In modern psychology, there are several conceptual approaches to solving problems existing in this science. One of them is cultural-historical psychology, the founder of which is the famous Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky. According to his plan, psychology should study the psyche of the person being tested, which has not yet been formed and presented to the researcher, as was done in many other experimental areas of psychology, for example, behaviorism, and the psyche, which is in constant transformation, formation, since it is the most productive and only correct for a psychologist consider a developing, evolving person. Therefore, cognition of the psyche is most rational in the course of the real practical work of a psychologist, for example, in the field of pedagogy or medical practice, or psychological support by an employee of especially responsible professions associated with a risk to life. large masses people, etc.

In the course of its development, this theory has had different names, of which the latter is used in this book.

Cultural-Historical Psychology- the direction in psychological research, laid down by Vygotsky in the late 1920s. and developed by his students and followers both in Russia and around the world.

Overcoming the dualism between the psyche, understood purely individualistically, and the external world, representatives of the Vygotsky school postulate a principally non-adaptive nature and mechanisms of development of mental processes. Assuming the study of human consciousness to be the main problem of psychological research, the role of mediation ( mediation) and cultural mediators, such as a word, a sign (Vygotsky), as well as a symbol and myth (V. Zinchenko) in the development of higher mental functions of a person, personality in its "summit" (Vygotsky) manifestations.

Higher mental functions (HPF)- specifically human mental processes. They arise on the basis of natural mental functions due to their mediation with psychological tools. The sign acts as a psychological tool. The HMF includes: perception, memory, thinking, speech. They are social in origin, mediated in structure and arbitrary in the nature of regulation. Introduced by L. S. Vygotsky, developed by A. R. Luria, A. N. Leontiev, A. V. Zaporozhets, D. B. Elkonin, P. Ya. Galperin. Four main features of HMF were identified - mediation, arbitrariness, consistency; are formed by interiorization.

Such a definition does not apply to either idealistic or "positive" biological theories and allows for a better understanding of how memory, thinking, speech, perception are located in the human brain and, with high accuracy, made it possible to determine the location of local lesions of the nervous tissue and even recreate them in some way.

Cultural-Historical Psychology

Thing: psyche transformed by culture

Representatives: E. Durkheim,Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Pierre Janet, Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich

For the first time, the question of sociality as a system-forming factor of the psyche was raised by the French sociological school. Its founder E. Durkheim (1858-1917), using the term "social fact" or "collective representation", illustrated concepts such as "marriage", "childhood", "suicide". Social facts are different from their individual incarnations (there is no “family” at all, but there are an infinite number of specific families) and are of an ideal nature that affects all members of society.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, using ethnographic material, developed the thesis about a special type of "primitive" thinking, which is different from the thinking of a civilized person.

Pierre Janet further deepened the principle of social determination, suggesting that external relations between people are gradually turning into features of the structure of the individual psyche. So, they were shown that the phenomenon of memory consists in the appropriation of external actions of the execution of instructions and retelling.

The principle of cultural-historical determination of the psyche was most fully revealed in the works of L.S. Vygotsky, who developed the doctrine of higher mental functions. L.S. Vygotsky suggested the existence of two lines of development of the psyche:

natural,

culturally mediated.

In accordance with these two lines of development, "lower" and "higher" mental functions are distinguished.

Examples of lower, or natural, mental functions are involuntary memory or involuntary attention of a child. The child cannot control them: he pays attention to what is brightly unexpected; remembers what was accidentally remembered. Lower mental functions are a kind of rudiments from which higher mental functions grow in the process of education (in this example, voluntary attention and voluntary memory).

The transformation of lower mental functions into higher ones occurs through the mastery of special tools of the psyche - signs and is of a cultural nature. The role of sign systems in the formation and functioning of the human psyche is, of course, fundamental - it determines a qualitatively new stage and a qualitatively different form of the existence of the psyche. Imagine that a savage who does not own an account needs to memorize a herd of cows in a meadow. How will he have to cope with this task? He needs to create an accurate visual image of what he saw, and then try to resurrect it before his eyes. Most likely, he will fail, miss something. You just need to count the cows and then say, "I saw seven cows."

Many facts indicate that the child's mastering of sign systems does not happen by itself. This is where the role of the adult comes into play. An adult, communicating with a child and teaching him, first "takes possession" of his psyche. For example, an adult shows him something, in his opinion, interesting, and the child, at the will of the adult, pays attention to this or that object. Then the child begins to regulate his mental functions himself with the help of the means that the adult used to apply to him. Also, being adults, we, being tired, can say to ourselves: "Come on, look here!" and really "capture" our elusive attention or activate the process of imagination. We create and analyze rehearsals of an important conversation for us in advance, as if playing out the acts of our thinking in speech. Then there is the so-called rotation, or "interiorization" - the transformation of the external means into the internal. As a result, from direct, natural, involuntary mental functions become mediated sign systems, social and arbitrary.

The cultural-historical approach in psychology continues to develop fruitfully now, both in our country and abroad. This approach turned out to be especially effective in solving problems of pedagogy and defectology.

CI psychology initially arose only as a kind of dissatisfaction of certain philosophers and psychologists with the inhumanity of "objective" science. However, in addition to this, purely scientific conscientiousness prompted scientists that natural science psychology turns a blind eye to many important phenomena, without which understanding a person and his behavior is impossible. Nevertheless, until the twentieth century, all CI psychological statements and research are made by scientists, as it were, within a common scientific space. In other words, there was no independent science or independent branch of psychology with such a name.

CI psychology stands out as an independent approach first in post-revolutionary Russia. However, not for long. Under the conditions of the ruling communist ideology, it was dangerous for a scientist to have views other than the permitted ones. Therefore, in the mid-thirties, shortly after the death of the founder of the Cultural-Historical School, Lev Vygotsky, his immediate students and successors A. Luria and A. Leontiev left this direction. Luria goes into a politically independent "pure" science and creates neuropsychology, Leontyev, on the contrary, accepts the ideologized paradigm of Soviet psychology developed by Rubinstein and becomes a "fighter of the ideological front." After that, in Russia, CI psychology as an independent school dies, although the current trend with the name "Development Psychology" (Zinchenko, Asmolov, etc.), perhaps, can be considered its continuation. True, it seems to me that this is a completely independent school, only using similar concepts. CI psychological research and observation in the proper sense of the word is done only by individual researchers. Perhaps this was hindered by the fact that the entire Soviet psychology was built on the basis of historical materialism, thereby, as it were, initially taking into account the cultural and historical environment. However, this accounting, as we all know perfectly well, was at the same time a limitation, because it could only be taken into account in a permitted way, which in the twentieth century was outdated and hindered development. In many ways, this approach is still alive in the modern Russian psychological community. An example is the article by the famous Soviet psychologist A.V. Brushlinsky's "Activity and Mediation (about M. Cole's book" Cultural-Historical Psychology ")" in the main organ of the psychological community "Psychological Journal" (No. 6, 1998), to which he promptly responded to the publication of Cole's book in Russia.

In the West, CI psychological research begins in the framework of cultural anthropology also in the thirties and in this form survives to our time. All researchers in this area provide psychological sketches of different cultures and even make cross-cultural comparisons. However, very few of the works in this direction can be called strictly psychological. Even such as, for example, the work of Ruth Benedict "Psychological types in the cultures of the Southwest of the United States", did not create CI psychology as an independent direction.

The emergence of specialized psychological disciplines related to culture can be attributed to the early seventies, when the school of Cross-Cultural Psychology by Leonor Adler (Wolman, p. 141) and Michael Cole's Cultural Psychology were born in the United States.

Since that time in the West, a significant number of professional psychologists began to engage in some form of CI psychological research. However, in my opinion, this direction of psychology has not yet taken shape fully. This is evidenced by the subtitle that M. Cole gave to his book: Science of the Future. It probably won't be a mistake to say that science has already been born, but has not yet fully realized itself.

In order to understand what CI psychology is, one must first, at least in general, decide on its subject. Strictly speaking, the presence of its own subject and decides the question of the right of a scientific discipline to exist. Already from the name it is clear that CI psychology is one of the private psychological disciplines. This means that, on the one hand, it, while exploring its subject, solves with its help the tasks posed to the whole of psychology, but, on the other hand, it is singled out from general psychology by its special subject. Accordingly, a detailed story about the subject of CI psychology would make it possible to show its differences with other psychological disciplines and thereby determine its place in the general system of psychology.

The subject of CI psychology is defined by the concept of cultural and historical.

Perhaps it would not be a mistake to say that CI psychology draws its material mainly from the history of culture, although not only there. Among the scientific disciplines that emerged in the last century, when the basic concepts of CI psychology matured, the history of culture, including the material one, was occupied by anthropology, ethnography, ethnology and philosophy of history. Anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography, rather, provide material for CI psychology. The question of differentiating objects with them is not worth it. But with the philosophy of history, it is necessary to draw a clear distinction, since it deals with the comprehension of the same material. I mean not only the material of the history of culture, but also the psychological material itself - thinking and its history.

Perhaps the best modern definition of the concept of "philosophy of history" was given by the English thinker of the first half of this century, RJ Collingwood. By the way, he also introduces a distinction between the philosophy of history and psychology:

“[I] The term“ philosophy of history ”was invented in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, who understood by it only critical, or scientific, history, that way of historical thinking, when the historian independently judges a subject, instead of repeating history, read from old books. The same term was used by Hegel and other authors at the end of the eighteenth century, but they gave it a different meaning: for them it simply meant universal, or universal, history. A third meaning of this term can be found among some nineteenth-century positivists: for them, the philosophy of history meant the discovery of general laws governing the course of events that history is obliged to tell.<...>I use the term “philosophy of history” in a different sense from all of the above, and in order to clarify what I mean, I must first say a few words about my understanding of philosophy.

Philosophy is reflective. Philosophizing consciousness never thinks simply about an object, but, thinking about any object, it also thinks about its own thought about this object. Philosophy can therefore be called second-order thought, thought about thought. For example, determining the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a task facing a first-order thought, in this case the task of astronomy; To find out exactly what we are doing when we determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a second-order task of thought, i.e. the task of logic, or the theory of science.

This does not mean that philosophy is the science of consciousness, or psychology. Psychology is a first-order thought, it views consciousness in the same way that biology views life. It is not concerned with the relation of thought to its object; it is occupied directly with thought as something that is completely separated from its object, as a kind of event in the world, as a specific phenomenon that can be considered by itself. Philosophy never deals with thought by itself, it is always busy with the relation of thought to its object and therefore equally deals with both the object and the thought ”(Collingwood, pp. 5-6).

Talking in this book about how CI psychology was born, I would like to preserve the psychological approach outlined by Collingwood to the historical material of human consciousness. In the water and the same phenomenon of thinking, the psychologist is interested in how a person thinks, the philosopher - how he cognizes. This means that the first task of CI psychology is to provide a qualitative description of the phenomenon of thinking and, first of all, on the basis of the material of the history of culture.

However, the very concept of "culture" forces us to make some clarifications in the problem statement. Culture - that which is cultivated, nurtured, that is, made by a person different from the natural environment, is a concept both material and ideal, that is, stored, living and developing in the minds of people. The task of giving a description of the phenomenon of thinking is also faced by general psychology. What is the difference?

In general, the subject is the same, since CI psychology is a particular psychological discipline. But different approaches make differences in the vision of the subject. General psychology, like any natural Science, considers consciousness and thinking as a given given in front of the eyes and devices.

CI psychology adds genetic and historical methods to this, that is, it examines the origin of mental phenomena in development and historical development.

Research in development involves, as I understand it, a comparison of the various stages of development of a mental phenomenon during a person's life, that is, in growing up. Proceeding from the name, it is hardly possible to consider this as the own subject of CI psychology, because in general psychology a discipline called "Developmental Psychology" has long been established.

Therefore, in my opinion, developmental psychology within the framework of CI psychology is an auxiliary discipline, which is studied then in order to see how at different stages of life a person assimilates the corresponding parts of the culture in which he grows. In other words, developmental psychology within the framework of CI psychology is developmental cultural psychology.

As for the historical development of the psyche, it cannot be observed directly. And nevertheless, if we are talking about the assimilation of culture at certain age stages of the development of the psyche, then this is not an accidental slip of the tongue: each age assimilates a culture corresponding to this age. And by culture, I mean here, first of all, the models of thinking and behavior corresponding to this age.

But in order to correspond to certain ages, these samples had to be born one day, realized as corresponding to a certain age, stored as such, naturally changing and developing during storage, and in a certain way transmitted when the time came.

All this: birth, storage, development, transmission, as well as the methods of implementation and the material in which they are embodied - all these are the most definite phenomena of our consciousness. They are revealed through the study of age-related and historical changes in the psyche and the comparison of stages of different cultures. This is the main subject of CI psychology.

Another part of it, perhaps, can be considered the history of the development of all other phenomena of our consciousness, in addition to transmitting culture, but which are recognizably related to culture. In fact, this is an exit to ethnopsychological concepts of nationality, nation, ethnos, folk spirit, etc. I am not yet in a position to give this a more detailed definition.

So: The age-related assimilation of culture, the way it is transmitted to the personality and the ways of preserving and transmitting culture in society - these are the three main psychological phenomena that I would define as the subject of CI psychology.

Of course, each of them can be expanded through its material up to general and individual psychology.

The current state of cultural-historical psychology, as far as I understand this, allows us to speak about three of its main directions.

First, it is general CI psychology. The best textbook on general cultural psychology, in my opinion, is still KD Kavelin's book "The Tasks of Psychology", written in 1872. In her, the rationale for the possibility of studying the psyche in terms of objects and phenomena of culture, in terms of artifacts, as they are called by modern CI psychology, is perfectly given. And also a study was made of the ability of a person's consciousness and thinking to store, process and use these artifacts, or rather, images of objects and phenomena.

Kavelin followed a completely independent path, so his book lacks a historical outline of the work of his predecessors in CI psychology. I hope my work can make up for this deficiency.

In addition, the most serious development of the theory of General CI psychology was made by the American psychologist Michael Cole in the works of recent years. His historical outline of CI psychology is very short, but he tells in detail and seriously about those psychologists of the twentieth century who can be considered his immediate predecessors.

Second, it's experimental CI psychology. Experimental cross-cultural research was undertaken as early as the thirties by Alexander Luria (1931) and Margaret Mead (1932).

Among the modern psychologists who have made significant contributions to this method, in addition to M. Cole, obviously, Richard A. Schweder and L. L. Adler (Wolman) should be named.

Thirdly, the accumulation of general theoretical knowledge about the structure of thinking, the constant experimental study of the traditional folk methods influences on consciousness lead to the fact that more and more often the CI psychologist is forced to act in the role of a consulting applied psychologist or psychotherapist. The accumulation of relevant experience inevitably leads to the emergence of applied CI psychology.

It is possible that the further development of psychology is generally impossible without a full-fledged study of mythological and magical thinking within the framework of applied CI psychology. At least, its current state clearly shows that natural scientific methods based on quantitative instrumental measurements are not able to grasp something very important, essential in such a subtle matter as human consciousness. Perhaps the devices available today are simply too crude, and for this research it is necessary to use the most delicate and sensitive device at the disposal of mankind - the human consciousness itself. Within the framework of magical thinking, people have mastered it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. This significantly exceeds the age of modern science.

Thing: psyche transformed by culture

Representatives: E. Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Pierre Janet, Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich

For the first time, the question of sociality as a system-forming factor of the psyche was raised by the French sociological school. Its founder E. Durkheim (1858-1917), using the term "social fact" or "collective representation", illustrated concepts such as "marriage", "childhood", "suicide". Social facts are different from their individual incarnations (there is no “family” at all, but there are an infinite number of specific families) and are of an ideal nature that affects all members of society.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, using ethnographic material, developed the thesis about a special type of "primitive" thinking, which is different from the thinking of a civilized person.

Pierre Janet further deepened the principle of social determination, suggesting that external relations between people are gradually turning into features of the structure of the individual psyche. So, they were shown that the phenomenon of memory consists in the appropriation of external actions of the execution of instructions and retelling.

The principle of the cultural-historical psyche was most fully revealed in the works of L.S. Vygotsky, who developed the doctrine of higher mental functions. L.S. Vygotsky suggested the existence of two lines of development of the psyche:

• natural,
• culturally mediated.

In accordance with these two lines of development, "lower" and "higher" mental functions are distinguished.

Examples of lower, or natural, mental functions are involuntary or involuntary child. The child cannot control them: he pays attention to what is brightly unexpected; remembers what was accidentally remembered. Lower mental functions are a kind of rudiments from which higher mental functions grow in the process of education (in this example, voluntary attention and voluntary memory).

The transformation of lower mental functions into higher ones occurs through the mastery of special tools of the psyche - signs and is of a cultural nature. The role of sign systems in the formation and functioning of the human psyche is, of course, fundamental - it determines a qualitatively new stage and a qualitatively different form of the existence of the psyche. Imagine that a savage who does not own an account needs to memorize a herd of cows in a meadow. How will he have to cope with this task? He needs to create an accurate visual image of what he saw, and then try to resurrect it before his eyes. Most likely, he will fail, miss something. You just need to count the cows and then say, "I saw seven cows."

Many facts indicate that the child's mastering of sign systems does not happen by itself. This is where the role of the adult comes into play. An adult, communicating with a child and teaching him, first "takes possession" of his psyche. For example, an adult shows him something, in his opinion, interesting, and the child, at the will of the adult, pays attention to this or that object. Then the child begins to regulate his mental functions himself with the help of the means that the adult used to apply to him. Also, being adults, we, being tired, can say to ourselves: "Come on, look here!" and really "capture" our elusive attention or activate the process of imagination. We create and analyze rehearsals of an important conversation for us in advance, as if playing out the acts of our thinking in speech. Then there is the so-called rotation, or "interiorization" - the transformation of the external means into the internal. As a result, from direct, natural, involuntary mental functions become mediated sign systems, social and arbitrary.

The cultural-historical approach in psychology continues to develop fruitfully now, both in our country and abroad. This approach turned out to be especially effective in solving problems of pedagogy and defectology.

Cultural-historical approach and its specificity at the present stage

1.L.S. Vygotsky and his cultural-historical approach in psychology.

2. The cultural and historical concept of A.R. Luria and neuropsychology.

3. New development of the idea of ​​historicism.

4. Cultural psychology of M. Cole.

5. Cultural-historical approach to family therapy.

6. Empirical ethnosociology.

7. The concept of A.N. Leontiev and non-classical psychology.

8. Conclusion

Speaking about the cultural-historical approach in the methodology of psychology, a few words should be said about its founder - the Russian psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934). In the work "History of the development of higher mental functions" L.S. Vygotsky developed a cultural-historical theory of the development of the psyche in the process of mastering the values ​​of human civilization by an individual. Mental functions given by nature ("natural") are transformed into functions of a higher level of development ("cultural"), for example, mechanical memory becomes logical, impulsive action - arbitrary, associative representations - purposeful thinking, creative imagination. This process is a consequence of the process of interiorization, i.e. the formation of the internal structure of the human psyche through the assimilation of the structures of external social activity. This is the formation of a truly human form of the psyche due to the individual's assimilation of human values.

The essence of the cultural-historical concept can be expressed as follows: the behavior of a modern cultured person is not only the result of development from childhood, but also the product of historical development. In the process of historical development, not only the external relations of people, the relationship between man and nature, changed and developed, man himself changed and developed, his own nature changed. At the same time, the fundamental, genetically initial basis for the change and development of a person was his labor activity, carried out with the help of tools. L.S. Vygotsky clearly differentiates the processes of using tools in humans and apes. He agrees with A.R. Leroy on the inadmissibility of comparing the technical activity of the first people ("primitives") with the dexterity of a billiard player, which in many respects resembles the actions of a monkey and other animals. Agility to a large extent belongs to the realm of instinct and is biogenetically transmitted. The technical activity of the "primitives" was of a supra-instinctive, supra-biological nature, which excluded the possibility of their biological study. Making a bow or an ax does not come down to an instinctive operation: you need to choose a material, find out its properties, dry it, soften it, cut it, etc. In all this, dexterity can give the accuracy of movement, but can neither comprehend nor combine.

Thus, Vygotsky could with good reason declare that cultural-historical theory sees the main factors in the psychological development of primitives in the development of technology. The position of A.N. Leontyev. Starting from his historical-genetic approach to the study of the psyche, he considers it as a product and derivative of material life, external material activity, which is transformed in the course of social historical development into internal activity, into the activity of consciousness. To the extent that man created technology, to the same extent she created it: social man and technology conditioned the existence of each other. Technique, technical activity led to the existence of culture.

According to L.S. Vygotsky, man in the process of his historical development has risen to the creation of new driving forces of his behavior. Only in the process of man's social life did his new needs arise, formed and developed, and the natural needs of man themselves in the process of his historical development underwent profound changes. Every form of cultural development, cultural behavior, he believed, in a sense is already a product of the historical development of mankind. The transformation of natural material into a historical form is always a process of a complex change in the type of development itself, and by no means a simple organic maturation.

Within the framework of child psychology, L.S. Vygotsky formulated the law of the development of higher mental functions, which arise initially as a form of collective behavior, a form of cooperation with other people, and only later they become internal individual functions of the child himself. Higher mental functions are formed during their lifetime, they are formed as a result of mastering special tools, means developed in the course of the historical development of society. The development of higher mental functions is associated with learning in the broadest sense of the word; it cannot take place otherwise than in the form of mastering given patterns, therefore this development goes through a number of stages. The specificity of child development is that it is subject not to the action of biological laws, as in animals, but to the action of socio-historical laws. The biological type of development occurs in the process of adaptation to nature through the inheritance of the properties of the species and through individual experience. A person does not have innate forms of behavior in the environment. Its development occurs through the appropriation of historically developed forms and methods of activity.

One of the first to understand and accept the concept of L.S. Vygotsky's student and follower A.R. Luria (1902-1977), in whose works the foundations of the cultural-historical approach are formed, in which culture is recognized and studied as the leading line of human spiritual development, as a form of personality. The problem of the relationship between personality and culture was one of the leading in his work, taking various modifications during his life, rich in research and scientific discoveries. Already in his early works, the genetic approach was combined with the historical, moreover, with the cultural-historical approach to the study of language and thinking.

For example, A.R. Luria believed that art can help in the formation of a new identity, since, enjoying a cultural work, a person realizes himself as a cultural being. Thus, the evoked "social experiences" help a person's socialization by regulating the process of his entry into that culture, into the society that surrounds him. Therefore, creativity is based on the process of appropriation (and at a certain stage in the development of the human personality and creation) of cultural values ​​and is associated with the ability of a person to give his thoughts a sign form. It is precisely this understanding of the role of culture in the formation of the psyche that was adopted by A.R. Luria and was developed by him in his subsequent works.

At the same time, he considered psychoanalysis as a theory that would help to find the cultural roots of a person, to reveal the role of culture in his life and work. It was not for nothing that the approach of K.G. was always closer to him. Jung, and not the classical psychoanalysis of Z. Freud, since he made it possible to reveal the ethnic and cultural possibilities of the content of individual images and ideas of people. However, from the point of view of A.R. Luria, these ideas are not inherited, but are transmitted from adults to children in the process of communication. The materials of psychoanalytic studies of neuroses were already cited by A.R. Luria to the idea that the environment is not a condition, but a source of human mental development. It is the environment and culture that form the content of both the conscious and unconscious layers of the psyche.

The ideas that were formed in the first decades of scientific activity remained largely unchanged, defining the foundations of the cultural-historical approach of A.R. Luria, in which culture appears as the leading line of human socialization, as a factor that determines the relationship between man and society, forming consciousness and self-consciousness, his personal activity.

Later A.R. Luria built his approach on the combination of psychology with medicine, forming a new concept in neuropsychology. This approach focuses on the search for the causes of mental disorders and ways to compensate them in the history of culture and social relations. The concept of A.R. Luria is based on the theory of cultural and historical origin, structure and development of higher mental functions, developed by him together with L.S. Vygotsky. With the help of these theoretical concepts, A.R. Luria carried out a deep functional analysis of various brain systems and described in detail the frontal, parietal, temporal and other syndromes of disorders of higher mental functions. In his first neuropsychological works, together with L.S. Vygotsky in the 30s. A.R. Luria became interested in Parkinson's disease, caused by damage to the subcortical nuclei of the brain. A.R. Luria and L.S. Vygotsky demonstrated the advantages of using mediation (creating external visual supports - cultural and historical tools) to restore walking in these patients.

In developing questions about psychological tools and mechanisms of mediation, L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria talked about stimuli-means, initially “turned outward”, towards the partner, and then “turned towards themselves,” that is, becoming a means of controlling their own mental processes. Further, internalization occurs - the rotation of the stimulus-means inward, i.e. the mental function begins to be mediated from within and thus there is no need for an external (in relation to a given person) stimulus-means.

The idea of ​​interiorization reflects the dialectical pattern of the formation of the human psyche, the essence of the development of not only individual mental functions, but also the entire personality of a person as a whole.

The application of Luriev's cultural-historical approach and the theory of three functional brain blocks turned out to be very productive for the development of neurogerontopsychology, which analyzes the rearrangements (both negative and positive) of mental functioning in old age, as well as the specific features of normal and various forms of abnormal aging.

The cultural-historical approach in neuropsychology, developed by A.R. Luria, turned out to be very fruitful for the study of the most difficult areas for psychological analysis: consciousness, personality, emotional sphere and communication of patients with rare types of pathology.

A.R. Luria believed that in the analysis of communication it is necessary to overcome linguocentrism, go beyond the description into the analysis of a different, non-verbal semantic organization of the world, which is extremely important for the modern understanding of the problem of communication and personality development in general. Using the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin that to be means to communicate dialogically, one can show the consequences of various fallouts of the Other for the development of the Self and try to rebuild the life path of the individual.

According to A.G. Asmolov, “when we talk about the works of Alexander Romanovich, we must first of all remember that no matter what he did, his key orientation was an orientation toward development. ... phenomena and in the same place - ways to compensate for the defect. "

The ideas of L.S. Vygotsky, M.M. Bakhtin and A.N. Leontiev coexist within the framework of modern neuropsychological research and, according to J.M. Glozman, “acquire the qualities of gestalt precisely thanks to such a network of coordinates as the cultural-historical theory of neuropsychological analysis of the development and decay of higher forms of human behavior by A.R. Luria. It is the pledge and guarantee of further intensive and extensive development of Russian neuropsychology ”.

Development psychology is based on the cultural-historical approach. V.T. Kudryavtsev proposes new ways of researching the idea of ​​historicism in psychology. Thus, he offers a new way of systemic interpretation of social life, highlighting two equal and equivalent social "subsystems": the world of children and the world of adults. Interacting and interpenetrating each other, they generate a vector of the integral movement of culture. Previous psychologists did not consider collective activity, confining themselves to the analysis of the individual. V.T. Kudryavtsev takes the next logically necessary step, realizing a dynamic research paradigm in relation to collaborative distributed activity. Here adults and children help each other in generating new contents of consciousness, they endow each other with consciousness. The contact of two "worlds" actually leads to the fact that adults expand the boundaries of their own consciousness and self-awareness, for example, feeling themselves to be carriers of a special mission in relation to children (to protect, prevent, direct, liberate, etc.).

Within the framework of the polemics of two Russian theoretical schools - Rubinstein and Leontiev - the idea of ​​the irreducibility of personality development to the assimilation of given norms and values ​​from the outside was expressed. Psychologists of the older generation equally limitedly interpreted the events of history in relation to the genesis of culture - as something that has become and happened. Today there is a new interpretation of the process of culture-genesis of personality. The idea of ​​historicism is presented here as the realization of the historical necessity of the development of psychological thought, developmental psychology.

At the moment, the main provisions of the psychological theory of activity and the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky are increasingly assimilated into the Western tradition. For example, M. Cole has done an enormous amount of work trying to analyze the facts obtained both in socio- and ethnocultural research, and in the field of experimental psychology and developmental psychology. He tries to "describe and substantiate one of the ways of creating a psychology that does not ignore culture in theory and practice," proposing to build a new cultural psychology on the basis of the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky and his closest colleagues - A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontyev. According to M. Cole, cultural psychology should be based “on the ideas of the Russian school of cultural-historical psychology, American pragmatism of the early XX century. and a hybrid of ideas borrowed from a number of other disciplines. "

M. Cole speaks of “the need to base theoretical constructions and empirical conclusions on the real subject of psychological analysis, corresponding to the experienced events Everyday life". In Soviet psychology, the task of studying the psyche in the context of activity was officially declared one of the basic principles of psychological research - "the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity." S.L. Rubinstein put forward this principle in 1934. However, in Soviet psychology, as M. Cole correctly noted, the emphasis was never placed on the analysis of everyday activities; it was usually about formally (institutionally) organized types of activity: play, study and work.

The cultural-historical approach is more and more relevant in the most diverse branches of psychological knowledge. In particular, he is of great interest in the field of family therapy, where much attention is paid to cross-cultural comparisons, as well as the study of the specifics of psychological work with families in a particular culture. Often, cultural and historical references in the framework of family therapy are very superficial from the point of view of the theory of psychology and do not take into account the full psychological depth of the influence of culture on the development of personality in a family environment. But Western family psychology also has serious cultural and historical developments that use the so-called “narrative” methods of working with families and show a very great interest in Russian cultural and historical psychology.

According to A.Z. Shapiro, due to the lack of development of general biological foundations, the cultural and historical context in Vygotsky's theory is divorced from the concrete historical context, primarily from the family one. Cultural-historical theory really does not take into account the family dimension of human life, the fact that the development of a person (including his psyche and personality), as a rule, takes place in a biological family. “Perhaps it is here that it is necessary to see the zone of proximal development of cultural and historical psychology, since the family is one of the most essential and fundamental characteristics of the social environment, reflecting the biosocial nature of man.” In order for the cultural-historical theory to be applicable as a theoretical and psychological basis in psychological assistance family and family therapy, it is necessary to correlate it with the "subjective" approach, a holistic view of a person.

In the XX century. empirical ethnosociology developed on the methodological basis of cultural-historical psychology. It breaks the boundaries between psychology, sociology, ethnography, history and pedagogy, creating a common problem space for the sociogenesis of education, the core of which is L.S. Vygotsky and M.M. Bakhtin. Cultural-historical psychological ethnosociology not only studies, but also gives birth to new realities, highlighting the historical-evolutionary and hermeneutic aspects of the world of childhood, the formation of social and ethnic identity, the generation of the image of self. Cultural-historical psychological ethnosociology allows us to say with confidence that cultural - the historical methodology of psychology is experiencing its rebirth as a concrete tangible holistic science that helps the education of Russia to follow the path of socialization from a culture of usefulness to a culture of dignity.

Based on the cultural and historical concept, A.N. Leontiev puts forward several theses about the future of psychology as a science. The first thesis is that psychology then and only then will become the leading science of man, when it invades the world and begins to understand what is happening in this world. The second thesis is that the development of psychology, the birth new system psychological knowledge will go in the future, not by specific areas, but by problems. The third thesis asserts that it is with the psychology of the personality, married to ethics and historical psychology, that A.I. Leontiev connects the transformation of psychology into the leading science of man. The fourth thesis briefly reveals the understanding of personality psychology inherent in the activity approach as a systemic and axiological psychology. The fifth thesis of Leontief's testament is connected with school life, its organization: to create a school, a growing personality, and not a school as a factory for making heads.

These five theses of A.N. Leont'ev can now be perceived as a program for creating a psychology of the XXI century. They brought A.G. Asmolov to the development of a non-classical psychology "based on a historical-evolutionary approach, love for psychohistory and an attempt to change, by referring to the organization of school life, psychosocial scenarios for the development of society in the era of vital action."

It is the historical-evolutionary approach that makes it possible to predict and structure the field of problems and directions with which the future development of non-classical relativistic psychology is connected: the growth of interdisciplinary research based on the universal laws of systems development; the transition from an anthropocentric phenomenographic orientation to a historical-evolutionary orientation when posing the problems of analyzing personality development; the emergence of disciplines that consider psychology as a constructive design science, which is a factor in the evolution of society. For non-classical psychology, based on cultural-genetic methodology (M. Cole), the question of psychology as a science is at the forefront.

In this regard, new guidelines for variable education arise, which open up the possibility of building education as a mechanism of sociogenesis aimed at developing the individuality of the individual. The embodiment of these guidelines in the field of education as a social practice makes it possible to take a step towards changing the social status of psychology in society and reveal the evolutionary meaning of practical psychology as a constructive science, "which has its own unique voice in the polyphony of sciences that create human history."

CONCLUSION

Thus, the use of the cultural-historical approach in psychology is currently opening up new horizons not only in various branches of psychology, but also in the fields of education, medicine, ethnosociology, family therapy, etc. According to A.G. Asmolova, “today there is no one cultural-historical psychology of the school of L.S. Vygotsky, but there are many cultural and historical psychologies. " There are three factors, without which there is no modern cultural-historical psychology: the activity style of thinking, a unique activity methodology; a special type of experiment that has proven its worth in the study of memory, perception, other higher mental functions and, finally, the action itself; the idea of ​​development, history, new non-Darwinian evolutionism.

At the present stage of development of psychology, systemic and interdisciplinary approaches (neuropsychology, ethnosociology) are gaining great importance. According to R.M. Frumkina, the main thing in Vygotsky's concept was not just an awareness of the role of culture and history in the development of the psyche, but giving an exclusive place and a special role to the development of operations with signs. “... the world of signs is the material used by thinking. In realizing the importance of the world of signs, Vygotsky stands next to ... Bakhtin. "

In his notes A.I. Leontiev traces the embryo of 21st century psychology. This psychology is a value ethical dramatic psychology. This psychology is a cultural-historical psychology through and through. And finally, this is psychology as the social construction of worlds. Non-classical psychology, growing out of the cultural-historical activity program of the school of L.S. Vygotsky, A.I. Leontiev and A.R. Luria, has a unique chance to become the leading science of man in the XXI century.

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