László Garai
Theoretical Psychology
Vygotskian Writings
Теоретическая психология
Выготскианские тексты
, CONTENTS
Interview with Laszlo Garai on the Activity Theory of Alexis Leontiev and his own
Theory of Social Identity as referred to the Meta-Theory of Lev Vygotsky
Towards a social psychology of personality: Development and current perspectives of
a school of social psychology in Hungary
Marxian personality psychology
The Principle of Social Relations and the Principle of Activity
Another crisis in the psychology: A possible motive for the Vygotsky-boom
Vygotskian implications: On the meaning and its brain
DERIVED THEORETICAL FEATURES –
ПРОИЗВОДНЫЕ ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ОЧЕРКИ
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY
A dialogue about man, his gene pool and eccentricity
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Social identity: Cognitive dissonance or paradox?
ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY
Identity Economics
How outstanding am I?
PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Theses on Human Capital
Determining economic activity in a post-capitalist system
Is a rational socio-economic system possible?
Why is bureaucratic control over economy not that rational?
PSYCHOLOGY OF BOLSHEVIK-TYPE SYSTEMS
The bureaucratic state governed by an illegal movement
The paradoxes of the Bolshevik-type psycho-social structure in economy
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКАЯ ПСИХОЛОГИЯ
O психологическом стaтусе деятельности и социaльного отношения
Eщё один кризис в психологии!
O значении и его мозговом аппарате
Вaсилий Дaвыдов и судьбы нaшей теории
Вaсилий Дaвыдов и судьбы нaшей теории
Диада Выготского и четвериада Рубинштейна
,Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 50, no. 1, January–February 2012, pp. 50–64.
Interview with Laszlo Garai on the
Activity Theory of Alexis Leontiev and his own
Theory of Social Identity as referred to the
Meta-Theory of Lev Vygotsky
Academician V. Lektorsky, who has been the editor-in-chief of Voprosy filosofii, a journal of the
Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, since 1987, and the new editor-in-chief who is replacing
him just at this time, V. Pruzhinin, conducted a joint interview with the Hungarian scientist László Garai,
a theoretical psychologist and researcher in problems of social and economic psychology.
Academician Lektorsky: Professor Garai, Your psychological research has always had a
clearly expressed philosophical meaning. It is no accident that we have published your
writings in our journal.1 Allow us to ask you a few questions, the answers to which may be of
interest to readers of Voprosy filosofii.
You were influenced by the cultural-historical theory of L.S. Vygotsky and the psycho-
logical theory of activity of A.N. Leontiev. Today interest in the activity approach has been
revived among both our psychologists and philosophers. Some link the activity approach to
philosophical constructivism. What do you think about the prospects for the cultural-historical
theory and the theory of activity in psychology and, more broadly, in the human sciences?
Professor Garai: These prospects stem from the fact that psychology, ever since it split off
from philosophy in the nineteenth century, has investigated problems that are multiaspected.
Rubinstein, for example, based on Marxism before it got violated, cited the aspect of activity,
the aspect of objectness, the aspect of community, and the aspect of historicity. Psychology
itself, however, was only interested in one of these aspects at a time. At first it was the object:
how we sense it, how our memory imprints and retains it, etc. Then came new times, and
behaviorism, with its exclusive interest in activity, became the mainstream of psychology.
Behavior, after all, is activity; except it is a kind such that, in order to study it, the object does
not exist. The object has been reduced to a single point, which is occupied by a stimulus
rather than an object. And incidentally, when behaviorism found itself removed from its
mainstream status, to which cognitivism had been assigned, the exclusive focus was again on
the object, which was ostensibly reflected by the consciousness without the participation of
any activity. So the theory of activity of Leontiev, Galperin, and Luria actually discovered for
our science not activity as such, but activity mediated by an object, and, in turn, activity that
mediates an object. Thus, instead of single-aspect psychologies, a psychology was invented
that organically synthesizes two of the four Rubinstein aspects.
Of course, one might think that two instead of four is a step back. But the point is that
Rubinstein derived from Marx’s writings not merely a methodology for an integrated
psychology (“merely” – yet after all, he accomplished a great feat in doing this), and Leontiev
and his associates worked out specific procedures for experiments that applied the theory of
activity to various fields. Single-aspect psychologies had very narrow capabilities: within
these frameworks it was not possible to explain even such phenomena as attention or
memory, although attention and memory had been the oldest topics of the new science as it
emerged in the 1860s. The psychologists of those years (and some to this day) applied the
principle of reflection to both topics. According to this, if a contemplated object whose
properties are reflected through sensation or perception is distinguished somehow from its
space-time surroundings, this distinct image is reflected in attention. Memory, meanwhile,
, ostensibly reflects the association of objects with one another in space-time. So we
psychologists began to truly understand attention when its single-aspect interpretation was
replaced by the concept of the theory of activity on the orientational basis of activity.
The fate of the psychology of memory developed in a more unfortunate way, since the
theory of activity was only able to rescue it to a lesser degree. For the simple reason that
memory is unquestionably associated with the aspect of historicity, and today we already
know that it is also intimately associated with the aspect of community, the theory of activity
regarding this pair of aspects is not doing anything like the research that has been done
regarding the first pair...
Pruzhinin: May I interrupt you? I would like you to focus on your original theory of
identity. How does it tie in with this tradition?
Professor Garai: When I became acquainted with Leontiev’s theory of activity, I discovered
a curious contradiction. Both community and historicity were predefined for the theory as a
self-evident definition of everything that was investigated, but they themselves were never
investigated as problems. The experiments of thee theory of activity always focus on the fact
that a specific individual confronts a specific object. Needless to say, the latter has a back-
ground, and this cultural background, at least as long as the focus is on an individual child, is
mediated for him by the company of another individual. But is that all there is to the aspect of
historicity and the aspect of community? And even if it is, how are they related to each other?
In the late 1960s (when I was interning in Leontiev’s department, and immediately
afterward was invited under a Keldysh grant to the Institute of the History of Natural Science
and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where I did research in the Scientific
Discoveries Sector) I began to deal with these issues. Under Leontiev I did an experiment (the
first social-psychological one in the history of the Psychology Division),2 in which it turned
out that involuntary memory worked significantly more efficiently when it was supporting the
activity of any of my coworkers, associates, or comrades in the joint activity than when it was
providing an orientational foundation for my own activity.
By that time Henri Tajfel had already issued his appeal “for a more social socialGL1 psycho-
logy.” He pointed out to us that our test subject did not come to our laboratory out of a vacuum
but as a representative of the place that he actually occupied in an actual social structure, and
that society had been predefined for him, accordingly, not in the form of another isolated
individual but in the structure off their relationship. There is likewise more to historicity than to
the history of the objectification of production and the passive presence of that history in de-
objectifying activity. Freud allowed us to understand that in the course of a biographical history
there is often a reversion not only to stages of that individual history that were already traversed
but also to archaic points in the generic history of humankind (see, e.g., the Oedipus complex).
At the same time, Tajfel’s social psychology and Freud’s anthropological psychology, as I
ventured to point out earlier, are mutually exclusive, just like behaviorism and cognitivism.
So I set myself the goal of copying the methodological feat of the creators of the synthesis
that emerged from the theory of object-based activity, and in this manner to create a
methodology on a parallel track for the synthesis of this other pair of psychologies. And then,
out of this synthetic methodology, to work out procedures for research efforts and for applied
psychological research, as Leontiev, Gal’perin, Luria, Davydov, and hence their coworkers,
did in their time and for their scientific purposes.
Social identity for us is different from how it is generally represented by the scientific and
laymen’s idea regarding it. For these ideas, social identity is an internal cultural-biological
certainty: whether I am a Hungarian or a Russian, Eastern Orthodox or Muslim, a man or a
woman, a black person or a white one. Here social identity is depicted perhaps even as a
cultural definition, but in any case as the same kind of definition as it is in nature to be a dog
Theoretical Psychology
Vygotskian Writings
Теоретическая психология
Выготскианские тексты
, CONTENTS
Interview with Laszlo Garai on the Activity Theory of Alexis Leontiev and his own
Theory of Social Identity as referred to the Meta-Theory of Lev Vygotsky
Towards a social psychology of personality: Development and current perspectives of
a school of social psychology in Hungary
Marxian personality psychology
The Principle of Social Relations and the Principle of Activity
Another crisis in the psychology: A possible motive for the Vygotsky-boom
Vygotskian implications: On the meaning and its brain
DERIVED THEORETICAL FEATURES –
ПРОИЗВОДНЫЕ ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ОЧЕРКИ
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY
A dialogue about man, his gene pool and eccentricity
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Social identity: Cognitive dissonance or paradox?
ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY
Identity Economics
How outstanding am I?
PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Theses on Human Capital
Determining economic activity in a post-capitalist system
Is a rational socio-economic system possible?
Why is bureaucratic control over economy not that rational?
PSYCHOLOGY OF BOLSHEVIK-TYPE SYSTEMS
The bureaucratic state governed by an illegal movement
The paradoxes of the Bolshevik-type psycho-social structure in economy
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКАЯ ПСИХОЛОГИЯ
O психологическом стaтусе деятельности и социaльного отношения
Eщё один кризис в психологии!
O значении и его мозговом аппарате
Вaсилий Дaвыдов и судьбы нaшей теории
Вaсилий Дaвыдов и судьбы нaшей теории
Диада Выготского и четвериада Рубинштейна
,Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 50, no. 1, January–February 2012, pp. 50–64.
Interview with Laszlo Garai on the
Activity Theory of Alexis Leontiev and his own
Theory of Social Identity as referred to the
Meta-Theory of Lev Vygotsky
Academician V. Lektorsky, who has been the editor-in-chief of Voprosy filosofii, a journal of the
Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, since 1987, and the new editor-in-chief who is replacing
him just at this time, V. Pruzhinin, conducted a joint interview with the Hungarian scientist László Garai,
a theoretical psychologist and researcher in problems of social and economic psychology.
Academician Lektorsky: Professor Garai, Your psychological research has always had a
clearly expressed philosophical meaning. It is no accident that we have published your
writings in our journal.1 Allow us to ask you a few questions, the answers to which may be of
interest to readers of Voprosy filosofii.
You were influenced by the cultural-historical theory of L.S. Vygotsky and the psycho-
logical theory of activity of A.N. Leontiev. Today interest in the activity approach has been
revived among both our psychologists and philosophers. Some link the activity approach to
philosophical constructivism. What do you think about the prospects for the cultural-historical
theory and the theory of activity in psychology and, more broadly, in the human sciences?
Professor Garai: These prospects stem from the fact that psychology, ever since it split off
from philosophy in the nineteenth century, has investigated problems that are multiaspected.
Rubinstein, for example, based on Marxism before it got violated, cited the aspect of activity,
the aspect of objectness, the aspect of community, and the aspect of historicity. Psychology
itself, however, was only interested in one of these aspects at a time. At first it was the object:
how we sense it, how our memory imprints and retains it, etc. Then came new times, and
behaviorism, with its exclusive interest in activity, became the mainstream of psychology.
Behavior, after all, is activity; except it is a kind such that, in order to study it, the object does
not exist. The object has been reduced to a single point, which is occupied by a stimulus
rather than an object. And incidentally, when behaviorism found itself removed from its
mainstream status, to which cognitivism had been assigned, the exclusive focus was again on
the object, which was ostensibly reflected by the consciousness without the participation of
any activity. So the theory of activity of Leontiev, Galperin, and Luria actually discovered for
our science not activity as such, but activity mediated by an object, and, in turn, activity that
mediates an object. Thus, instead of single-aspect psychologies, a psychology was invented
that organically synthesizes two of the four Rubinstein aspects.
Of course, one might think that two instead of four is a step back. But the point is that
Rubinstein derived from Marx’s writings not merely a methodology for an integrated
psychology (“merely” – yet after all, he accomplished a great feat in doing this), and Leontiev
and his associates worked out specific procedures for experiments that applied the theory of
activity to various fields. Single-aspect psychologies had very narrow capabilities: within
these frameworks it was not possible to explain even such phenomena as attention or
memory, although attention and memory had been the oldest topics of the new science as it
emerged in the 1860s. The psychologists of those years (and some to this day) applied the
principle of reflection to both topics. According to this, if a contemplated object whose
properties are reflected through sensation or perception is distinguished somehow from its
space-time surroundings, this distinct image is reflected in attention. Memory, meanwhile,
, ostensibly reflects the association of objects with one another in space-time. So we
psychologists began to truly understand attention when its single-aspect interpretation was
replaced by the concept of the theory of activity on the orientational basis of activity.
The fate of the psychology of memory developed in a more unfortunate way, since the
theory of activity was only able to rescue it to a lesser degree. For the simple reason that
memory is unquestionably associated with the aspect of historicity, and today we already
know that it is also intimately associated with the aspect of community, the theory of activity
regarding this pair of aspects is not doing anything like the research that has been done
regarding the first pair...
Pruzhinin: May I interrupt you? I would like you to focus on your original theory of
identity. How does it tie in with this tradition?
Professor Garai: When I became acquainted with Leontiev’s theory of activity, I discovered
a curious contradiction. Both community and historicity were predefined for the theory as a
self-evident definition of everything that was investigated, but they themselves were never
investigated as problems. The experiments of thee theory of activity always focus on the fact
that a specific individual confronts a specific object. Needless to say, the latter has a back-
ground, and this cultural background, at least as long as the focus is on an individual child, is
mediated for him by the company of another individual. But is that all there is to the aspect of
historicity and the aspect of community? And even if it is, how are they related to each other?
In the late 1960s (when I was interning in Leontiev’s department, and immediately
afterward was invited under a Keldysh grant to the Institute of the History of Natural Science
and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where I did research in the Scientific
Discoveries Sector) I began to deal with these issues. Under Leontiev I did an experiment (the
first social-psychological one in the history of the Psychology Division),2 in which it turned
out that involuntary memory worked significantly more efficiently when it was supporting the
activity of any of my coworkers, associates, or comrades in the joint activity than when it was
providing an orientational foundation for my own activity.
By that time Henri Tajfel had already issued his appeal “for a more social socialGL1 psycho-
logy.” He pointed out to us that our test subject did not come to our laboratory out of a vacuum
but as a representative of the place that he actually occupied in an actual social structure, and
that society had been predefined for him, accordingly, not in the form of another isolated
individual but in the structure off their relationship. There is likewise more to historicity than to
the history of the objectification of production and the passive presence of that history in de-
objectifying activity. Freud allowed us to understand that in the course of a biographical history
there is often a reversion not only to stages of that individual history that were already traversed
but also to archaic points in the generic history of humankind (see, e.g., the Oedipus complex).
At the same time, Tajfel’s social psychology and Freud’s anthropological psychology, as I
ventured to point out earlier, are mutually exclusive, just like behaviorism and cognitivism.
So I set myself the goal of copying the methodological feat of the creators of the synthesis
that emerged from the theory of object-based activity, and in this manner to create a
methodology on a parallel track for the synthesis of this other pair of psychologies. And then,
out of this synthetic methodology, to work out procedures for research efforts and for applied
psychological research, as Leontiev, Gal’perin, Luria, Davydov, and hence their coworkers,
did in their time and for their scientific purposes.
Social identity for us is different from how it is generally represented by the scientific and
laymen’s idea regarding it. For these ideas, social identity is an internal cultural-biological
certainty: whether I am a Hungarian or a Russian, Eastern Orthodox or Muslim, a man or a
woman, a black person or a white one. Here social identity is depicted perhaps even as a
cultural definition, but in any case as the same kind of definition as it is in nature to be a dog
