Elaboration of Cultural-Historical Approach in Developmental and Clinical Psychology: Tendencies and Levels of Analysis

Abstract

The research was focused on the following opportunities of further development of L. S. Vy-gotsky’s cultural-historical approach: 1) further analysis of symbolic mediation methods of mental activity in socially and culturally stratified modern society and 2) cultural-historical analysis use in research of theories and conceptual apparat of clinical psychology. Drawing on performed research, we argue that psychological knowledge should be analyzed in the context of its cultural-historical formation. The application of cultural-historical analysis in di˙erent levels provides an opportunity to extend the methodology used for empirical research including research of certain clinical case. We’ve developed the integrated cultural-historical approach that combines the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin complementing psychology of interiorization with psychology of exteriorization. To develop further, modern cultural-historical psychol-ogy needs to extend the “experience” concept and to integrate the experience of depth psychology, inasmuch as an individual develops within the culture, which means, that development is closely related with language and should be analyzed in the context of language and voice dialogues as fundamental conditions of psychological development. Thereby, mental activity is dialogical in its structure – it does not only evolve in dialogue, but is a dialogue at the root as well. Performed research proves L. S. Vygotsky’s idea that normal and abnormal development goes in accordance with the same rules. Moreover, normal and abnormal phenomena intertwine in the midst of empirical development of an individual. Historically divergent phenomena provided an opportunity for extension of normal consciousness that places developmental psychology and pathopsychology in the global phenomenological and historical context of analysis.