At the time I was asked to contribute to this volume, I was preparing a brief essay on the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, whose chief work I had translated a few years earlier. This essay seemed to me to be an appropriate contribution to a volume dedicated to Kurt Goldstein, since the two men had had a central area of interest in common: the "higher psychic functions" as described by Vygotsky, coincide, or greatly overlap, with Goldstein's categorial or abstract attitude. Although Vygotsky's interest in this specifically human level of functioning arose originally within the framework of developmental psychology, not of psychopathology, he knew of Goldstein's work and must have been influenced by it. In the outline of Vygotsky's work, which forms the first part of the present communication, similarities with Goldstein's theories will be obvious to the reader.