L.S. Vygotsky’s Ideas in the Clinical Psychology

The present article discusses possible perspective trends of the development of the cultural-historical approach in the context of clinical psychology. This puts forward the thesis about the development of man in ontogeny as a result of his interaction with cultural environment which causes the transformation of natural mental functions into higher mental ones and the formation of the whole range of psychopathological abnormalities. It also discusses the voluntary regulation of higher mental functions, the determination of involuntariness and postvoluntariness of functions, the internalization of actions, the differentiation of affect and emotion (incl. as a higher mental function), the “cultural” socialization of non-mental functions (sexual, sleep, excretion) and the inconsistency of natural and “cultural” entity in a human. This paper confirms the statement that the basis of the development of man in ontogenesis is the emergence of subjectness like all the forms of higher activity through the encounter with cultural restrictions and requirements. It suggests extending the concept of “higher” functions by means of including physiological and bodily functions. The latter acquire the characteristics of higher mental functions during the socialization: the voluntary regulation, hierarchical structure and control. This considers the phenomena of alienation, conversion and dissociative disorders and voluntariness as a result of the complication and restructuring of natural functions. It also suggest trends for further investigations.

In his classical concept of higher mental functions presented in the epigraph, A.R. Luria formulates the main ideas of the cultural-historical approach in psychology. Having schematized these theses to the limit in order to separate out the principal and key points.

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