Through others we become ourselves.
Psychologists
Lev Vygotsky
Belarusian-born Soviet psychologist (1896-1934) sometimes called the Mozart of psychology. In barely a decade of active work he opened developmental psychology, education research, the psychology of art and defectology, and left behind three concepts that still organize the field — the zone of proximal development, cultural-historical activity theory, and inner speech as the bridge from outer dialogue to thought. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven. Stalin's regime banned his work from 1936 until 1956, and the global rediscovery that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, led from Cambridge, Massachusetts by Jerome Bruner and Michael Cole, makes him one of the most influential psychologists of the late twentieth century.
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Lev Vygotsky's Other Quotes
The mind cannot be independent of the brain, but neither can it be reduced to it. Higher mental functions are formed by social means.
What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.
This is the final thing I have done in psychology — and I will, like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it.
Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
Related Quotes
Every other is wholly other.
-- Jacques Derrida
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.
-- D. T. Suzuki
Despair is a sickness of the self, a sickness unto death.
-- Søren Kierkegaard
Hell is other people.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the task of one rightly oriented toward others to draw the circles in toward the centre.
-- Hierocles
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be at home in oneself.
-- Michel de Montaigne