305 “Magic Mirror" 306 Vasili Davydov

p The psychology of the future—that theory and practice of future man—will be similar to present-day psychology only in name or, to invoke Spinoza’s brilliant language, it will be as similar to it as the Great Dog constellation is to a barking dog. That is why we put such store by the name of our science, a name on which the dust of centuries has settled but to which the future belongs.

p Lev Vygotsky

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p DAVYDOV, Vasili (b. 1930), Doctor of Psychology, Professor, Full Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy, Director of the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy since 1978.

p He graduated from the Philosophy Department of Moscow University in 1953, taking a degree in psychology. He went on to complete a graduate course at the University, and in 1956 defended a Candidate’s dissertation “On the Problem of the Formation of Mental Actions".

p Between 1956 and 1959 he was an editor at the publishing house of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy.

p In 1959, he became a junior researcher at the Institute of General and Educational Psychology; in 1961 he became head of a laboratory at that institute, and in 1973 was named its director.

p He defended his Doctoral dissertation in 1970. It was published as a monograph Types of Generalisation in Learning (1972). Davydov has more than seventy scientific papers to his name. Among them are The Age Limits of Assimilating Knowledge (1966), Psychological Capacities of Elementary Schoolchildren in Learning Mathematics (1969), Psychological Conditions of the Origin of Ideal Actions (1979).

p The words Heraclitus said two and a half thousand years ago provide a fitting title for this chapter. The twenty-five centuries that have sped by have convinced people that it is not enough, it is in fact very little, to be knowledgeable, literate, or even educated. One must also be able to think. “Learn to Think from Youth”, is the title of Ilyenkov’s booklet quoted earlier.

p Then, too, the epigraph to this chapter is provided by 308 Vygotsky’s article “Consciousness as a Problem of Behavioral Psychology" published in the collection Psychology and Marxism in 1925. Vygotsky’s book Mind in Society ( published by Harvard University Press half a century later) opens with these lines. All of them are links in the same chain-constant attempts over the millennia to decipher “the phenomenon of man" and to get a clear idea of his psyche, consciousness and soul.

And so, I have chosen this talk with Vasili Davydov, Director of the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy to conclude this book. He was for many years scientific collaborator of Luria and Leontiev, a good friend of Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov, he gladly hired the deaf, dumb, and blind graduates of the Psychology Department of Moscow University to work at his Institute, and on many occasions, he gave assistance and support to many of the other people mentioned here who make up an “invisible collegium”, the name of which is the Vygotsky school. But even if one ignores the fact that from his early days as a student he was in the midst of the ideas, arguments, successes and disappointments of that trend in Soviet psychology, the talk that follows leaves no doubt that Davydov is a successor of Vygotsky, representing the third generation of that remarkable scientific school.