Cultural-historical Psychology

Introduction

From the 1920s onwards, a group of Russian psychologists, revolving around the intellectual ‘troika’ of Lev Vygotsky, Aleksandr Luria und Aleksej Leont’ev, started to come up with a corpus of closely interwoven experiments, field investigations, and theoretical writings which later were to become the basis of the cultural-historical school. Although it was confronted with political resentments and suppression in the Soviet Union and the USA for many decades, cultural-historical psychology still stands as one of the most consistent and inspiring approach in the field of psychology. It provides fruitful concepts and inspires new investigation methods in many different areas of the discipline, such as developmental psychology, social psychology, linguistics, cultural psychology and critical psychology.

Definition

Even though its topics range from aesthetics to perception and neurology, and from developmental to culture studies, and though its