ABSTRACT
In 1923 Vygotsky – as an instructor in the humanities and social sciences in a local college in Gomel – starts teaching psychology and doing dilettante psychological experiments. In order to interpret his experimental findings he turns to the work of the scholars of the Petrograd/Leningrad “reflexological” school of academician Bekhterev, and presents his work at the All-Union congress in January 1924. His flirtation with Bekhterev’s “psychoneurology” and “reflexology”, however, appeared fairly short-lived: in 1924 he got an invitation to join the Institute of Psychology in Moscow, which effectively put an end to his persona of “reflexologist” and led to notable changes in his theoretical standpoint.
