From a Notebook on Psychology (Part 2)

From a Notebook on Psychology (Part 2)

[1]

Marx writes of communism as the ‘solution to the riddle of history’ and as ‘knowing itself to be so’. But what does this signify for the development of the human personality in communism and for the character of interpersonal relationships? There is an incredibly rich literature for studying this and related questions. For example, see…

https://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/marxists.htm

https://www.marxists.org/archive/seve/

Human conscious awareness is fundamentally a social creation. It is not simply a biological creation although, of course, it implicates biological processes within itself. It was, at root, the need to co-operate and communicate in the labour process which gave birth to language and necessitated the rise of consciousness itself. Language and thought are inseparable aspects of the same psychological process.

The relationship between instinct and learning found in the animal primate is transformed with the rise of consciousness. Originating conscious awareness transforms animal instinct into the human unconscious. In the course of this transformation, emerging consciousness establishes itself in dynamic dialectical relation to its psychic opposite (the unconscious) to which it has given rise in the course of the transforming of instinct by the rise of consciousness itself. Each – the conscious and the unconscious – therefore arise and evolve as mediating the life of each other and, in so doing, constituting the psychic totality of the human mind or “Consciousness” as a whole. The specific relation between instinct and learning found in ancestral primates is superseded (sublated) with the rise of consciousness which gives rise to the higher relationships and content of the human psyche as a whole.

The dialectical relationship between the conscious and unconscious sides of the psyche raises the following question : can this dialectic be resolved at a higher level in which both the conscious and unconscious sides are superseded into a higher form of the human psyche? So that the conscious (as we know it) and the unconscious cease to be? Is this dialectic between the two sides becoming resolved into a higher psychic synthesis as communist life continues to evolve? The resulting psyche is neither “conscious” or “unconscious” as we know it? Hence the human psyche ceases to be characterised by this dialectic of its conscious and unconscious sides? It becomes a “return” (a negated negation) to the pre-human form of awareness but in a higher humanised form? But not, of course, a return to the purely non-conscious awareness of the pre-human primate ancestry. The conscious and the unconscious would become only superseded moments in the overall life-process of this psyche.

The conscious and the unconscious are psychic opposites. Each is what it is only by virtue of its relation to the other. The rise of conscious awareness simultaneously engenders the human unconscious and, in the course of its origination, establishes the dialectical relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

Perhaps the psycho-historical role of the origination and evolution of the “conscious psyche” is to prepare the ground and conditions for the emergence of this higher order of the human mind in consonance with higher, different forms of behaviour and human personality as communist humanity evolves? So that this social history is itself the unfolding of the conditions that are necessary for this ‘revolution’ in the mind? In this way, by evolving along this path, this higher psyche would be the negation of that of previous eras? This movement, of course, being expressed as a tendency in the human psyche in the course of the enduring evolution of communist society.

This return (negation of negation) could not be a simple repetition i.e. humanity cannot possibly return to the mere natural mode of life of ancestral primates. This return is also, at the same time, a real advance beyond both the natural mode of life of the animal and beyond the socio-historical periods of development of pre-class and class societies and the forms of conscious awareness corresponding thereto. In the reconciliation and synthesis of the naturalness of the ‘animal awareness’ and the conscious human social awareness is formed the higher relations of the human personality of classless society.

Human consciousness evolves and takes different forms in different epochs so that different stages in its development correspond to different stages in the history of society from its origins in the natural mode of life of animal primates through to the dissolution of class societies and the consequential emergence and onward development of classless society. But within this whole development, the dialectical relationship between the relative and the absolute is expressed in the alteration of the forms of conceptual content revolving around and integral to the enduring relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. This latter relation between the conscious and the unconscious becomes subject to a relativisation as communist life evolves with the emergence of a new fundamental absolute i.e. with the transcendence of this historically absolute relationship between these two intermediating sides within the human psyche. What are the underlying social processes driving the resolution of this dialectic within the psyche? To create a higher form of the psyche? This needs to be researched. It can only lie in the altering nature of human relations when communist life has irreversibly established itself and is evolving upon its own self-created foundations; when humanity globally as a species is so far beyond the legacies of class society that even the memory of these legacies no longer ties humanity to this distant past. Its growing realisation must lie beyond the ‘realm of natural necessity’ and within the evolving ‘true realm of freedom’

The evolution of human freedom in communism does not become subjectively acknowledged as ‘freedom’ as such. Just as communist humanity does not register psychologically its own communist nature. This is, of course, a paradox of human history. For only the truly ‘unfree’ can envisage but not directly experience such a state whereas the truly free have no need to envisage it in the direct immediacy of experience of such a state of human freedom. Truly free human beings will not be and can never be conceptually aware of their own state of freedom as a social condition. A truly free human society will be free of all concepts of freedom. A truly free human being can have no concept of freedom and has no awareness of being free. This human freedom will progressively deepen and widen, of course, but this will not be experienced negatively as the negation of an ‘unfreedom’ but positively as the augmentation and intensification of the quality of the freedom of the ‘true realm’. Only the ‘unfree’ speak of freedom. A society with concepts of freedom remains divided against itself; a society divided into classes; a society based on enslavement in one form or another.

In the transition to classless society, the forms of human consciousness, human relations and behaviour corresponding to this period of transition will continue to reflect a disappearing connection to and with bourgeois society showing that society – in this revolutionary transition phase – will not have completely disentangled itself from the psychosocial legacies of bourgeois society. As long as the historical umbilical cord connecting society to such legacies of bourgeois society – and the human memory of them – has not been completely severed, then human society has not re-founded and re-developed itself as an association of free human beings. At such a stage, the legacies of the relations of bourgeois society would continue to exert their influence, binding humanity (at least psychologically) to the forms of social antagonism of the past. Accordingly, under these conditions, the thinking, feeling, behaviour and interpersonal relationships of people would continue to be conditioned by the legacies of the exploitative relations and legacies of the class society which is in the course of being transcended during this period of transition.

[2]

If humanity creates a state of affairs where, initially, basic needs are identified and realised, if people have access to work, good quality housing adequately serviced, education, medical facilities, recreation, mobility and new cultural experience, all of these and more and this access is universal for every man, woman and child worldwide and always improving and becoming better in quality, then this must create the basis for a society which is more worthy of our humanity than the present bourgeois state of affairs. A state of affairs where millions are subject to chronic unemployment and will never work again, homelessness, a street existence and destitution, lack of healthcare, social support and educational development or none at all, no facilities for human recreation, fulfillment and personal development, the weight of systematised threat and humiliation (implicit violence), coercion, oppression and exploitation. All these and more creating the epidemic of stress, fear, anxiety, depression, suicide and many different psychological problems arising from this chaotic, unplanned, pandaemonium state of affairs. The establishment of a socialist society will go a long way towards providing the unfolding conditions for the elimination of all these psychological problems because they are all rooted in the continuing rule of capital. It must serve to alter, for the good, the whole character of interpersonal relationships and forms of human behaviour which can serve to wreck and destroy people’s lives. The gnawing dissatisfaction of people with their conflicted, stress-filled and unfulfilling lives under the rule of capital…

Dissatisfaction with oneself is either dissatisfaction with oneself within the framework of a definite condition which determines the whole personality e.g. dissatisfaction with oneself as a worker, or it is moral dissatisfaction. In the first case, therefore, it is simultaneously and mainly dissatisfaction with the existing relations; in the second case – an ideological expression of these relations themselves, which does not all go beyond them, but belongs wholly to them.

[Marx. The German Ideology. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol 5. (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976) p. 378]

The individual ‘self’ as the ‘ensemble’ of the prevailing social relations [Marx, Theses on Feuerbach]. Even the forms of psychological self-evaluation, evaluation-of-others and personality characteristics – within which such evaluation is psychologically grounded – as intrinsic to this ‘ensemble’ and developed within these relations and ‘belonging wholly to them’.

The existence of the nuclear family articulates a division between the private and the public space in the development of children. The nuclear family as socially porous and yet existing as a Janus unit of relationships with different faces for the inside and outside. This is a barrier which individuals traverse back and forth throughout life as children, adolescents and adults. This contemporary division is itself the creation of bourgeois relations.

The life and development of the child within and outside the family make up the two sides of the conflict between its private conditions of life and its wider social conditions of life outside the family. In bourgeois society, the psychological development of the child is primarily centred in the family i.e. within the social arena where its physical and other needs are met. It is the psychosocial medium in which children form their earliest and most significant psychological attachments and dependencies. The establishment, interplay and development of these attachments and dependencies form the psychological content of the inner relationships of the nuclear family within which children’s needs are realised or not as the case may be.

The relationship between the bourgeois system of social relations and the nuclear family are ambivalent. These relations tend to necessitate, maintain and encourage the continuation of the inner relationships of the nuclear family. However, at the same time, these same conditions and relations – in the course of their development – undermine the family and even are now creating the basis for the disintegration and supersedence of the nuclear family. The relationship between the nuclear family and bourgeois social relations is contradictory, here encouraging its reproduction and now there its break down and break up.

The conflict between the ‘public’ life of the individual outside the family and the ‘private’ life within the exclusive coterie of the nuclear family is one which can only subsist under general conditions of social alienation. This separation between the ‘private’ world of the individual and the individual’s ‘public’ world and role in society is a function of the rise and evolution of private property and not something inherently human. The very notion of ‘private’ is a creation of the historical process itself.

Marx notes that there is a dichotomy in the life of each individual. He writes that…

Individuals have always proceeded from themselves but of course from themselves within their given historical conditions and relations, not from the “pure” individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course of historical development, and previously through the fact that within the division of labour social relations inevitably take on an independent existence, there appears a cleavage in the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions pertaining to it.

[Marx. The German Ideology. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol 5. (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976) p.78]

This social ‘cleavage’ in the life of each individual is reflected in the distinctions between the public and private psychology of the individual. This psychological contrast corresponds to the ‘cleavage’ in the social being of each individual. It is a ‘cleavage’ which is expressed in the form of the psychological contrast between the public persona of the individual on the one hand (embracing occupational/professional relationships, etc) and the inner egoism of the private world of thought and feeling of the same individual on the other hand. This antagonism between the private and public sides of the human personality is a feature of human relationships in bourgeois society. The continuation of the existence of bourgeois relations serves to cultivate and perpetuate this antagonism. In so doing, it serves to fragment the personality of the individual – opposing this side or that aspect to another, etc – in his or her psychosocial relationships.

The progressive dissolution of the family in communism means and ensures that the rearing and development of children takes place on an entirely different (indeed opposite) social foundation. Children are reared within the social conditions, and through the social relationships, of the commune. This seres to resolve the conflict between the private and public sides of the life of the individual. Children become ‘the children’ of the whole commune – are reared by the whole community – as the psychosocial relationships which characterise the internal structure of the nuclear family start to disappear. Biological parents cease to have the same degree of social significance which they have for ‘their’ children reared within the monogamous nuclear family. Each child has biological parentage, naturally, but every adult becomes the social ‘parent’ (guardian) of each and every child. Hence, the traditional family-based notions of ‘parent’, ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘son’ ‘daughter’, etc – which express the social relationships of the nuclear family – will vanish and be replaced by relations which express a degree of freedom impossible in bourgeois society. Child-adult relationships become transformed in the commune where biological parentage does not have or confer any special, exclusive social role upon these adults. The child is reared by the whole commune and grows to maturity without any notions of family, mother, father, brother, etc. The narrow, exclusive mode of rearing children in bourgeois society is superseded. It will signify the emergence and development of the highest possible degree of individual human freedom where children and adolescents are nurtured by the whole community. These relations will become intrinsic to the life of the commune as the individual grows to maturity.

In capitalist society…

the ability of children to develop depends on the development of their parents and that all this crippling under existing social relations has arisen historically, and in the same way can be abolished again in the course of historical development. Even naturally evolved differences within the species, such as racial differences, etc,…can and must be abolished in the course of historical development.

[Marx. The German Ideology. ibid., p. 425]

‘The ability of children to develop depends on the development of parents’. The psychology of the child is a sensitive indicator of the general character of the social relations of the epoch. The dissolution of the nuclear family is the social transformation of the development of children in the commune. Their physical and social needs are unconditionally guaranteed and attainable outside the traditional constraining bounds of the nuclear family.

The maturation of children in the commune outside the nuclear family facilitates a higher degree of personal independence than can ever exist in bourgeois society. The psychology that is associated with the possible or actual non-attainment of needs – food, shelter, clothing, etc – disappears which, further, serves to dissolve the traditional ties of the nuclear family. The psychosocial relationships of the nuclear family – which grow out of the necessity to satisfy human needs under the conditions of exploitation of bourgeois society – become historically unnecessary and gradually disappear in the transition to and onward evolution of classless society. The individual that replaces the individual of the nuclear family is the ‘social individual’ who is a fully integrated and active part of the life process of the commune itself. It is only within the commune that each individual has….

the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community. In previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc, personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed under the conditions of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community in which individuals have up till now combined always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and since it was the combination of one class over against another, it was at the same time for the oppressed class not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.

[Marx. The German Ideology, ibid., p.78]

[3]

Private property and the psychology corresponding to its existence.

The very notion of property itself must disappear with the negation of private ownership and the emergence and onward development of social relations based upon common ownership. The deep and profound significance of such a development for the human personality is obvious.

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another.

[Marx. Capital, Vol 3. Lawrence and Wishart, 1974, p.776]

Those personality characteristics which are intrinsically associated with the rule of private property – e.g. greed, acquisitiveness, possessiveness, etc – must and will disappear. Human relationships become free of their psychological effects.

Shaun May

December 2014

mnwps@hotmail.com

http://shaunpmay.wordpress.com

https://spmay.wordpress.com

From a Notebook on Psychology (Part 1)

From a Notebook on Psychology (Part 1)

[1]

It is very clear that social relationships and the psychology of people are related. The areas of Social Psychology and Critical Psychology have plenty to say about this relationship. For example, if whole populations are subjected to oppression and terror in one form or another, this profoundly affects the psychology of the present adult and younger generation growing up under such conditions. We only have to look at what is happening to children in Syria at the moment as the civil war continues. If coercion and compulsion on threat of sanction are the order of the day, then this must have psychological effects such as anxiety, fear, depression, etc. If a person’s employment enables him or her to feed family and keep home, body and soul together, then the lurking threat of redundancy or dismissal must engender fear in the life of that person because the realisation of such a threat must mean the destruction of the structure of that person’s life or, at least, its complete alteration and disruption. It introduces conditions which carry the possibility of personal catastophe and the overturn of a previously stable and relatively secure personal existence. This is the same with domesticated animals such as pets, for example. A pet which is constantly abused and subject to cruelty will develop different behavioural patterns to the same pet which is fed, watered, medicated when sick and generally shown human care and affection. A child growing up in an abusive household will undergo a markedly different psychological development to one reared in a caring and nurturing environment involving a focus on the child’s individual human interests. The examples are too numerous to mention.

The “psychological” is a legitimate historical category but only in its relationship to the category of the “social”. It is not legitimate in isolation from this latter category.For example, the “psychopathic” personality is not the creation of the biological malfunctioning of the brain in the way a diabetic is the creation of a dysfunctional pancreas or a blind person of a defunct retina. The “psychopath” or child killer is an individualised creation of the society into which he is born and has developed. He has been created on the ground and within the social conditions of his own personal experience in this society.

The character of the prevailing and dominant social relations constitutes the foundation upon which the human psychologies of a given culture develops. However, the human mind has and must have – in its discreteness – its own laws of development which do not simply ‘reflect’ social development and also are not absolutely identical with this development Within their unity – the interrelation between society and mind (their interdependence) – subsists the discreteness of each.

In the sense that thought itself cannot take place without the organ of the brain, matter itself must be a material pre-condition for thought. And production itself furnishes the nutrients to feed the body and its various organs. Of course, the human brain itself is also, partly, a product of socio-historical development i.e. the brain itself has developed materially (plasticity) in the course of, and as a product of, the historical development of human society. However, in that it is the conceptual content of thought that ‘constitutes’ the ‘substance’ of the mind, it is the character of social relations that forms the basis and conditions for its origination and development:

socio-historical shifts not only introduce new content into the mental world of human beings; they also create new forms of activity and new structures of cognitive functioning. They advance human consciousness to new levels.

[Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976) p.163]

[2]

The awareness of the animal primates ancestors of humanity was a non-conscious awareness in contrast to the awareness of humanity which is a conscious awareness. This conscious awareness incorporates (supersedes) within itself the awareness of the animal ancestor as a unity of instinctual and learning capacities. This unity is raised (ascends to a higher stage) to the level of consciousness in humanity, with the emergence of beings possessing a conscious awareness.

If I state that I am conscious of this object in front of me, this conscious awareness of this object also involves the psychic mediation (psychological, neuropsychological, etc) of processes of which I am not conscious, of which I am unconscious. Therefore, conscious awareness simultaneously involves the mediation of these processes which are my unconscious. If I look at the object in front of me, its shape, colour, its texture, temperature, when I handle it, etc, I am drawing on mental powers which are a unity of the conscious and the unconscious. I am using my mind (which involves the physiology of the brain) and therefore this active process must necessarily involve indispensably contributing unconscious aspects.

The unconscious is expressed within and mediated by the conscious (otherwise it would not be the unconscious as such) but does not, in itself, originate entirely within the field of consciousness. In the dialectical moments of mediation of each by the other (intermediation) is expressed their mutual identity and distinction. The origination of human conscious awareness itself simultaneously gives rise to the human unconscious itself. It creates it and in the course of this creation establishes a relation with it so that they intermediate each other. But this human unconscious is created out of the instinctual material furnished by humanity’s primate ancestors and, therefore, cannot be simply the child of human conscious awareness. It contains elements of the pre-human sublated within itself but elevated into the human mind as a totality.

The human mind, accordingly, must have arisen and evolved, as a whole and as a unity of the unconscious and the conscious. This is what “consciousness” is in the complete sense and meaning of the word. It is a fully integrated form of awareness in the life of the human being. But, paradoxically, “consciousness”, as this integrated totality, is ontologically more complex than that of the “conscious” alone as the phenomenological expression of “consciousness” in the totality of its life-process. [“Consciousness” with an upper case ‘C’ and the “conscious” with a lower case ‘c’. We may also use the term “Mind” interchangeably for “Consciousness”]

The different aspects of Mind must be considered in their relation to each other i.e. they must be considered dialectically. In this way, the nature and function of each aspect is understood as being a part of, and intrinsic to, the life of the whole. Each aspect, function and facility affects and mediates the activities of all the others, constituting a unified whole which is higher than a mere aggregation of parts.

The origination of humanity is the process of an aware yet non-conscious primate becoming conscious of itself and of Nature. This process – which we may refer to as sapienisation – is a transition between the mode of life of the non-consciously aware animal primate and that of the earliest modes of human existence as a consciously aware existence. This transition brings with it – in sublated form – this form of awareness of the animal primate ancestry. It transcends this “animal awareness” only by preserving and re-positing aspects of it in a higher conscious form. For example, the hunger, thirst, energy, sex drive, etc, of the animal are transformed in this transition process of becoming human. They become human drives but they maintain a relationship with their animal ancestry in the course of their supersedence (sublation) i.e. insofar as aspects of these human drives which resemble those in our animal ancestors are carried over and preserved in the negation. An operative example of this is the ‘fight or flight mechanism’ inherited from our animal ancestors which, taken in its isolated abstraction, is many millions of years old, passed from generation to generation, from species to species and so preserved as advantageous for succeeding species in the course of evolution. Today passed down and operative in the various forms of human fear and anxiety.

Consciousness itself, as distinguished from the simple awareness of animals, is a social product of the human brain embracing and incorporating within itself an awareness of the ‘self’ involving the capacity to reflect. Reflection – i.e. thought consciously monitoring the progress of its own conceptual content – is an exclusive property of the human mind which is not found in animals or in higher primates. Animals are aware but non-conscious natural beings and do not possess this capacity to reflect. When an animal encounters its image in a mirror by chance it merely sees the image of its own physicality, itself as an object which it does recognise as ‘itself’. When a human being looks into a mirror it observes not only a physicality but also the ‘me’ or ‘I’. For the animal there is no ‘I’ to which this physicality is intrinsic. ‘I-ness’ is a function of the reflective capacities of human beings. This, of course, is not to assert that all animals do not possess sensitivity or awareness of their surroundings and that they orientate their behaviour according to their changing relationship to their surrounding conditions of life.

[3]

The mind is a complex synthesis of the social and the biological. Human thinking is a social product of the brain. If the neurology of the brain becomes diseased, degenerated or disordered, this can affect the capacity to think (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disorder). But the actual animating conceptual content of human thought is social in its origin. The brain does not produce political conceptions, for example, by a process of neurochemical secretion in an analogous way to the stomach producing acid or the liver producing bile. In a analogous way, to adopt a mechanistic example, the mirror does not produce the image by generating it out of its own materiality. Without the mirror there is no image, of course, but the the actual image in the mirror is dependent on the existence of the object reflected external to it. If the mirror is concave or convex, the image in the mirror will be a distorted reflection of the object.

Again, there is no emotion or feeling without its registration by the brain and body. ‘I’ ‘feel’ my anger or joy only insofar as I am a living material being with brain, nervous sytem, blood, organs, etc. But anger, pain (unlust), joy, etc, are not simply neurological products. They involve the mediation of thought, either conscious or sub-conscious. If I am elated because x and not y has happened, this involves and implicates the rumination of thinking, anticipation, even worry within my thinking. Examples are too numerous to give.

But does this link human emotion to the history of social relations? An obvious example of this is the feelings of jealousy and resentment in the interrelations between the sexes. This man ‘steals’ the wife of another man who is so enraged with jealousy, etc, and plans to kill them both? But in a different society where these monogamous relationships are transcended and the human mind has become accommodated to unconditional polygamy and the open character of sexual relations, what becomes of such emotions as jealousy? Are such emotions the passing attributes of a historically-conditioned human psyche? Are they subject to alteration and negation as these social relations change? So the woman takes different men (or women) to her bed and there is no jealousy, resentment or hostility mediating the changing relations?

It appears, therefore, that certain human emotions only arise with the emergence of definite social relationships and institutions. Thus, the emotion of envy/jealousy only comes into being with and accompanies the psychological interdependencies and acquisitiveness (‘possession’) of interpersonal relationships which are a social product of the rise of private property and the changing forms of the family corresponding to the evolution of private property.
Human behaviour – mediated by mental life – can only be comprehensively and scientifically understood on a socio-historical basis, within a socio-historical perspective. Implicitly, the conception that there is some nebulous, eternal psychological ‘human nature’ destined to characterise human beings in, at and for all places and all times must be considered untenable.

Moreover, we need to consider whether or not, at a physiological level in the brain, emotional states are correlated with definite neurological states. That rage and joy are associated with different neurological states of the brain. [I dare say that this has already been observed or even studied by the neuroscientists]. The subject individually registers anger or joy, for example, as a state of feeling. I “feel” angry, I “feel” happy, etc. The most fundamental question that radical psychology must address concerns the nature and quality of the emotional life of the human individual i.e. humans as ‘feeling’ beings. Feeling as the eternal focal point around which the nature and quality of the subjective life of the individual revolves. If I am suffering a terminal, malignant sadness, what does this say about the character of the social relations through and within which I am living my life? And this psychological state comes into relation with, and becomes manifest in, my behaviour, in my interpersonal relationships, in my perception and evaluation of self and others. Engels writes that..

How real people behave and did behave depends and always did depend on the historical conditions under which they lived

[Engels. From the Preparatory Writings for Anti-Duhring. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25. (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1987) p. 605.]

The implication here is one of altering forms of human behaviour as ‘historical conditions under which people live’ change and become transformed. And hence the alteration of their psychology in the course of human beings altering their lives and creating new modes of living, higher ‘historical conditions’ more worthy of their humanity? So that the different forms of human behaviour and psychologies can only be understood relative to established and evolving socio-historical conditions and therefore not conceived as fixed and unalterable. The forms of human behaviour and psychology in any society therefore reflecting the prevailing socio-historical conditions and their dominance in the life of the individual.

[4]

Vygotsky proposes that in the psychological development of children…

Any function in the child’s cultural development appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first on the social plane and then on the psychological; first between people as an interpsychological category, and then inside the child, as an intrapsychological. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory and to the formation of concepts. The actual relations between human individuals underlie all the higher functions.

[Vygotsky, L.S. Development of Higher Mental Functions. Psychological Research in the U.S.S.R. (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966) pp. 44-45]

The psychological development of the individual involves the psychological assimilation of the actual social relationships and modes of behaviour ‘between human individuals’. These ‘actual relations….underlie all the higher functions’.

However, the mind is not simply a passive reflection of social relations but is a most active element in the development of these relations. Vygotsky’s proposal implies that the ‘inner dialogues’ of thinking are intrapsychological transpositions and transformations of the dialogues and social interactions between individuals. These interactions are psychologically internalised in the form of ‘inner dialogues’ thereby reflecting the social structure and content of the actual relations between human individuals.

Shaun May

December 2014

mnwps@hotmail.com

http://shaunpmay.wordpress.com

https://spmay.wordpress.com