Abstract
According to the historian of psychology Edwin Boring, “the present changes the past; and … new parts of the past enter into its history and other parts drop out” (1929/1950, p. ix). Edwin Boring’s (1929/1950) selective account of psychology’s past made sure a lot “dropped out.” It was an attempt to redefine psychology as experimental psychology and even, perhaps, a pure psychology. This is certainly how one reviewer took it: It is difficult to imagine that a psychologist can read this book and still not feel the lure of a new working plan for his science. Such a plan would emphasise experiment as never before. … This development, however, must be in the hands of scientists who are almost harshly empirical and who, like Dr. Boring himself, yield to no emotional desire to leave the laboratory in order to save society. (Carmichael, 1930, p. 331; cited in Capshew, 1999, p. 27)
To the extent that psychology might be useful, even life-enhancing, this was to be the province of an “applied psychology,” a supposedly derivative practice dependent upon a preexisting “pure psychology.” Another example of selective history! Psychology as a set of practical practices preceded its identity as a university-based subject, and continues to have its own very active life outside the “academy.”
The author of The Transformative Mind, Anna Stetsenko, is interesting. She not only studied and worked with Vygotsky’s leading followers in Moscow (pp. 15–20), but she also draws widely on American pragmatism, notably Dewey and James. (During the Soviet era, pragmatism was often dismissed as an apology for craven Western capitalism.) However, her ambitious and unique project also connects with a much wider range of resources: ecological psychology, situated and dynamic theory, feminist and critical scholarship, critical pedagogy—and spans diverse fields from philosophy and biology to psychology and education.
In this book she is promoting an ideal of “developmental psychology” that is not only about what “happens” to children (p. 36), but an active project that is also life-long: a developmental psychology of becoming (p. 97). She calls it “The Transformative Activist Stance” (TAS): Whatever else TAS is or can be, its starting premise is that every person matters because the world is evoked, real-ized, invented, and created by each and every one of us, in each and every event of our being-knowing-doing—by us as social actors and agents of communal practices and collective history, who only come about within the matrices of these practices through realizing and co-authoring them in joint struggles and strivings. (p. 7)
The radical crux of this approach was captured by Leontiev, whose words were conveyed by Bronfenbrenner (1977), a scholar directly and profoundly influenced by Vygotsky’s project, in concluding remarks of his influential work (cited on p. 97): It seems to me that American researchers are constantly seeking to explain how the child came to be what she is; we [however] … are striving to discover not how the child came to be what she is, but how she can become what she not yet is [emphasis added]. (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 528)
Although Anna Stetsenko insists she is not presenting an exegesis of Vygotsky’s ideas, there are plenty of important insights tucked into this book. In terms of transformation, she focuses on schooling: it can be argued that the locus of problems pertaining to human development and mind, subjectivity and agency, belongs in classrooms because every theory of these matters is implicitly a theory of education, of teaching and learning in their linkage to development. (p. 13)
Although she does not refer to Ivan Illich (1971), her objections to classroom practice are very similar. But whereas Illich was proposing radical alternatives to school, Anna Stetsenko, as far as I can judge, believes things can be fixed within the existing institutional structures (cf. Illich, 1971, p. 92: “The inverse of school would be an institution which increased the chances that persons who at a given moment shared the same specific interests could meet—no matter what else they had in common”). In subsequent publications, she has applied TAS, among other things, to science education, curriculum development, play development, and methodology.
Anna Stetsenko is deeply committed to contextualism (e.g., ecological and situated approaches). But she makes an essential qualification to defend the possibility of transformation. The subject/agent should not be regarded as submerged in, or even disappearing into, the context: In many approaches, people are viewed as if they were removed from reality or, alternatively, as fully and seamlessly immersed in the world to such an extent that they lack ability to resist the all-powerful forces of culture, history, and society. … In [such an] approach, the mind and subjectivity are not considered to have power, but rather as either excluded as epiphenomenal or viewed as ecological functions that mirror material interrelatedness of the mind with the environment. (pp. 31 & 292)
The Transformative Mind is, at heart, a manifesto. As such, it is unusually long (421 pages!), and the writing can at times be daunting on crucial points (e.g., page 266 on Stetsenko’s own non-dualist and dynamic approach). But its message is an extremely important one: psychology not as description/re-presentation but a science of the possible. This book is not only a contribution to psychology. It presents a framework for what psychology could itself become.