Lev Vigotsky

Although I had heard about this author, I had not been familiar with his work so far. However, I can not say I completely understand his work, or that I share it, but I found interesting study. For the subject of Developmental Psychology I we have had to read it and is one of few texts that I have read with interest.

To comment a little about Lev Vigotsky (1896-1934), he was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Russia. According to a provision of the Tsarist regime, only 3% of students in universities could be Jews, despite this, Vygotsky could enter to the University and studied in parallel in two universities Law and History, Philosophy and Psychology, graduating in 1917 from both careers.

For Vigotsky its initial objectives were to organize a psychology with marxist bases and find in this solutions to social problems. For this decides to start from the notions of Marx and Engels that explain how man was taken to work creating tools, which when used in conjunction with others determine the appearance of language and conscience. Another idea which incorporates from these authors is that human conscience is determined by social and material conditions of life.

The fundamental idea of his work relates how human development and learning can be explained only in terms of social interaction. The social environment influences the development, as this is the internalization of cultural tools (like language) which initially did not belong to us, they belong to the human group in which we are born, which conveys the cultural products through the social interaction.

This psychologist, being the founder of cultural-historical psychology, has made ​​notable contributions to developmental psychology, and also in various topics such as the relationship between learning and human development, the relationship between language and thought, the understanding game as a psychological phenomenon, among others.