Psychological Development as History: Developing Notions of Historicity and Temporality in Vygotsky’s Work and Life

Abstract

In this work, we present the developments of previous investigations on the topics of temporality (Simao LM, Guimaraes DS, Valsiner, Temporality: culture in the flow of human experience. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, 2015) and historicity (Doria NG, Simao LM, Theory Psychol 28(6), 757–779, 2018) in the context of the semiotic-cultural constructivism. We propose that revisiting some Vygotskyan concepts and propositions may be useful for understanding the relations between temporality (seen as the experience of time in a phenomenological sense) (Simao LM, The temporality of tradition: Some horizons for semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology. In: Simao, LM, Guimaraes DS, Valsiner J (eds) Temporality: culture in the flow of human experience. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, pp 483–503, 2015) and historicity (as the set of qualitative transformations of the human psyche over historical time) (Doria NG, Simao LM, Theory Psychol 28(6), 757–779, 2018), in human psychological development. We identified the absence of a theory, in Vygotsky’s works, that combines these two temporal dimensions. However, some theoretical and meta-theoretical elements present in his works and in the works of authors who continued, commented, and developed his legacy help us further understand the subject. The following topics are particularly relevant: (a) the notion of perezhivanie; (b) the notion of internalization and its reinterpretation in terms of appropriation; (c) the notion of externalization and its reinterpretation in terms of completion; (d) the relations between sign, meaning, and sense in Vygotsky’s theory of language; (e) the differences between the psychological processes involved in the genesis of a higher mental function on the historical plane and its recreation on the ontogenetic plane; and (f) the fecundation of the notions of the history present in Vygotsky’s work by classical and contemporary views on the subject provided by authors from the field of Social Sciences and History. We believe these aspects of Vygotsky’s work can help us understand contemporary issues in Cultural Psychology in general, and in semiotic-cultural constructivism in particular, allowing us to understand the dynamics of the culture-person-culture cycle in intersubjective exchanges.