The theoretical research reported in this Phd thesis aimed: 1) to examine the concepts of emotions and experiences in the production of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), xraying their composition and epistemological genesis from 1916 to 1934, and 2) to discuss the formation of a historical-cultural perspective about these concepts. For this, it fell back upon the consultation and analysis of multiple bibliographic sources, interviews and conversations with experts regarding Russian/Soviet culture and psychology. It has concluded that the concept of experience (perezhivanie) is very close to emotion (emotsia, tchuvstvo, affekt) in Vygotsky´s first work, “The Tragedy of Hamlet” (1916). But the concept changes: in his pedological works of 1930s, becomes unity of analysis for the internal relationship between consciousness/personality and the environment. The experience expands on the scope of psychological phenomena and theoretical works discussed: from a profile especially linked to the Russian symbolism, start to be marked by the influence of Lewin, the Gestalt psychology and other German references. The concept acquires wide and important methodological role as systemic unity of conscious life, marked by the dynamics of functional psychological systems. Regarding to emotions (emotsi), Vygotsky considered them as the chapter less developed (although possibly the most important in the future) of the psychology of his era. There are important aspects that remain from 1925 to 1934, and others that arise along the course, setting a conception properly Vygotskyan. It is remarkable observing that emotions appear as subject of Vygotsky´s general psychology in "The teaching about emotions" (1933), manuscript directed to the search for a new psychology of emotions through the overcoming of dualism, as noticed in the dichotomy between descriptive and explanatory psychology. The author defended the design of a single theoretical framework of the manifestations concerning human emotional life and its processes of determination. The works of Vygotsky reveal many influences, specially: historical materialism, structural psychology, Ribot, Stanislavsky and Espinosa, defining, in the full sense acquired for such an idea, that human emotions are higher mental functions; the art and the language, the main cultural forms of mediation that constitute them. The studies on the emotions are the more difficult and the last frontier of Vygotskyan materialist monism, placing the brain in the body and the body in the word. Gravitating in this thesis, around the ideas and problems imposed by Vygotsky, there is a literature review of recent researches in psychology and neuroscience, showing some of their contributions to the historical-cultural perspective, problems of translation and terminology, as well as ideas and questions that determine its future. |
