Abstract
This article asks what kind of science psychology should be and what new readings of Vygotsky can contribute to answering this question. Methodology and method are key to constituting psychology as a science. Hence, the focus is on three major methodologic-methodic approaches to what Vygotsky referred to in his Notebooks towards the end of his life as his and his colleagues’ “acmeist psychology” – the objective-analytical, the method of double stimulation and the semic method. Each will be discussed in its own right, followed by a discussion of the interrelatedness of the three in order to provide stimulation for future possibilities. These possibilities – it will be argued – lie in decisively re-orienting psychology as a science that brings single cases and complex semiotic analyses to the fore and thereby also rethinks psychology’s relation towards the arts, especially literature.
Highlights
Keywords Vygotsky studies · Objective-analytical method · Method of double stimulation · Semic method · Acmeist psychology · Russian literature · Semiotics · Psychology and art · Single cases
We again encounter the method in The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology (Vygotsky, 1997), this time embedded in more general reflections on the philosophy of science and methodology
What kind of empirical studies would the semic method be appropriate for? I would argue that detailed biographical reconstructions definitely belong to those kind of studies, provided they take the wealth of the single case seriously and analyze thoroughly the complex web of sense and meaning constituting the multifaceted person-world-relations
Summary
Keywords Vygotsky studies · Objective-analytical method · Method of double stimulation · Semic method · Acmeist psychology · Russian literature · Semiotics · Psychology and art · Single cases “The method of The Psychology of Art is analysis, abstraction (that is why there is not a word about the fable as such; I ignore its specific traits).”
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