Abstract
The topic of human psychological development has frequently been dealt with by general individualistic, teleological and moralistic theories. However, within Soviet psychology, Vygotsky and Bozhovich advanced theoretical alternatives for the study of psychological development, in which the concepts of perezhivanie and social situation of development were central. The importance of that legacy opened new ways of understanding the subjective side of psychological development. The focus of this chapter is to advance a comprehension of subjective development , on the basis of concepts that permit to integrate the diversity of social and cultural conditions of experience into processes and subjective units (subjective senses and subjective configurations ), which emerge not as reflection of those social and cultural conditions, but as new qualitative subjective productions. The chapter presents two case studies, one about learning difficulties and the other about severe mental health problems. These case studies show that singularity is not reduced to an individualistic approach. Moreover, they evidence that the emergence of new subjective senses and configurations is closely related to the creation of new spaces of social integration characterised by a dialogical communication, which, in turn, is a condition for the emergence of affective processes. The concept of subjective configuration is presented as an attempt to define a unit of subjective functioning that allows us to overcome the dispersive taxonomy which characterises the history of developmental psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
Personality in this theoretical proposal is understood as the dynamic system of historical subjective configurations that always participate in the current individual performances through some subjective senses that emerge as the subjective configuration of those performances.
- 2.
We consider any performance as a moment of human experience that always includes a network of social relationships within which the performance takes place.
- 3.
Education is defined here as a system of actions addressed at the development of the persons and social groups. The ground on which these actions take place is the dialogical communications of the educator with the group and between the participants in the processes. Education as such is very absent in the institutions devoted to the attention of human beings, as schools, hospitals, communitarian attention, and prisons.
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González Rey, F., Mitjáns Martinez, A., Rossato, M., Magalhães Goulart, D. (2017). The Relevance of the Concept of Subjective Configuration in Discussing Human Development. In: Fleer, M., González Rey, F., Veresov, N. (eds) Perezhivanie, Emotions and Subjectivity. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4534-9_11
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