Soviet Influence on Psychology Part 1: Identity Formation

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), one of the most prominent influencers of modern educational psychology.

As someone who is currently studying the influence of early Soviet ideas on current outlook on education and psychology, I felt that it would be valuable to do some investigation into identity development from the Sociocultural perspective. More and more modern theorists in the field of developmental psychology use Lev Vygotsky’s framework in researching higher-order mental processes. Here I just want to present my findings on the Vygotskian perspective of identity formation. 

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The traditional understanding of identity relies on the concept of identity being static and hardly changing, but recent studies and theoretical works in psychology and applied linguistics have begun to question this traditional understanding.  Like many of these studies, I use the sociocultural understanding of identity, based on the work of Lev Vygotsky. The basis of the sociocultural understanding of identity relies on “the L2 learner’s relationship to the world, to the culture of the language he or she is studying, and to his or her assumed affiliation with that culture and its natives” (Kilmanova, 2013, p. 70). Rather than understanding identity as a static representation of an individual, in the Vygotskian model of identity, “[a]s the social context in which an individual involved [in social practices] changes, identity is reconstructed and developed as well” (Park, 2015, p. 3). These “identity changes [are] characterized by dynamic process, multiple dimensions and unintended shifts” (Gao, 2007, p. 103), thus an identity label of an individual in simple terms is not only inaccurate in the academic field but it is also not useful. The “lack of attention to and interest in social factors” in the field of applied linguistics, as Pavlenko pointed out in 2002, still exists today as a result of the Chomskian notion that language is somehow “biologically innate” as opposed to being a result of social interaction (277).

Despite the simplistic definition of identity being “convenient for the researcher, [it] drastically misrepresented the nature of identity and identity formation” (Haggerty, 2011, p. 204). Rather than assuming identity is carried by a person, the sociocultural stance assumes identity as a role that is being played or “engaging in contextually situated sociocultural practices” (Vianna, 2011, p. 316). Furthermore, in many cases, individuals “associate themselves with many languages and identify themselves as members of a multilingual group” (Eastman, 1984, p. 259) or it can be assumed that many don’t associate with a group at all. Therefore it is more helpful to understand identity through the lense of perception as built by a summation of social experiences because “one’s identity, though unique, draws from socially constructed and recognizable identity types” (Reis, 2008, p. 2).

Vygotskian theory relies heavily on the principles of Marxism (Fu, 1997; Jornet 2018; Lima, 2014), therefore in order to begin understanding what identity is, it should be considered what identity is in the Marxist sense. Marxism is very dependent on the concept of dialectal materialism, which is essentially summed up as “matter is in a process of constantly moving and changing” and that social phenomena, including language and identity, are in the “process of becoming but not in the state of being” (Fu, 2014, p. 11).  Similarly, we can consider that “[i]dentity is not a self-evident notion as has been assumed in the research” (Qu, 2005, p. 93), but rather it is constantly in the process of regenerating itself through the process of perezhivanie which I will explain in detail later. Just as language acquisition is mediated through social processes (Lantolf, 2011) we can assume that the process of identity formation takes place in the presence of social interaction.

While the participants in an empirical study on identity from this perspective may be prompted to identify themselves, rather than taking this self-identification as an inherent label, researchers tend to use this self-identification as a tool to gauge self-perception in relation to society. From the Marxist perspective, social psychology must be studied in two ways: “from the viewpoint of content..and second, from the viewpoint of forms and types of verbal communication” (Voloshinov, 1972, p. 20), therefore it is important to gauge self-perception in the wider context of the participant’s experience. The aim of a study on identity is not to categorize the participants into a box and generalize, but to present them as individual cases that an educator could be made aware of by critically examining the underlying structures of identity formation that participants reported from personal experience.

An often overlooked, but essential aspect of identity formation in Vygotskian literature is perezhivanie (переживание). When perezhivanie, (plural: perezhivaniya) is introduced as a concept to the western audience, it is often simplified in translation to “lived experience,” but as many scholars have pointed out (Rey, 2016; Veresov 2016), this is far too simplistic of an understanding. The base understanding that might be helpful in first defining this concept is that perezhivanie is “the emotion that characterizes the creative artistic performance, which also involves talent and operational processes” (Rey, 2016, n.p.); these operational processes of course include identity formation and language use as higher order mental processes.  Essentially, as an identity-changing event is experienced, Vygotsky posits that the mind is indifferent and unable to learn from it until after when “we later invent to explain its influence” and this “is thought to be a complete rationalization of unconscious processes” (Vygotsky, 1965, p. 5). It can therefore be said that identity is learned and formed as a perception unconsciously through the process of perezhivanie. As Veresov, 2016 put it, perezhivanie can be seen as a process or as content on the phenomenological level and then more deeply understood on the conceptual level (see figure 2, p.4), but when discussing identity formation, the concept of perezhivanie is taken as a given.

It is also important to differentiate the Vygotskian approach to identity as a constructionist approach. Unlike the structuralist viewpoint of identity as “an inherent and enduring structure,”  the constructionist approach of identity as “focuses more on the importance of human agency, whereas social constructivism stresses interaction” (Gao, 2007, p. 104). From the structuralist view, it is impossible to tell whether “certain ‘identity changes’ are exclusively attributable to language learning,” therefore studying the relationship between the two is seen as illegitimate, whereas, in the view of constructionist approach, sometimes referred to as the post-structuralist or post-modernist approach (Pavlenko, 2007, p. 669), the relationship between language and identity is seen as reciprocal and complex (Gao, 2007, p. 105). Second language learners often experience “significant identity conflicts in the[ir] target language community” (Shardakova, 2004, p. 25) and from the perspective of a structuralist, this conflict would not be able to be resolved and is thus problematic. 

Through my review of literature relevant to the concept of identity, I have solidified my understanding of the Vygotskian stance on identity and how it is relevant to second language acquisition. I hope to present my future research in a way that is useful to language instructors who likely have students that struggle with identity in their second language culture.

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