The Cognitive Paradigm and the Cognitive–Emotive Divide
While I may have encountered the word paradigm before then, it wasn’t until I had already earned my PhD (in 1977) that I remember paying any attention to it. For whatever reasons, the book that popularized the term, Kuhn’s (1962) monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wasn’t on any of my graduate school course reading lists. I think things have changed enough in 30 years so that this is not your first encounter with the concept.
Although it has specific meanings in some academic disciplines, Kuhn’s characterization of paradigm as “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community” (1962, p. 175) is generally accepted and popularly used, along with model, system of thought and worldview. In his description of how science develops, and through examples from the history of physics, biology, medicine and other areas of science, Kuhn outlined an historical process that included extended “moments” of the revolutionizing of scientific thought, what he called paradigm shifts. These are not merely revisions of individual theories; rather, they change everything – the way scientists view their subject matter, the terminology of the field, the questions that are considered valid, and the methods by which particular theories are to be evaluated. Commonly cited paradigm shifts are those from a Ptolemic (earth-centered) to a Copernican (sun-centered) cosmology, and from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian physics. Within philosophical, scientific and social scientific circles there has been a sustained debate on the validity and applicability of Kuhn’s characterization and terminology outside of the physical sciences. Meanwhile, Kuhn’s terminology has entered the vocabulary of nearly every academic discipline and professional field. Whether overused or not, I find the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shifts useful in understanding Vygotsky, and you will encounter them frequently throughout this chapter and beyond. For what I have found in Vygotsky’s attempt to create a new human science paradigm are the seeds of a nonparadigmatic approach to human life. The path to discovery was an unlikely one.
Thirty years ago I brought Vygotsky to Fred Newman, the creator of an unusual therapeutic approach known as social therapy. Social therapy was a few years old then, and completely new to me. I was thrilled to have discovered Vygotsky in my own search to understand the complexity of the relationships between language, thought, learning and development. I was intrigued by social therapy and Newman’s overall approach to people, institutions, ideas, life and revolutionary change. Meeting Vygotsky had changed my world. Meeting Newman had changed my world. Understandably, I very much wanted the two to meet each other! I was convinced that bringing Vygotsky and Newman together would yield something unique. They didn’t disappoint me.
Once I succeeded in interesting him in Vygotsky, Newman, who was a philosopher by training, enlisted me – a developmental psychologist – in an exploration of Vygotsky’s approach and ideas in relation to social therapy. The “results” have been deep and broad. As a psychotherapy, social therapeutic practice has become more radical and more relevant for being Vygotskianized. Additionally, social therapeutics more broadly has emerged as an effective human development methodology applicable to a wide variety of educational and cultural settings, institutions and communities in the USA and other countries. These developments have yielded new understandings of the paradigmatic constraints of contemporary, philosophically overdetermined psychology and how to break free of them.1
Many, many others have critiqued what psychology has become and presented their arguments for alternative paradigms.2 Vygotsky’s popularity from the last quarter of the twentieth century up to the present can certainly be understood in this way. His writings have served to inspire and support a paradigm shift in our understanding of human development and learning from ahistorical, acultural, individualistic unfoldings to cultural-historical socially created processes (often referred to as CHAT – cultural-historical activity theory – or socio-cultural activity theory). There is an active global community of scholars informed by Vygotsky whose research methods and findings are working to effect a qualitative change in how psychologists see. To me, this is one of the most important and exciting things happening in the social sciences and educational research. And while I am counted among this community of scholars (which is something very important to me), there is a way in which my work differs qualitatively.
Rather than work to effect a paradigm shift in psychology, my efforts are to effect a shift away from paradigmism altogether.3 Activity theory, as it has come to be practiced and articulated in the work my colleagues and I do, is more and other than a new paradigm. It is a new ontology that can do away with the need for paradigms. This radical position against paradigmism (and epistemology, explanation and knowing) is a lot of what Newman and I write about, as we urge others to turn their attention to creating new “ways of seeing” synthesized with discovering new “ways of being” (Holzman, 1999; Newman, 2000a; Newman and Holzman, 1996/2006, 1997). Vygotsky was not a fellow antiparadigmist, yet his attempts to do away with some of the most deeply rooted dualistic ways of seeing human development have greatly informed and advanced our work.
Vygotsky traversed several dualistic divides: biology and culture, behavior and consciousness, thinking and speaking, learning and development, and individual and social.4 He refused to accept the foundational dualism of this kind of psychological conceptualization and argued forcefully against it, urging instead a method of dialectics. His writings on these matters have been noted and debated, some extensively, by Vygotskian researchers and historians. Far less recognized but equally important is Vygotsky’s challenge to psychology’s dualistic conceptualization of cognition and emotion. This aspect of Vygotsky’s thinking has been critical in my work, and I often have wondered why my academic colleagues do not follow suit.
Which brings us back to psychotherapy. Vygotsky’s ideas have been studied in relation to dozens of intellectual disciplines and areas of professional practice, but psychotherapy, emotions and emotional development are not among them. With few exceptions, contemporary Vygotskians stay clear of that area. As for psychotherapy researchers and practitioners, unless they have come across writings on social therapeutics, the theoretical writings of psychologist John Shotter (1993a, 1993b, 2000, 2006) or the recent writings of narrative therapist Michael White (2007), it is doubtful they have even heard of Vygotsky.5 What are we to make of this phenomenon – that the work of such a seminal thinker, dubbed “the Mozart of psychology” (Toulmin, 1978), frequently uttered in the same breath as Piaget and Freud, and ranked within the hundred most referenced psychologists (Haggbloom et al., 2002) has not been vigorously applied to the largest area (in impact and in sheer number of psychologists) within the discipline of psychology? I think it speaks loudly of the same paradigmatic constraints and biases that make it so difficult to see the significance of how Vygotsky understands cognition and emotion. For, in order to appreciate Vygotsky’s challenge to psychology’s dualistic conceptualization of cognition and emotion, psychotherapy – where emotion occupies center stage – is where one would have to go.
Emotion has a long history in Western culture of being considered second rate – inferior to cognition, the enemy of rationality and an attribute not of men, but of women. In spite of the significant contributions feminist psychologists and philosophers have made in exposing the male biases of accepted conceptions of being human, the overall cultural environment of psychology has remained paradigmatically male and cognitively overdetermined.6 I believe this is no less the case among socio-cultural psychologists, including those who have been greatly influenced by Vygotsky. As for psychotherapy, the area of psychology most identified with emotion, it is generally thought of as soft science, or not science at all. This assessment is applauded by those who agree and relate to psychotherapy as an art or cultural activity, and lamented by those who disagree and work to advance its scientific credentials. Especially in the last two decades, the profession as a whole has bowed to pressure or taken up the mantle (depending on one’s point of view) to become more “scientific” (objective, measurable, “evidence-based,” etc.), even as female psychotherapists now outnumber their male counterparts, a trend also noted for psychology as a whole (American Psychological Association, 2005). While the shift to relationality (often making use of the feminist conception of connection, as put forth in Toward a New Psychology of Women, Miller, 1976) that is occurring in the profession is a welcome innovation, in the overall conservative environment in which it is taking place it is not only marginalized but vulnerable to being cast in cognitive terms.
My focus on the cognitive–emotive split is not meant to imply that it is, in some abstractly hierarchical sense, more significant than the other dualistic divides Vygotsky traversed. Rather, it is woven throughout this text because of its unique importance to the Vygotsky that my colleagues and I have discovered and been inspired by.
Why Method?
I write this book as a “creative imitation” of Vygotsky, the revolutionary, the Marxist, the psychologist, the educator. Because I am a psychologist and do not like what psychology as an institution, industry and discipline promulgates. I think that nearly all of its theory and practice – generated in a misguided effort to emulate the natural and physical sciences – goes against the stated mission of its largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), which is to promote “health, education, and the public welfare” (http://www.apa.org/about/). Because I am an educator and lament the ineptitude and impenetrability of the current educational system and the harm it is doing to children, educators, families and the world. Because as a psychologist and educator I have learned that most people, including fellow psychologists and educators, have similar opinions about how psychology and education are misguided and misguiding, but do not know what to do other than go along with how things are and make the best of it. And because I have learned first hand that not knowing what to do is often the best place to be to create innovation and effect change. Vygotsky has helped me and, I suspect, many others to not know. How he has been helpful is not straightforward, for he was, in many ways, as invested in knowing as anyone of his time and place. But he did step outside what was known even though he did not know how before he did it.
Lev Vygotsky was, in a word (or two), a revolutionary scientist of the last century (Bruner, 1996; Newman and Holzman, 1993; Wertsch, 1985). He worked brilliantly and painstakingly to understand what needed to be understood to make profound and progressive social change. For him, much of what needed to be understood was how human beings learn and develop and create culture. That he managed at all to “think outside the box” of the dominant worldview of his time is remarkable. For, the modernist scientific view and its conceptions of truth, systemization, generalization, explanation, measurement and teleology not only shaped the developing social sciences, but also overdetermined the Marxism and communism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a Marxist, Vygotsky could not help but to buy into the belief that human liberation would have a scientific face. Read today, Vygotsky’s writings show both acceptance and struggle against this intellectual constraint, which is both sobering and inspiring to me.
Early on in conceptualizing this book I thought I would begin by drawing parallels between the “crisis in psychology” that Vygotsky was addressing in the early twentieth century and the one that we who live in the early twenty-first century are faced with. So I went back and re-read a thoughtful essay on this same topic by Rieber and Wollock, which appears as the “Prologue” to Volume 3 of Vygotsky’s collected works (1997). I wondered if I had anything to add, given the passage of a decade since they wrote.
Rieber and Wollock characterize the two crises as formally similar but substantially different.
When Vygotsky was writing the “Crisis,” psychology was only at the start of its popularization in Europe and America. Then as now the profession was chaotic, but for a different reason. At that time it was because the profession was everywhere undeveloped, though full of brilliant possibilities. Today it is because the field is overpopulated and its general level is mediocre.
(Rieber and Wollock, 1997, p. x)
That seems hard to disagree with, but it is seriously under-historicized. In Vygotsky’s time, psychology was not merely young – its course toward natural, social or human science was uncertain, and that uncertainty was an important reason for the urgency with which Vygotsky addressed the issue. Furthermore, what was to become psychology’s massive influence as an industry and its incredible success as a means of social control was unimaginable. Given that the entire world, and not just the role psychology plays in the world, has completely transformed politically, economically, scientifically, technologically and culturally since the 1920s, I do not think there is much to be learned from comparing the two crises. It might, in fact, not even make sense to speak of a current crisis in psychology at all. We live in a world in which psychology rules. It is the authority that is appealed to in the classroom, the courtroom, the clinic, the personnel office, the organization, the advertising and media industry, the armed forces and the family. I no longer think there is a crisis in psychology. In fact, psychology is doing just fine, while the world mess is getting worse. And that’s the crisis.
In that period of uncertainty as to the direction psychology would take, Vygotsky was raising fundamental questions about science. His conviction that there needed to be a general (unifying) and systematic psychology (Vygotsky, 1997, pp. 233–343) came directly from his era’s conception of science as a body of knowledge/inquiry bounded by a core set of agreed upon conceptions and explanatory principles. His intellectual contribution mirrored and contributed to late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy of science. Viewed in light of contemporary dialogues in the history and philosophy of science and the newer interdisciplinary field of science studies, his thinking on the matter often appears simplistic. Rather than this being a criticism of him, it is a reminder that he was a product of his time. This is, in my experience, often forgotten or overlooked in discussions of Vygotsky and contemporary work inspired by him.
One way the forgetting or overlooking of Vygotsky’s social-historical location looks is when he is judged by contemporary standards of scholarship or in light of twenty-first century scientific developments and cultural, political or historical understandings. (Is Vygotsky’s empirical work replicable? Was he truly a psychologist? Was Vygotsky racist? Was he a Marxist? Was his work ideologically driven?) Another manifestation of this “forgetting” is assessing who or what of the current day is worthy of being called Vygotskian – and assuming that the closer to Vygotsky’s own work, the better. It seems to me that one could just as plausibly argue the opposite; namely, that the closer contemporary work is to Vygotsky’s original work, the less “Vygotskian” it should be considered, given that his was first and foremost a cultural-historical endeavor and that historical conditions have transformed so thoroughly. This seems in keeping with Vygotsky’s life activity, from what we have been told of it, including his perspective that “a revolution solves only those tasks raised by history” (Vygotsky, quoted in frontpiece, Levitan, 1982). For Vygotsky those tasks were raised by the first successful communist revolution, and he devoted himself to revolutionizing the psychology of his day to solve those tasks. His failed effort (inseparable from communism’s failure) contains remarkable methodological breakthroughs that are useable in efforts to revolutionize today’s psychology to solve the tasks history is raising for us.
The question Vygotsky posed about human development and learning and how to study it was a task raised by history. First, the transformation from a feudal Russia to a Soviet Union characterized by a planned economy was a monumental task. Creating a new culture involved facing very serious “learning and development” challenges – among them, nearly universal illiteracy, cultural differences among the hundreds of ethnic groups that formed the new nation, absence of services for those unable to participate fully in the formation of the new society, and millions of abandoned and homeless children who roamed the country. Vygotsky and his colleagues were a part of a great real-life experiment in creating the hoped-for new society (see, for example, Bruner, 2004; Friedman, 1990; Newman and Holzman, 1993; Stetsenko, 2004; Wertsch, quoted in Holzman, 1990, pp. 21–22).
Second, in posing this question, Vygotsky was treating science as a cultural phenomenon open to scrutiny and radical transformation. Science as social-cultural-historical activity was what concerned him. By the 1920s, the field of psychology was well on its way to becoming an empirical and experimental science, and questions of method and units of analysis were hotly debated. For example, would following the experimental path mean excluding from psychological investigation the very nature of human consciousness? Vygotsky was not willing to give up the study of consciousness (nor the “higher psychological processes” that are its manifestations). Nor was he willing to settle for two kinds of psychology (a subjective one for mental events and an objective one for nonmental events) or one psychology if i...
