Comments on Commentaries About Cultural Psychology

I wish to thank Andrei Brushlinkii for his kind invitation to enter into a discussion with Russian colleagues who have taken the time to read and comment on my recent book. The invitation to discuss the role of culture in human development in this forum is, as the expression goes, “the opportunity of a lifetime” because I have sought to promote dialogue between American and Russian psychologists for most of my professional life – long enough to know how rare and difficult such dialogues can be. It is almost exactly 38 years to the day since I arrived at the old Sheremetovo airport (the old, old Sheremetovo) ready to begin a post-doctoral research working under the guidance of Alexander Luria. During that year I worked not only with Luria and his students, but with Evgenii Sokolov and the members of his laboratory and with colleagues at the Institute of Higher Nervous Actvity. I was exceptionally fortunate to be given a warm welcome and generous support by my hosts, to whom I remain indebted to this day. The 1962-1963 academic year was anything but a placid time in Moscow. The end of “the thaw” had arrived. For several weeks that fall we sat huddled around our radio in the company of Cuban students, knowing how close the world was to thermonuclear holocaust, a concern which was not felt so sharply by our Russian peers, who did not have access to such radios, and whose own media minimized the dangerous passage through which the world was going. Our Russian acquaintances had their own concerns, among which was the harm that would come to them if they became too friendly with us -the ino-strantsi who came from that other world. It did not seem even remotely possible in 1962 that some day, when I had grown older than Alexander Romanovich was when I first met him, I would be responding to a series of commentaries about a book which, in large measure, he helped to make possible. I did not arrive in Moscow knowing much about cultural-historical psychology and I did not leave knowing much more The first, abbreviated, translation of Myishlenie i Rech first appeared in English while I was in Moscow. But I did not have a copy of the translation and I was too busy pursuing empirical research on orienting responses and semantic conditional reflexes in temporal lobe patients to take time out to read the book in Russian. Besides, although Alexander Romanovich seemed to think Vygotsky’s ideas very important, Vygotsky didn’t seem to have much to say about semantic reflexes and I was disinclined to spend my time studying someone so “old fashioned.” In this respect, I was a typical product of American graduate training, then and now.