Toward the Study of the Sense-Based Sphere of the Personality

摘要

The past decade has seen the appearance of an entire series of theoretical, experimental, and clinical investigations in which the propositions of activity theory not only are applied to the resolution of concrete tasks of personality psychology but also serve as a platform for the elaboration of new approaches to the understanding of personality as a whole. One such approach is study of the sense-based components of activity or—more broadly—of the sense-based sphere of the personality. Here in turn, one can distinguish several research trends. I have in mind, first of all, the analysis of pathological defects of the sense-based sphere. The foundations of this trend were laid as early as the 1930s by the work of B.V. Zeigarnik and G.V. Birenbaum, carried out under the guidance of and in close collaboration with L.S. Vygotsky (Zeigarnik 1934; Samukhin et al. 1934; Birenbaum and Zeigarnik 1935). These investigations, in the words of Birenbaum and Zeigarnik, "were planned by L.S. Vygotsky with a view to elaborating a number of propositions from his theoretical understanding of thinking and affect" (1935, p. 75).