ABSTRACT
Lev Vygotsky, the Russian/Soviet psychologist who has been an inspiration for current cultural-historical approaches in psychology, worked throughout his life to change the culture of the psychology of his day. He tried to escape the Stalinist dogma of many of his Soviet colleagues and refused to be an ideologue. He took seriously the ideas of European and American psychologists, even as he was troubled by the linear, dualistic and reductionistic idealism and scientism of many of them. He deeply appreciated the creativity of Piaget’s work, for example, while at the same time he rejected Piaget’s premise of the asocial and ahistorical child who possessed “pure thought” and did not communicate until the age of 7. Vygotsky was, in his own words, searching for method-to create a new psychology inseparable from creating a new environment for (the creating of) that new psychology.
