Cultural-Historical Psychology

Cultural-historical psychology is a branch of psychological theory and practice associated with the Soviet psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria and the circle of researchers they led, who initiated it in the 1920s and 1930s. The phrase itself never appears in Vygotsky's own writing and was applied to the movement afterward by his critics and followers alike, though it is under this name that the movement is now known. The Vygotsky-Luria project aimed to build a new psychology accounting for the inseparable unity of mind, brain and culture as they develop, in the concrete social and historical settings of individuals and across the history of humankind as a whole, and it was closely linked to a new theory of consciousness and its relationship to the development of higher psychological functions.