Externalization

externalization

The ability to easily connect to and transfer information between business partners. Increasingly, information systems are designed to make their data available to outside partners and customers. This type of collaboration is expected to be a vital part of IT in the 21st century. See EDI.

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Externalization 

in psychology, the process whereby a person’s internal psychic life is expressed in external (symbolic and social) forms.

The Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotskii was the first to adopt the concept of externalization as a principle in his cultural-historical theory of behavior. A major tenet of the theory is the idea that man has mastery over himself as over a force of nature from without, and that he achieves such mastery by means of the specific symbolic techniques created by culture. In other words, according to Vygotskii, mastery over some inner psychological process presupposes its prior externalization by special symbolic means. The concept of externalization is also associated with the concept of objective psychological investigation of the higher forms of behavior. Externalization has been the subject of further research studies by various Soviet psychologists, such as A. N. Leont’ev and P. Ia. Gal’perin.

REFERENCES

Vygotskii, L. S. Razvitie vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii. Moscow, 1960.
Gal’perin, P. Ia. “Razvitie issledovanii po formirovaniiu umstvennykh deistvii.” In the collection Psikhologicheskaia nauka v SSSR, vol. 1. Moscow, 1959.
Leont’ev, A. N. Problemy razvitiia psikhiki, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1965.

A. A. PUZYREI