Cultural-historical psychology

[1] The phrase "cultural-historical psychology" never occurs in the writings of Vygotsky, and was subsequently ascribed to him by his critics and followers alike, yet it is under this title that this intellectual movement is now widely known.

[2][3][4] The main goal of Vygotsky-Luria project was the establishment of a "new psychology" that would account for the inseparable unity of mind, brain and culture[5] in their development (and/or degradation) in concrete socio-historical settings (in case of individuals) and throughout the history of humankind as socio-biological species.

To that end, he claimed that the development of "higher psychological functions" are a result of the impact of the society (including, according to Marxist principles, its economic basis and the relations of production) and the culture at large.

However, the earlier intellectual effort and the legacy of the Soviet scholars of the 1920s-1930s produced a range of specialized, loosely-related fields of psychological theory and practice including cultural[11][12] and child psychology[13] and education (most notably, in the subfields of dynamic assessment[14] (which stems from Vygotsky's speculations on the so-called Zone of proximal development, the ZPD[15]) and the so-called developmental education[16]), neuropsychology,[17][18] or psycholinguistics.

[25] The major influences on cultural-historical psychology were the mechanist neurophysiology of Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev (during the so-called "instrumental period" of the 1920s),[26] philosophy of language and culture of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his followers,[27] socio-economic philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and, primarily, holistic German-American Gestalt psychology—specifically, the works of Max Wertheimer and Kurt Lewin.