Vygotsky’s reception in the West

Introduction

The history of the diffusion of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky’s work ¹ in western European countries in the early decades of the second half of the past century is interesting not only because of its influence on the development of psychology in the strict sense, but also for the political and social issues emerging in the discussions about the innovative contributions made by the Russian psychologist. This aspect was particularly relevant in countries such as France and Italy, where the presence of a strong Communist Party favoured knowledge of and references to everything produced by Soviet culture and science. At the same time, communist or pro-Soviet intellectuals and scientists took as a model the theories that were officially approved by Soviet institutions, often at the risk of misunderstanding or underestimating other theories that were developed in western countries, but were considered ‘bourgeois’ by Soviet colleagues aligned with the positions of the party. The ‘Lysenko case’ is the best-known example not only of the errors committed by Soviet scientists when they blindly adopted Trofim D. Lysenko’s pseudo-theory, supported by Stalin, with serious consequences for research in the fields of genetics and the economy, but also because communist or pro-Soviet western scientists felt obliged to defend those positions (Joravsky, 1970; Soyfer, 1994; on the Lysenko case in France see Lecourt, 1995[1976]; for Italy, see Cassata, 2008). The same scenario was evident for psychology too. Especially after the 1950 conference on Pavlov’s work, the theory of higher nervous activity became the official view, condoned also by Stalin, in the study of brain and mind (Joravsky, 1989). However, the relationship between the Pavlovian School and the trends of Soviet psychology in the 1950s and early 1960s was complex and articulated. While a complete submission of Russian psychologists to Pavlovianism did not occur, they felt obliged to mention Pavlov, along with Marx, Engels and Lenin (and Stalin until 1953), at the beginning of an article or a book (Mecacci, 1979; Joravsky, 1989). As is well known, the first official rehabilitation of Vygotsky’s work occurred in 1956 with a book that included Thinking and Speech. The diffusion of Vygotsky’s thought in Italy began 10 years later, when Italian Pavlovianism, prevalent among some Italian psychologists and physicians linked to the Communist Party, was losing influence. A turning point was determined by the congress held in Rome in 1979, during which the whole complex of Vygotsky’s work was discussed. In this article, I will first briefly illustrate how I came across Vygotsky’s theory in the early 1970s and how this experience led to a series of activities to translate and disseminate his works. Later, my analysis will cover some aspects of this diffusion, between the 1970s and 1990s, particularly in relation to the Italian social and political context of the period.

A personal account

It is not due to any kind of autobiographical smugness if I describe here some episodes of my stay in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, but rather I think that my experience may enlighten the way in which a psychologist, who had heard of Vygotsky within the limits of what was known in western countries, might acquire new information and come to know new texts. In January 1972, I began my stay at the Institute of General and Educational Psychology in Moscow, as the Institute of Psychology was named at that time. After the revolution the institute, founded in 1912 and active since 1914, became the centre of original research conducted by young psychologists, among them Lev S. Vygotsky and his co-workers Aleksey N. Leontyev (1903–79) and Aleksandr R. Luria (1902–77). My research programme involved the investigation of the physiological correlates of cognitive processes, to be carried out in the Laboratory of Differential Psychophysiology directed by Vladimir D. Nebylitsyn (1930–72). This laboratory became known in western countries after the British psychologist Jeffrey A. Gray (1964) published a selection of the most important works produced by the so-called ‘Teplov School’. Boris M. Teplov (1896–1965) had revised Pavlov’s typological theory, extending it to human psychophysiological differences, while his student Nebylitsyn had expanded the research project in light of current neurophysiology and the application of updated electrophysiological techniques (Nebylitsyn, 1972). The integration of the theory of the British psychologist Hans J. Eysenck and this neo-Pavlovian school generated a series of original investigations on the biological bases of personality (Mecacci, 1976, 1987; Mecacci and Brožek, 1973). Although during my stay in Moscow I worked in this psychophysiological field (Rusalov and Mecacci, 1973), I soon discovered that Soviet psychology had much more interesting developments at the theoretical level.

A brief digression is necessary on what was known about Soviet psychology until the early 1970s in western countries. Since the 1960s a series of translations, mostly in English, of works by Russian psychologists and neurophysiologists, as well as various reviews of Soviet psychology, in particular by Josef Brožek and Gregory Razran, was available (a bibliography was provided in Mecacci, 1974b). However, the most complete overview of Soviet psychology appeared in the book edited by Cole and Maltzman (1969), where remarkable essays were translated in the 4 areas of developmental psychology, abnormal and social psychology, general experimental psychology, and higher nervous activity. However, the particular originality of Vygotsky’s work did not clearly emerge even in this anthology, especially if one considers that at that time only the English translation of Thinking and Speech was available, and notoriously in an abridged version. In Italy the situation was not any different. In 1966, an Italian translation of Thinking and Speech appeared, largely based on the English version, and edited by Angiola Massucco Costa (1902–2001), university professor and member of the Communist Party in the Italian Parliament. Massucco Costa had already published the book Soviet Psychology (1963), which included a discussion of Vygotsky and his school, but in very general terms. So for a young Italian psychologist (25 years old) who went to the Institute of Psychology in Moscow in 1972, Vygotsky might be only a brilliant theorist whose productivity had been blocked by premature death. In addition, Luria, though known as one of Vygotsky’s students and co-workers, was considered a neuropsychologist, and I had to contact him to deepen my understanding of his research on the relationship between brain and mind. Within a few months I was able to obtain completely different ideas thanks to Vygotsky’s daughter, Gita L. Vygodskaya (1925–2010), and Aleksandr R. Luria.

How I made the acquaintance of Gita Lvovna exemplifies the atmosphere of the Brezhnev age in Moscow, and the peculiarity or difficulty of relationships that a foreign scientist might have with Soviet colleagues. Like other foreign scientists (about 10 at that time), who stayed in Moscow in the framework of the agreements with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, I lived at the Gostinitsa Akademya Nauk (Hotel of the Academy of Sciences). It was only possible to meet Soviet colleagues inside the scientific institutes. Though this was not a written rule, one soon learned that no other way was practical. Soviet colleagues could have foreign guests at their home after a formal request (I do not remember which office had to be addressed). Perhaps permission was easier to be obtained by outstanding scientists such as Luria, at whose house I was a frequent guest, or Nebylitsyn who, besides being the deputy director of the Institute of Psychology, was also a member of the Moscow Soviet, and with whom I established a relationship of friendship (unfortunately interrupted by his untimely death, together with his wife, in a plane crash in October 1972: he was 42 years old). One day Vladimir M. Rusalov, one of Nebylitsyn’s co-workers, told me that Vygotsky’s daughter wanted to meet me. The meeting should take place at my room in the hotel. The reasons for this choice were never fully clear to me, but I believe that Gita Lvovna wanted to avoid making public the meeting inside the Institute of Psychology. So I received Gita Lvovna, accompanied by Rusalov, in my room at the end of January 1972. She had with her a copy of the first edition of Thinking and Speech, a copy of Educational Psychology, and a series of manuscript sheets of the first version of Thinking and Speech. She told me she had been informed by Luria that there was an Italian psychologist in Moscow and thought that I might be of help in increasing knowledge of Vygotsky’s work among Italian psychologists. She left me the books and manuscript sheets to make copies of them. I could give them back to Rusalov who would return them. However, in 1972, in Moscow, it was not easy to make photocopies. The machines existed only in some public institutions and, as a matter of fact, it was necessary to ask permission to reproduce books and documents. So Rusalov could photocopy only a few pages of the manuscript (Figure 1). After that time it was no longer possible to meet Gita Lvovna again in 1972. However, we had a continuous exchange of correspondence (to which I shall later refer), and we met each other again in Moscow in 1975 (and in subsequent years). Gita Lvovna was later in Italy in 1996 to give a lecture on her father’s work (Figure 2). So I began systematically to study Vygotsky’s work, collecting texts hitherto little known and in any case never translated into western languages, and I also began some systematic research on the history of Soviet psychology. I received, too, some unexpected help. I remember, for example, that a young Russian girl, a student in developmental psychology, gave me a block of Vygotsky’s unpublished articles. They circulated in the form of samizdat so that copies were often difficult to read as each was one of many carbon copies.

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Figure 1.

The first page of the first draft of Thinking and Speech. Gita L. Vygodskaya informed the present author (Moscow, January 1972) that only 40 sheets were preserved.

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Figure 2.

Gita L. Vygodskaya and the present author (Pisa, Italy, 1996).

Particular encouragement was given to me by Luria whom I got to know a few days after my arrival in Moscow. Luria was very generous to me. Rather than impose on me his view of Vygotsky’s work, he referred me to rare documents and books. Indirectly he made me realize that on the basis of this material I might attempt to outline a different interpretation of Vygotsky in the context of Soviet psychology, different from what he, Leontyev and other Russian psychologists had written. My general book on Soviet psychology and neurophysiology, with a preface by Luria, appeared in 1977 (Mecacci, 1977), followed two years later by the English translation. The book was based on a series of translations into Italian that I had already taken care of for the publisher Editori Riuniti (to which I will return later). These books were (I provide the English translation of Italian titles): L. S. Vygotsky, Problems of Psychological Development (an anthology of his writings), Psychology of Art, Tragedy of Hamlet, The Imagination and Creativity in Childhood; A. N. Leontyev, Problems of Developmental Psychology; A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, The Man with a Shattered World; F. V. Bassin, The Problem of the Unconscious; the anthology The Problem of the Unconscious in Soviet Psychology, with essays by D. N. Uznadze and others; E. V. Ilenkov, On Idols and Ideals. Moreover, especially in the anthology Soviet Psychology 1917–1936 (with the translation of writings by V. M. Bekhterev, P. P. Blonsky, G. I. Chelpanov, K. N. Kornilov, I. P. Pavlov, I. Vaynshteyn, L. S. Vygotsky, and A. V. Zalkind) I attempted a history of psychology in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in direct and strict relationship with the historical and political context, up to the 1936 decree on pedology (Mecacci, 1974a).

On 15–16 January 1979, I organized a conference in Rome with the aim of obtaining as complete as possible a picture of Vygotsky’s work. The conference was devoted to ‘Vygotsky and Human Sciences’. Because this was the first congress on Vygotsky (later, in October 1980 there was a conference in Boston and then in June 1981 another one in Moscow), it may be of interest to list the topics that were discussed, also because the lecturers continued to study Vygotsky and to write about him: evolution of Vygotsky’s work (L. Mecacci; paper reprinted in Vygotskij, 1983), historical-cultural trends (A. Massucco Costa), psychology of art (E. Garroni), education (M. A. Manacorda), biological and cultural evolution (F. Robustelli), semiology and society (T. De Mauro), developmental psychology (T. Musatti), social and cognitive development (L. Benigni), concept formation (N. Dazzi), theory of play (S. Morganti and F. Scaparro), social conditions of cognitive development (O. Albanese and E. Barolo), developmental neuropsychology (G. Levi), Vygotsky, Luria and neuropsychology (D. Salmaso), contemporary Soviet psychology (M. S. Veggetti), Russian formalism (A. Di Salvo), Soviet semiotics in the 1920s and 1930s (A. Ponzio), linguistic education (L. Tornatore), inner and egocentric speech (L. Camaioni), writing and cognitive skills (D. Parisi), intrapsychological communication and awareness in verbal thinking (D. Sobrero), sense and meaning (F. Fanelli), problems of pragmatic linguistics (F. Lorenzi), philosophical problems of the relationship between thinking and speech (S. Tagliagambe), Thinking and Speech and linguistics (D. Gambarara). ² Among these authors, Maria Serena Veggetti deserves special mention because she wrote many articles and books on Vygotsky and his school as well as on the theory of activity (Veggetti, 2004, 2006).

During the beginnings of the 1980s, knowledge of Vygotsky’s work seemed to be deeper in western countries than in the Soviet Union. Surely, Soviet psychologists might have had easier access to Vygotsky’s texts, but they remained vague about some important aspects (for example, what I discussed in my works especially about the pedology, the problem of nationalities, and in general the political relevance of Vygotsky’s theoretical and empirical approach during the period of Stalinism). In the symposium on Vygotsky held in Budapest in September 1988, there was also a group of Soviet psychologists (Mikhail D. Yaroshevsky, Dmitri A. Leontyev and Tamara M. Lifanova). Yaroshevsky, a well-known historian of Soviet psychology, gave a general introductory lecture that was especially interesting because it showed how there was still a lot of circumspection in discussing Vygotsky. Vygotsky was again represented as an eminent theorist in psychology in the early 20th century, but the actual relations his research had with the cultural, social and political context of his time were not discussed. I protested openly against this way of presenting Vygotsky. Gita Lvovna was informed of this episode in Budapest, as shown by the following letter of 16 November 1989. I reproduce this letter (translating it from Russian) because Gita Lvovna provided some very important information related to the problem of the various editions of Thinking and Speech (at that time I was finishing translating it into Italian).

Dear Professor Mecacci!

It is difficult to say how much I have welcomed your letter. Many years have already passed I did not know anything about you. Last year, returning from Budapest, Lifanova told me of your meeting and your reaction to the irresponsible intervention by Yaroshevsky. I had written you some words of thanks and I had sent you greetings for the New Year. But after a few months my letter returned to Moscow, because your address (as it was written on the envelope) was inaccurate. Therefore, your letter made me happy …

Thank you very much for having completed the translation of Thinking and Speech. It is very remarkable that even in Italy readers may know the last work of my father. ³ You are right: the 1934 edition had no change in the text. Actually I am not sure that Lev Semenovich saw the book already in the form ready for printing. The fact is that the disease arose in early May and until death (i.e. within a month) he could already not work because of his poor condition. And the book, judging from the data printed there, was sent to the press on August 27. In preparing the second edition (1956), it was said [at what institutional level? It remains unknown, LM] not to include in the book the chapter ‘Genetic roots of thinking and speech’. Aleksandr Romanovich [Luria] agreed with this request, provided [the rest of] the book was preserved (so he told me afterwards). But I objected to this. I insisted that the book had to be published in the complete form, but in the preface the editors might write whatever they thought was necessary. No, I did not give up despite Aleksandr Romanovich’s exhortation, and he was forced to surrender – he went to some authority and there he showed the opportunity to keep that chapter. As far as I know, the changes were limited to the fact that the word ‘pedology’ was changed to ‘child psychology’ and the word ‘test’ was changed. As I recall, this was all that was changed. The 1982 edition followed the second one (1956) without any correction. It seems to me that this is exactly what happened …

Indeed the changes were many in the second edition (1956) compared with the first one (1934), whereas also in the third one (1982) new corrections were added. This extensive work of censorship of Vygotsky’s masterpiece was shown in detail in my full translation of Thinking and Speech, based on the 1934 first edition (Vygotskij, 1990; Mecacci and Yasnitsky, 2012). But we are now in the 1990s, when a new series of historical research began at international level, and finally Vygotsky’s human and scientific personality emerged in all its richness and complexity.

Marxism, communism and Italian society

It is worth noting that most of Vygotsky’s works were published in Italian in the 1970s by Editori Riuniti, the publishing house of the Italian Communist Party. The costs for translation and printing of Soviet authors were largely covered through an agreement with Soviet publishers (especially Mir and Progress). In addition to psychology, books particularly in physics and mathematics were also published. Special attention to psychology was paid by Giuseppe Garritano, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house. Garritano was a historian, known also as a communist partisan of the anti-Nazi resistance in Rome. For many years he was the Moscow correspondent of the newspaper L’Unità, the official organ of the Italian Communist Party, and during that period he became a personal friend of the literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin and the philosopher Evald V. Ilyenkov. The first western translation of Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky appeared in Italian in 1963 by Garritano himself. Garritano was also involved in both the ‘Pasternak affair’ in relation to the world’s first Italian translation of Doctor Zhivago in 1957 and the ‘Italian affair’ (so named by Oittinen, 2005) in relation to the Italian translation of Ilyenkov’s book on the dialectics in Marx’s Capital in 1961 (this remarkable book, published in Russian in 1960, was translated into English only in 1982). ⁴ Garritano himself entrusted me to take care of the long series of books on Soviet psychology mentioned above.

Notwithstanding this diffusion of Vygotsky’s work, the actual assimilation of Vygotskyan theoretical principles and research methods was not immediate in university and research institutions. It should be noted that the development of psychology as an independent discipline in Italy, with special theoretical and experimental foundations, was very complex. Reservations about and resistances to psychology arose from different fields of culture and science (Mecacci, 1998). Idealistic philosophy, dominant in the early 20th century, believed that psychology was a pseudoscience having no real autonomy with respect to both philosophy and biomedical sciences. Later, in the early decades of the second part of the past century when Marxism became the philosophical movement more common among left-wing intellectuals, psychoanalysis was the main reference point in the debate on psychology. Cultural and social factors were taken into account in the light of neo-Freudian theories, the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse’s work. At the same time, Pavlovian theory was accepted by some psychologists who were physiologically oriented, and in this way psychological processes were reduced to neural phenomena. Autonomous lines of psychological research were carried out in Italian laboratories, first (the 1950s–1970s) in the framework of Gestalt theory and then, around the mid-1970s, along a cognitivist paradigm. In this context of experimental research, socio-cultural variables such as those stressed by the Vygotskyan School were not considered at all.

The interest in Vygotsky emerged at the end of the 1970s (note that the Rome Congress was held in 1979) under the pressure of strong social and political changes in Italy over those years. Reforms were proposed by left-wing parties to change fundamental aspects of Italian society. For example, within issues of psychological relevance, divorce was definitively approved in 1974, the so-called ‘classi differenziali’ [differential or special classes] for 6–14-year-old students with cognitive, social and personality disorders were abolished in 1977, and psychiatric institutions were drastically reformed in 1978.

Moreover, Vygotsky’s thought was highly appreciated in far-left groups. Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were the founders of the Red Brigades, the terrorist and extremist group in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s (the best-known episode was the murder of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democracy Party, several times minister and prime minister, on 9 May 1978). They wrote a book (1982) while they were in the state prisons in which the second chapter was devoted to Vygotsky’s theory and its ‘revolutionary’ value from a social and political point of view. Furthermore Corrispondenza Internazionale, a quarterly journal directly linked to left-wing extremists, published in 1981 some excerpts from Vygotsky’s works, stating in an editorial note: ‘We recommend the reading and study of this work [“The Instrumental Method in Psychology”], as well as his other writings as Thinking and Speech.’ The lecture Augusto Ponzio gave at the Rome Congress in 1979 on ‘Reading together Vygotsky and Bakhtin’ was also published in this journal in 1981. Of note, the paper by Curcio (1981–2) entitled ‘Culture as a Mechanism of Production, Circulation and Fixation of Extra-genetic Information’ was published in 1981 in the same journal.

In conclusion, although these publications did not circulate within the community of academic psychologists, it should be noted that in the far-left extreme groups between the 1970s and 1980s scant reference was made to the previous rich literature on the relationship between Freud and Marx, whereas attention was being paid to another psychologist, at that time scarcely known, but whose theory seemed more compatible with Marxism and more promising for the construction of a new society: Vygotsky.

The Italian neo-Vygotskyan trend

In the early 1980s a new line of research began to develop in Italian psychology that might be called, in general terms, a neo-Vygotskyan trend. The interest in ideological aspects of cultural-historical theory diminished compared with the importance of Vygotsky’s work in dealing with issues of contemporary psychology. Various research fields were characterized by the application of Vygotskyan concepts. In cognitive psychology the issue of the relationship between mind and technological cognitive tools became very important, going beyond the past relationship between man and machine, or mind–computer interaction. Research was carried out investigating the relationship between cognitive processes and new artificial cognitive systems: the Internet, the Web, videogames, etc. In this area, sometimes referred to as ‘cognitive ergonomics’, Vygotsky’s notion of stimulus-means, reformulated under the name of ‘cognitive artefacts’, was a basic reference (Mantovani, 1996; Rizzo, 2012; Zucchermaglio, 1996). As expected, the notion of the zone of proximal development became the core of research in developmental psychology, especially with regard to the relationship between education and learning; this is now considered by Italian developmental psychologists as two processes closely intertwined expressed in the concept of the typical Vygotskyan word obuchenie (Pontecorvo, Ajello and Zucchermaglio, 2007; Veggetti, 2004). In general the former pre-eminence of Piagetian theory in developmental and educational psychology research progressively vanished, superseded by the Vygotskyan approach (Fonzi and Mecacci, 1997; Liverta Sempio, 1998). This shifting paradigm was particularly evident in studies related to the development of metacognition in children (for instance, at the European Congress on Metacognition, held at the Catholic University in Milan in September 2012, Vygotsky was the main theoretical reference). Another research area recently influenced by Vygotskyan ideas is cultural psychology, especially because of the need for new forms of social and cultural integration under the pressure of increasing immigration from African and Asian regions to Italy (Inghilleri, 2009). The multi-ethnicity that now characterizes Italian schools has produced new issues for teachers and educational psychologists that are examined within a cultural-historical approach (Mantovani, 2000). Additionally, in the field of linguistics and psychology of language new theoretical proposals were discussed in the framework of a neo-Vygotskyan perspective (Cimatti, Mecacci and Velmezova, 2012). Studies on Vygotsky from an historical point of view are also noteworthy, particularly about the influence of psychoanalysis and psychology of art (Angelini, 2008; Ghiro, 2014; Trimarchi, 2007).

Today, although Vygotsky remains a classic reference, eminent from an historical point of view, for the purposes of contemporary research aimed at addressing the problems of the human mind in the context of 21st-century society, Italian psychologists are looking for an integration between Vygotsky’s ideas and new concepts drawn from other psychological trends.