Ape, Primitive Man and Child

"In Ape, Primitive Man and Child , Luria and Vygotsky put forward a theoretical framework for explaining what makes us human. They argue that there are three principal lines in the development of the creation of our uniquely human abilities: the evolutionary line, the historical line and the ontogenetic line. In order to understand who we are as human beings, we need to understand that we’re the product of all three of these lines of development. If it wasn’t for the evolution of our human genetic make-up, the human genome, then we wouldn’t be human. But, as Luria and Vygotsky stress, the evolution of our human make-up is merely the precondition for our humanity. Our genome is very similar to when homo sapiens was first around 100,000 years ago, but in terms of how we live our lives, we are incomparable to our ancestors. So, in order to fully understand who we are, we need to go beyond just the evolutionary line and we need to look at the historical line of development, and also, finally, to understand individuals you have to look at their unique social relationships, their own life history. Each human being that has ever existed on planet earth is unique, and that’s the result of the historical and ontogenetic line of development. It means individual lifespan. It’s the life history of an individual – the area really that developmental psychology studies. I don’t think so. I think as a theoretical framework it still holds. All of the books I look at, although they don’t always reference Vygotsky and his work, you get a sense that they have been influenced by his thinking and the real breakthroughs that he made, despite only living to age 37. Stalin tended to suppress anything that did not conform to the party doctine. Vygotsky’s ideas would have been threatening because they were revolutionary – Marxist – in the true sense. He adopted the dialectical method for understanding the mind. But also he engaged with the ideas of great thinkers outside of Russia, such as Freud and Piaget, and was therefore dismissed by Stalin as a ‘bourgeois idealist’."