In recent years Vygotsky has acquired the status of a grand master. His work represents more than a contribution to a specific field of psychology and provides a broad framework or way of thinking about and dealing with psychological issues. It is not uncommon nowadays for Vygotsky to be ranked alongside Freud, Piaget and others as one of the leading innovative voices of twentieth-century psychology and this is probably as a result of the translation into English of his six-volume Collected Works. In reading the Collected Works, we need to remind ourselves constantly that they were written by a young scholar in his twenties and thirties when most academic careers are only beginning to get off the ground. These are not the works of a thinker whose ideas have been incubated and honed over an extended period of time. Although Vygotsky's texts express a maturity of thought way beyond his years, they also exude a youthful exuberance in the overflowing of ideas that emerge from his works. Any life cut down in its prime represents an unfinished and incomplete story and this too is Vygotsky's legacy. It may also explain an intriguing and distinctive feature of Vygotsky's writing that is initially hidden from view. Extracting the main points or gist of a text usually means that one is left with a residue of non-essential or redundant material, but to attempt this exercise with Vygotsky's texts produces an unexpected outcome.