Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change

abstract

In Vygotsky’s writings on development, we find the concept neoformation in the context of his distinction between quantitative-incremental and qualitative-revolutionary change in psychological development. Few studies have taken up this concept. The purpose of this article is (a) to provide a dialectical grounding to the distinction generally and to the emergence of new psychological and personality forms specifically and (b) to describe a 5-step historical-genetic method that qualitative researchers can use to document the emergence of new psychological (behavioral) forms. This work therefore contributes to the elaboration of a dialectical method that Vygotsky himself has failed to articulate in a systematic way.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael Cole for his encouragement to write this text and for his repeated feedback that led to the present article; any opinions expressed are mine. I thank Erika Germanos for the Leandro’s story and our discussions about how it fits within a cultural-historical approach.

Notes

¹ Vygotsky writes about the development of the psyche, not just the mental, as readers of English translations might assume where the Russian adjective psixičeskij often is translated as “mental,” rather than as psychical (psyche-related, psychological) as in other languages (Ger. psychisch; Fr. psychique; It. psychico).

² This is so unless the researchers employ catastrophe theory, a mathematical method and language for describing the emergence of qualitatively new forms from quantitative changes.

³ One neo-Piagetian theory does include periods of quantitative-incremental growth and qualitative-revolutionary change (Case, 1985), but it has no mechanism to explain how quantity turns into quality.

⁴ The story was told to me by Erika Germanos, who is writing her dissertation in part on the quantitative and qualitative changes in the life and consciousness of this teacher.

⁵ Measure is not measurement, which always is a quantitative determination of a variable.

⁶ The mathematical-technical details of catastrophe theory, from which the graph derives, are beyond the scope of this article.

⁷ The original formulation of the five components (Holzkamp, 1983) has been modified in several empirical studies, including one pertaining to the conceptual change that a scientific research group has undergone (Roth, 2014). This new formulation is consistent with a catastrophe theoretic account of morphogenesis (neoformation), a mathematical approach that combines quantitative and qualitative aspects to account for the topological and local classification of form-generating processes (Thom, 1981).

⁸ In dialectics, a moment refers to a part of an irreducible whole that cannot be understood independent to all other parts (moments) and, therefore, independent of the whole.