ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I aim to outline Vygotsky’s central plan for a psychology of emotions. I claim that in his path toward surpassing dualism and creating a new materialist dialectical science, the author planned to compose a psychology that would express the diverse manifestations of emotional life. For him, description and understanding of all manifestations of human emotional life and its determination should not be done through a patchwork of phenomena but through dynamic psychological systems, totalities that surpass the dichotomy of “nature” versus “nurture.” For Vygotsky, phylogenesis, social history, and ontogenesis interact in a monist fashion that focuses our potency for mastering passions and changing personality. Illustrating the methodological possibilities of understanding emotion as a “structural complex,” I will analyze how a group viciously attacked a low-income black adolescent suspected of robbery in the city of Rio de Janeiro in January 2014. I aim to highlight a particular situation in the dynamics of Brazilian society, marked by a history of exploitation, slavery and privilege. Rage and indignation will be analyzed as social emotions embedded in a dynamic in which, as Vygotsky assumed, culture changes biological structures of interaction between individuals and their immediate environment. Thus, I try to shed light on a potential Vygotskian critical analysis of emotions that places the brain in the body, and both in the wor(l)d.
