Overcoming the Two-Factor Approach to Determination of the Psyche as a Key Problem in A.N. Leontiev’s Activity Theory: Psychic Determination and Human Freedom

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers A.N. Leontiev’s activity theory through the prism of the scientific problem that gave rise to it. This problem is often described as the need to go beyond L.S. Vygotsky’s “word-centrism,” but it seems more reasonable to argue that the problem addressed by activity theory had already been posed by Vygotsky himself as the need to overcome the two-factor approach to determination of the psyche, which for cultural-historical theory meant a transition from social to psychological determination and from there to human freedom. This problem caused Vygotsky to change his theory many times and, in particular, led to a transition from the theory of higher mental functions (“instrumental theory”) to the theory of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness (“cultural-historical theory”). This problem was taken up by [Leontiev’s] “Kharkov School” directly from Vygotsky, and the difference between their activity theory and Vygotsky’s theory was only in the proposed solutions. Whereas Vygotsky proposed a solution that viewed “the personalized emotional experience of events” [perezhivanie]1 as a unit of the psyche, the Kharkovites proposed what seemed to them a more materialistic version, the concept of activity as a mediator refracting the influence of two factors, the social and the physiological, on the psyche. Understanding the genuine problem that Leontiev created his activity theory to solve, affects our understanding of the main theses of activity theory as well as the research carried out from its perspective. From analysis of some of these studies, we derive and emphasize such characteristics of activity as holism/integrality and supra-individuality.