues, pursued this idea back into the primal origins
of the organization of living matter while continuing to pursue its
implications for the development of human society and human chil-
dren as well.
For further reading see:
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding. Helsinki; Ko-
sultat Oy.
Leontyev, A.N. (1979). The problem of activity in psy-
chology (pp. 37-71). In J.V. Wertsch (Ed.). The concept of ac-
tivity in Soviet psychology. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.

Mike Cole
February 2009
1. The Problem of the Origin
of Sensation*
I. The Problem
1
The origin, i.e. the genesis proper, of the psyche, and its subse-
quent evolution, are closely related problems. Our general approach
to psychic development is, therefore, directly characterised by how
we theoretically resolve the problem of the psyche’s origin.
There have been many attempts, of course, to give a fundamental
answer to this problem. First and foremost there is the answer that
can be briefly designated as in the spirit of ‘anthropsychism’, and
which is associated in the history of philosophical thought with the
name of Descartes. Its essence is that the origin of the psyche is
linked with the advent of man, and exists only in man. The whole
prehistory of the human mind is thus expunged altogether. This view
cannot be considered dead today; it is still met, and finds reflection in
specific sciences. Some workers still cling to it, holding that the psy-
che, strictly speaking, is a quality inherent only in man.
Another, opposite answer is given by the doctrine of ‘panpsy-
chism’, i.e. of the universal mental character of nature. Such views
were expounded by certain French materialists like Robinet. Fechner,
among others famous in psychology, also held such a view.

* This paper was a section of the author’s doctoral dissertation (Razvitie
psikhiki, 1940). The first part set out his hypothesis of the origin in principle
of sensitivity as a capacity for elementary sensation, which he had developed
in 1933-36. The hypothesis was originally formulated in several papers in
Kharkov and Moscow, and was later presented in a special paper (A Contri-
bution to the Problem of the Origin of Sensitivity) in the symposium dedi-
cated to the 35 years of D. N. Uznadze’s scientific work (Tbilisi, 1944), and
also in the first edition of the present work (Ocherk razvitiya psikhiki); in the
present edition this chapter has been omitted. The second part of the section
was an exposition of his experimental investigation of the forming of sensi-
tivity to inadequate stimulation, which he had carried out with his colleagues
in 1936-39 in the laboratory he headed in the Institute of Psychology in
Moscow, and in the chair of psychology of the Kharkov Pedagogical Insti-
tute.
2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIND
Between these two extremes, attributing the existence of mind,
on the one hand, only to man, and on the other hand recognising
mind as a quality of all matter in general, there are also intermediate
views, which are much more common. First of all there is the view
that could be called ‘biopsychism’, the essence of which is that the
psyche is a property not of all matter in general but solely of living
matter. Such were the views of Hobbes and of many natural scientists
(Claude Bernard, Haeckel, and others). A psychologist who held this
view was Wundt.
There is yet another, fourth mode of answering the problem, i.e.
that of attributing the psyche not to matter in general, or to all living
matter, but solely to those organisms that have a nervous system.
This point of view might be called the conception of ‘neuropsy-
chism’. It was advanced by Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and has
become very common both in contemporary physiology and among
psychologists, especially the Spencerians.
Can any one of these four positions be adopted as a standpoint in
general to orient us correctly on the problem of the origin of mind?
It is as alien to consistently materialist science to hold that mind
is the privilege only of man as to attribute universal spirituality to
matter. Our view is that the psyche – mind – is a property of matter
that arises only at its highest stages of development, at the level of
organic, living matter. Does that mean, however, that all living matter
has some kind of very simple mind, that the transition from inani-
mate matter to animate is at the same time a transition to living, ‘sen-
tient matter?
We suggest that this assumption, too, contradicts modern scien-
tific knowledge of the simplest living matter. Mind can only be the
product of living matter’s subsequent evolution, and of the subse-
quent evolution of life itself.
Thus we must also reject the contention that the psyche origi-
nates together with living matter and that it is inherent in the whole
organic world.
There remains the last of the views listed, that the origin of mind
is linked with the development of a nervous system in animals. That
view, however, also cannot be accepted uncritically, from our point of
view. It is unsatisfactory because it arbitrarily supposes a direct link
between the development of mind and the development of a nervous
system, and ignores the point that, although the organ and the func-
tion are inseparably interconnected, their link is not at the same time
immobile, singular, and fixed once and for all, so that analogous func-
tions can be performed by different organs.