Michel Foucault said, ‘To approach the essence one must go backwards’. My own development as a psychologist can be seen as an inversion of the history of the Soviet psychology: First there was the cultural-historical approach; later – the psychological theory of activity. I started with the latter and am slowly approaching the former now. From my earlier research on sensory-motor skills and perceptual actions I had moved to studies of the development of visual image, visual thinking and visual memory; finally, through my fairly late interest in poetry and psychology of art, I have turned my attention to the word and culture – at last.

Naturally, I went back to re-reading Vygotsky. This time, I found myself puzzled by his description of a child as having natural ‘lower’ psychological functions that develop into higher mental functions only as a result of interiorisation and intellectualisation. I felt that this view contradicted his own theory of cultural-historical development and was rather similar to the gradual animation of a statue – a metaphor for human development proposed by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in his book Traitédes sensations. Thus, I decided to take a closer look at child development in the light of my current understanding of the cultural-historical approach and the psychological theory of activity.