Abstract
In our reflecting upon ourselves, we invent ourselves—a capacity that Homo sapiens has developed and mastered to its extreme. This dynamic move between acting and reflecting—leading to new ways of acting—is the core of the specifically human level of psychological functioning—the object for understanding in this book. Making signs in the process of experiencing and using them to create meanings of the on-flowing experience is a particularly human characteristic. Human beings not only live and reproduce but also die and eradicate one another in ways they consider meaningful both in societal discourses and in intrapersonal feelings about the role of oneself in this tumultuous world. In this book—on human psychology—I treat the construction and destruction processes axiomatically as mutually linked opposites that regularly transfer from one into the other. That axiom is given here as value-free—I do not intend to lament about human capacities of destruction (although in real life I resent these like most peace-loving people do). The cyclicity of the construction<>destruction process starts for ordinary daily life—we bake a delicious cake and decorate it nicely, serve it to our friends at dinner, who appreciate the beauty of the cake—after which they destroy it and enjoy its disappearance into their stomachs. If there are “leftovers” they may end up in the garbage. The construction><destruction cycle is thus complete. The unity of opposites takes many intricate forms in the human mind.
Diego Velazques, 1647–1650, Venus at Her Toilet
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Notes
- 1.
The “Rokeby Venus ”—as the Velazques’ painting above has been called in England—became the target of a knife attack in 1914. The painting had been in the British National Gallery since 1906, after having been brought from Spain to England into private collections in 1813 and finally purchased by the National Gallery. On March, 14, 1914, a certain self-proclaimed fighter for women’s equality in society, Mary Richardson, attacked the painting in the museum with a knife, in protest against the Government’s arresting of a fellow suffragette. Vandalism against various images of artwork has been documented over centuries in various waves of iconoclasm—eradication of images for religious, ideological, and political stated goals,
- 2.
In the beginning of World War I in 1914—when the atrocities of the massive devastations in Europe had not yet commences—all participating societies in the war glorified the upcoming event as “the Great War” (see Valsiner, 2018). Feelings of patriotism are easily used as legitimation for killing.
- 3.
Schechter (2018) describes examples of how new soldiers are given personal weapons with “weapon biography” of “this weapon has killed X enemies”—promoting the continuation of such killing spree in battles.
- 4.
Oudewater is a small town near Utrecht, which in 1575 was besieged—and finally on August 7 captured—by the Spanish troops fighting the Dutch Republic in the 80-year war. Half of the inhabitants were murdered in the 2-day long looting spree that Flemish engraver Frans Hogenberg—who escaped from war-torn Antwerpen to Amsterdam—depicted a few years later. It is a sixteenth-century moral commentary upon the capacity of human beings for cruelty.
- 5.
Described well in Hults, 1987.
- 6.
The North American colonies had their maximum of witchcraft accusations in the 1690s; African countries show examples of these today (Behrend, 2006).
- 7.
In Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was Maria Theresa in 1756 who forbid witch persecutions locally and ordered all suspicious cases to be forwarded to her central court in Wien. The trigger for this governmental intervention was the rising of local witchcraft and vampire accusations in the Empire. In 1755 in Hermersdorf (near Moravian and Silesian border), the corpse of a dead woman was dug out by local municipal decision because “people were complaining about her being a vampire and attacking them at night” (Klanicsay, 1987, p.167). The body—that had been buried a few months earlier—was found to be in good condition (taken as a proof of her being a vampire)—blood in veins, no decomposition. To overcome the “vampire state” her family was required to perform a ritual—drag the corpse, by hook attached to rope, through an opening made in the wall of the graveyard, to be buried and burnt outside. Note the theatralization of the reverse act of the burial in the cemetery (extra hole made in the wall) and the ritual burning of the corpse outside of the cemetery.
- 8.
The research program initiated and carried out in Berlin Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung from 1980 to the present time originally led by Paul Baltes (1939–2006) was dedicated to demonstrating that even if adults in their old age in Occidental contexts become frailer in health and some cognitive processes, their accumulated life wisdom would grow (Baltes, 2006, Baltes & Meyer, 1999). The selective optimization theory that resulted from the project stands as one of the contemporary pillars of gero-psychology (Boll et al., 2018).
- 9.
The contrast between irreversible and cyclical models of time—that makes big difference in the organization of life courses of the living—is actually eliminated if it is treated as a version of linear time as part of Riemannian infinitely large time cycle.
- 10.
Interestingly, the centrality of resistance for psychological processes is only recently emphasized (Chaudhary et al., 2017). In the present coverage based on innovated Gegenstand theory, this concept is the cornerstone for all higher psychological processes.
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Valsiner, J. (2021). Constructing and Destroying One’s Life: Phenomenology of the Human Life Course. In: General Human Psychology. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75851-6_1
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