Cultural-historical psychology and the epistemological redefinition of scientific psychology

Abstract

This theoretical-epistemological essay examines cultural-historical psychology, especially in the work of Lev Vygotsky, as a decisive shift in the constitution of scientific psychology. Rather than understanding it as merely one theoretical approach among others, this study argues that this perspective redefines the object of psychology by displacing it from observable behavior, perceptual form, logical structure, and pulsional interiority toward consciousness understood as a historical, social, symbolic, and mediated process. The study is characterized as qualitative, bibliographic, and analytical-interpretative, guided by a critical-comparative procedure involving behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, genetic epistemology, psychoanalysis, and cultural-historical psychology, articulated through a logical-historical and reconstructive approach. The analysis demonstrates that classical frameworks, although fundamental     to the consolidation of the discipline, remain limited by partial reductionisms—naturalistic, structural, logical, and drive-based—that restrict the understanding of the psyche in its historical-cultural complexity. In contrast, cultural-historical theory introduces categories such as symbolic mediation, internalization, the social genesis of higher psychological functions, mediated activity, and interfunctional systems, allowing the psyche to be understood as a process of consciousness formation within social relations. In dialogue with Bachelard, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Morin, it is argued that this approach may be interpreted as a reconstruction of the scientific object, a paradigmatic reorganization, a progressive research programme, and a formulation compatible with an epistemology of complexity. It is concluded that cultural-historical psychology reorders the epistemological foundations of psychology and offers a broader, more relational explanatory horizon.