Vygotsky and Psychology as Normative Science

The political and revolutionary character of Vygotsky's theory consists not only in the project of a psychology based on the principles of Marxism, but in the idea of the primary role of practice as the source of the development of theoretical research itself. In the Vygotskyan analysis of the differences between normal and pathological in psychological processes, the normative character of psychology emerges, imposing patterns of behavior and personality beyond the specific social and cultural contexts in which they were developed. After the turning point of the monograph by Van der Veer and Valsiner (Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis, Blackwell, 1991), and the new knowledge derived from the publication of the Notebooks, edited by Zavershneva and Van der Veer (Vygotsky's notebook: A selection, Springer Nature, Berlin, 2018), recent historical studies on Vygotsky's work show that, faithful to this perspective, the Russian psychologist investigated the dialectical relationship between theory and practice particularly in the areas of pedology and defectology where the risk of a normativity, imposed from above and mediated by psychology, was very high.