American Family Resource Center

Vygotsky: Thought & Language 2ed (Cloth)

Since it was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1962, Lev Vygotsky's highly original exploration of human mental development has become recognized as a classic foundational work of cognitive science. Vygotsky analyzes the relationship between words and consciousness, arguing that speech is social in its origins and that only as children develop does it become internalized verbal thought. Now Alex Kozulin has created a new edition of the original MIT Press translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar that restores the work's complete text and adds materials that will help readers better understand Vygotsky's meaning and intentions. Kozulin has also contributed an introductory essay that offers new insight into the author's life, intellectual milieu, and research methods. Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) studied at Moscow University and acquired in his brief lifespan a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, and the arts. He began his systematic work in psychology at the age of 28, and within a few years formulated his theory of the development of specifically human higher mental functions. He died of tuberculosis ten years later, and "Thought and Language" was published posthumously in 1934. Alex Kozulin studied at the Moscow Institute of Medicine and the Moscow Institute of Psychology, where he began his investigation of Vygotsky and the history of Soviet psychology. He emigrated in 1979 and is now Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) at Boston University. He is the author of "Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (MIT Press 1984). Read more...

The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Volume 2: Fundamentals of Defectology (Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities) (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics)

List Price: $149.00

This work is a translation of Volume 5 of Pedagogika's 6 volume series published in Moscow between 1982 and 1984. It includes Vygotsky's works on defectology originally published between 1924 and 1932, as well as posthumous, unpublished material. Read more...

This work is a translation of Volume 5 of Pedagogika's 6 volume series published in Moscow between 1982 and 1984. It includes Vygotsky's works on defectology originally published between 1924 and 1932, as well as posthumous, unpublished material. Read more...

Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes

List Price: $25.00 Price: $21.98 You Save: $3.02 (12%)

The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky's important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English.

The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky's relevance to modem psychological thought.

The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Volume 6: Scientific Legacy (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics)

List Price: $189.00 Price: $150.10 You Save: $38.90 (21%)

Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and one of the most influential psychologists in the world during the 20th century. This volume, the last of six, examines Vygotsky's scientific archives and legacy. Read more...