How did the human psyche become cultural-historical? The contributions of Saussurian analysis to Vygotski’s developmental theories

• Autor(a) principal: Bronckart, Jean-Paul
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Bulea, Ecaterina
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos Cenpec (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://cadernos.cenpec.org.br/cadernos/index.php/cadernos/article/view/42
• topic: Vygotski. Saussure. Development of the psyche. Linguistic sign. Verbal thought.; Educação; Ciências Sociais; Cultura; Vigotski. Saussure. Desenvolvimento do psiquismo. Signo linguístico. Pensamento verbal.

This article discusses one of the fundamental theories of Vygotski’s work: that the interiorization and appropriation of language would cause a revolution in the human psychological system, causing it to go through a bio-behavioral regime to a social-historical regime. Although the validity of this is accepted, this paper presents the problems of some of the implications of how Vygotski postulated it; in other words, it shows the problems regarding the consequences of the supposition that two disjointed developmental roots would be joined by originating in verbal thought as a new socio-historical reality. In proposing to reinforce and develop Vygotski’s theory, the authors look to Saussure’s theories on the linguistic sign for contributions to clarify aspects that are not clearly seen and developed in Vygotski’s work: i) the role of interactions on the formation of verbal thinking; ii) the nature of signs and meanings; iii) the mechanism and structure through which verbal thinking becomes socio-historical thinking. To do this, the authors mobilized a broader corpus of Saussure’s work, including Saussure’s manuscript notes – part of which were discovered in 1996 – and the notes of E. Constantin regarding the third class given by Saussure, which were unknown to the reporters of the general linguistics course.