Abstract
This paper aims to deepen the understanding on how people face experiences of significant ruptures in their life trajectories, in articulation with and in the light of the notion of disquieting experience. Since the semiotic-cultural constructivist perspective in psychology, the empirical corpus that will be taken for analysis, based on this circumstantial nature experience, refers to women’s narratives whose life trajectories were marked by repeated gestational losses. The experience of a gestational loss can be perceived and felt by a woman as an unexpected event, which challenges personal and socio-cultural expectations of what was about to happen – becoming a mother and the birth of a baby. Gaps established between the imagined expectations and perceived reality, produce a non-sense field, experienced by the person as disquieting. In order to reduce the experienced psychological tension and integrate non-sense field in cognitive-affective base pre-existing, new symbolic actions are required to subject in the construction of reorganizers meanings from personal experience – what we denominate semiotic strategies of dynamic self-repair. With this, this paper aimed to shed light on the dynamic and complex aspects of human life related to the psychological processes involved in self repair, due to disruptive events.
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Notes
The names of the participants were changed on behalf of ethical requirements.
The inexistent or scarce socio-cultural support at the mesogenetic level of experience (Valsiner 2012) tells us that the experiences of pregnancy loss will not be guided by the mesogenetic collective-cultural structure, that is, they will not suffer canalization inside culturally structured activity contexts. This can represent, for example, the absence of funeral rites, such as the memorial service and burial – activities that would help the woman and her family realize the loss, facilitating the grieving process. Without the support of the mesogenetic level of experience, the pregnancy losses have a great impact on the ontogenetic level, that is, on the person’s development throughout their course of life, representing a threat to the woman’s mental health (Pontes 2013, 2015).
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Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful to Professor Lívia Mathias Simão, who was her supervisor during her postdoctoral studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, for their thoughtful readings on previous versions of this article.
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Pontes, V.V. Disquieting Experiences of Ruptures in the Life Trajectory: Challenges to Dynamic Self-Repair. Integr. psych. behav. 53, 450–462 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-09492-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-09492-5