Abstract
This Special Theme is dedicated, with all due honour, to the Cuban, Latin American and Caribbean psychologist Roberto Celestino Corral Ruso, who for more than 50 years diligently devoted his heart and soul to his profession, thus contributing to the development of psychology — in the professional, educational and research fields — in Cuba and beyond.
His untimely departure has deeply shocked the psychologists’ guild. He did, however, leave us an immense body of work, and we wish to dedicate this In Memoriam section to providing readers with a small sample of his oeuvre, consisting of four works: two authored by Corral himself, and the other two written by several of his long-standing colleagues.
We begin with an article written by ourselves, the invited editors, titled A portrait of the life, work and legacy of Roberto Corral (Rodríguez-Mena & Rodríguez-Arocho, 2024), which offers a brief summary of Corral’s biography, and of his main contributions to psychological science. As a theoretical framework, we use a set of analysis categories that frame the production of knowledge from a historical and sociocultural perspective, which Corral always defended. This article intends to underline the economic, political, sociocultural and academic context in which Corral developed his ideas, so that their reach and future potentiality can be understood.
In the second article, An overview of Roberto Celestino Corral Ruso’s contributions from the Vygotski Chair (Arias Beatón et al., 2024), a group of Corral’s colleagues at the University of Havana Vygotski Chair (Guillermo Arias Beatón, María Milagros Febles Elejalde, Odalys Roche Chávez and Belkis Echemendía Tocabens) present some of Corral’s contributions to the development of the socio-historical approach in Cuba from his position as vice-president of the Chair, and as a perpetual and fervent student of the work of Vygotsky and his followers. Of note are his reflections on some of Vygotsky’s categories, particularly the zone of proximal development, complementing some of the ideas presented in the first article.
We present an unpublished work by Corral (although it can be seen as a product of the integration of many of his previous writings), which synthesizes some of the most relevant ideas to which he was devoted throughout his professional life: the education of psychologists; his ties with the theoretical and methodological proposals of the socio-historical approach; the resonance of the latter with the ideas of complexity theory — all in a historically oriented search for knowledge. The article, under the title Transdisciplinarity and complex thinking: training experiences in Cuba (Corral, 2024b), has been edited by Mario Rodríguez-Mena on the basis of the author’s notes for a keynote address he was invited to deliver at the 5th International Conference for Transdisciplinary Research in Human Sciences on 22 May 2024 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, but which he could never present because of his sudden passing.
Lastly, and also authored by Corral, we present the article Complexity and psychology (Corral, 2024a), published originally in 2010 in issue VIII, year IV, of the journal Pensando la Complejidad (Corral, 2010), in which some of the ideas referred to above are further expounded. Here, his register as a historian of psychology is on full display, as is his interest in the effect of change on contemporary psychological science, as well as the potential of Complexity Theory for systematizing and clarifying converging positions. We wish to thank Antonio Correa Iglesias, Editor-in-Chief of Pensando la Complejidad at the time of this article’s original publication, for authorizing us to re-publish it (and to translate it into English for the first time) in this issue.
In all, we believe these four works may be a stepping stone for anyone interested in knowing more about Corral’s oeuvre. We are aware that we have only offered a brief sketch of his contributions, and logically from our own particular viewpoint. A more comprehensive understanding of his work will require a deeper reading of his many books and articles, some of them referenced in these four articles, which we have precisely selected to pique our readers’ interest in his larger body of work.
We wish to thank the journal Studies in Psychology, and especially our colleagues Amelia Álvarez, Pablo del Río and Miguel del Río, for providing us with this opportunity to disseminate the work and life of the great Cuban psychologist that Roberto Corral Ruso was, and always will be. May this tribute pay worthy homage to his memory.