Vygotsky’s plural discourse on the human mind

Louis Althusser claims in his papers on Marx and Freud that both of them established a new science, different from classical modern science (Althusser, 1996). Both were, according to Althusser, critics of the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Althusser points out that to make a move to a new science requires an epistemological break with the old one. This break is never an easy one and does not happen in the first steps of the new theory. On the contrary: ‘The youth of a science is its maturity: before that age it is old, having the age of the prejudices on which it lives’ (Althusser, 1996, 19). New science starts with concepts borrowed from the old theories, and because of this the demarcation line between the old and the new science is within the new theory. New science achieves its youth in its old days.