Abstract
In the following paper, I analyze the prominent cleavage of inner–outer world within Cultural Psychology. Many cultural-psychological scholars have elaborated on the importance of CP as a science investigating the issue of objective cultural givens/patterns and their personological appropriation. Yet, there is a research gap within categorizing different but complementary personal sense-making processes of cultural givens. The present paper identified three major personal appropriation spheres such as an acceptive, rejection-like (resistant), and negotiative one. I instance the three categories by a concrete example of human traffic/mobility as well as by an autoethnography exploring my sexuality. I conclude the paper with a pattern-like picture that emerged from the semiotic investigation of personal appropriation processes: Acceptive introception provides transparency/structure, rejection and resistance overcomes encrusted transparency, and negotiation ensures the dynamic transformation of a sign that unfolds different but more adaptive consequences for the person–environment interaction.
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Notes
Introception is a specific personological term that goes back to the German psychologist W. Stern arguing that foreign purposes (Fremdzwecke) can become personally appropriated and turn out to be self-purposes (Eigenzwecke). Stern goes on to explain that introception marks the norm of humans living with other humans as we mostly deal with supra-personal entities (family, nation, sports club, etc.) but that we justify our involvement in these (socio-cultural) activities within a personal teleology (Stern, 2020, p. 79).
Knowing whether problems arise within a given personal sense-making process or with a specific social meaning-making pattern is important in order to decide whether one should alter his relationship towards the object (personal adaption) or whether one should try to change the social meaning-making pattern (von Fircks, 2022b). Thus, the knowledge whether one’s personal sense-making process is problematic or the given social meaning triggers other possibilities for change, e.g., intrapersonal vs. interpersonal resources. This is indeed a huge debate for practitioners (Doubrawa, 1998).
I am aware that the term appropriation is politically loaded and has negative connotations (Reitzenstein, 2022), nowadays. But this should not mean to abandon the term but to re-define the term in its initial theoretical frame. Terms are always polyvalent (Boesch, 2021) and scientists can show the original meaning of a term helping people to use the term more cautiously.
Semiotic mediation (or guidance) denotes the process of cultural texts penetrating our everyday occurrence by means of scripts, narrations, and so forth suggesting which goals to pursue and how to pursue them (see Valsiner, 2014). Importantly, those texts do not exist in isolation but only in convergence with concrete persons that are introcepting them, e.g., the police officer trying to punish deviation from a particular semiotic guidance that threatens the well-being of other people.
We need to ask ourselves how the concept of introception relates to the general notion of Cultural Psychology. Introception tries to analyze how foreign purposes are turned into self-purposes, thus how cultural patterns turn out to be personally meaningful. Here, we are confronted with social meanings that arise in a given cultural setting but that are personally made relevant by concrete agents. This is exactly the goal of Cultural Psychology such as called out by Valsiner (2021) in the term of cultural personology. As Psychology is interested how the individual or a given group makes sense of a given situation, Cultural Psychology adds the layer of culture into this endeavor because the individual can only make sense of something that already exists beforehand, thus socially (Mead, 2015).
Gestalt refers to a pressing issue that captures all our physical and psychic energy in order to close the issue (see Lewin, 1926, 1936). If I get hungry, I am focusing on my environment and look for several stimuli that can satisfy my need. All other needs that might be central are shifting to the background and can only become central again if the most urgent need gets fulfilled.
All resistance is from a semiotic perspective a call for re-negotiation of semiotic guidance. The planned assassination of Hitler by the military and the Kreisauer Kreis (Dönhoff, 1994) was in its very own heart a try for re-negotiating Germany’s position within Europe as well as the conditions of peace and Germany’s political structure that is not dependent upon dictatorship (Bechtolsheim, 2020) and frees the individual from the tyranny of the dictator.
The term of the person expressing himself psycho-physically neutral denotes that the person and his directionality are expressed both bodily and mentally in a simultaneous way, not being actually separable. If I get hungry, my stomach sends me some signs of not having enough energy to work. But equally, I might lose concentration for my current assignment and hence feel a lack of motivation when not having eaten breakfast or lunch. Thus, my directionality is valid in a psycho-physically neutral way (see Stern, 2020).
One of the reviewers asked the question how introception is related to the Vygotskian concept of perezhivanie. I am in line with the definition of perezhivanie as an “affective-volitional process” (Rey, 2016, p. 307). Yet, I want to remain within the Vygotskian framework of art showing that perezhivanie is an artistic directionality. Yet, as we know from Boesch (1975, 2005), artistic directionality can only come into being if we act on a cultural canon of knowledge and try to alter specific details in order to underline our individuality. Once we complete our artistic endeavor, we feel joy and pleasure because we have changed the environment in a more compatible manner with ourselves (Boesch, 1998). What happens during introception, especially if we are re-negotiating foreign purposes (Fremdzwecke) in order to make them more synthon with our self-purposes (Eigenzwecke), is an artistic involvement such as we find in poetry (von Fircks, 2022c).
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Für Anna Ghazi, die mich wachsen lässt und mir hilft, meine Ideen zu schleifen.
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Freiherr von Fircks, E. Categorizing Personal Appropriation Processes of Cultural Givens and Investigating Their Personal and Collective Functions. Hu Arenas (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-023-00351-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-023-00351-9