Showing papers by "Jerome S. Bruner published in 2015"

The uneasy relation of culture and mind

Abstract: I want to start with the compelling subject of ‘culture and mind’ and how it emerged in psychology and with what subsequent effects. Obviously, one would have to mention Vygotsky in such an account. But I mostly want to speculate about how psychology turned toward cultural explication – even in the early but polite attacks on Freud by the ‘culture-and-personality’ people like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. What was going on in the world culturally and politically in those years? Migration into radically different cultures by refugees from Europe who were awakened to the impact of culture? The rise of more subjective anthropology in America, aided by the political subjectivism of our great Franklin Delano Roosevelt as expressed in his famous ‘Four Freedoms’? But let me be more specific about changes that were taking place in psychology around the world – including the contribution of Vygotsky. For deep changes were also taking place in Germany with the rise of Gestalt psychology, in America (as mentioned) with the growth of such topics as ‘culture-and-personality’, and in Britain with the leadership of Sir Frederic Bartlett and his famous book Remembering. There was a worldwide movement in psychology against mindless, mechanistic theory. The new heroes were much more holistic, much less reductionist. So, for example, the worldwide major figures in the field of developmental psychology were now Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget. But the big difference between those two was that Piaget was indifferent to the role of cultural factors in mental activity, while Vygotsky was preoccupied with them, though both had rejected mechanistic approaches to mental functioning and mental growth. (I might mention in passing that on my visits to Piaget in Geneva, he was always eager to discuss my ideas about the impact of culture on mind, as if he wanted to find out what he had been omitting from his theoretical and experimental work. Indeed, his chief collaborator, Baerbel Inhelder, came to Harvard for a year as a Visiting Fellow to get a

Clark Lecture in 1968 “Processes of Cognitive Growth: Infancy”

Abstract: Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. I am deeply honored and personally moved to be the Heinz Werner Lecturer. For Heinz Werner was a man whose stature and purpose give dignity and substance to the study of development.