Abstract
This chapter summarizes the key ideas from the whole monograph. The main conclusion is—personology cannot be understood without its social self-making through semiosis, and semiosis cannot be understood without clear focus on the agency of the person. Psychology and semiotics are united in New General Psychology, Building further from William Stern’s personological system of General Psychology which recognized the active role of the “Gestalt-maker” in this book the cultural-psychological focus on the semiotic nature of higher psychological functions is added. While Stern looked at the person in terms of dynamic complexity, here in this book we can observe how such complexity emerges, maintains itself, and at times vanishes – all through the human active use of signs to create one’s own dialogical Self in the relations with constantly changing and meaningfully transformed environments. The New General Psychology outlined in this book reverses the focus of psychology as science from static categories to dynamic variability fields of the psyche that are guided by the normative nature of societal expectations. The latter—needed for social life—are blinders for general science. Science is an aesthetic activity that transcends the common sense—while taking its permanent presence into account.
A psychological phenomenon is that which is given directly to my self-observation. Phenomenological psychology holds itself to the word ‘given’, but what happens when we focus on the words ‘self-observation’?. Something given in itself is unthinkable. The given must be given to someone. And this someone knows about the given, and only grasps it through self-observation, that is, through an act which is directed to the given.
(Stern, 1917, p. 15–16 translated.
in Lamiell & Deutsch, 2000, p. 721,
emphasis added).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Building this synthesis is the result of my three decades of theoretical construction efforts. On that journey a few mindmarks need to be considered. Valsiner (1987) started from the efforts to understand the concrete relevance of the signified objects in child development (mealtimes). This was followed by the effort to make sense of the mind as a dynamic sign-maker and user (Valsiner, 1998) with further focus on its direct societal embeddedness (Valsiner, 2007) and looking at the insertion of meaningful forms into the texture of life environments (Valsiner, 2018). The core of human psychological functioning at the highest level is affective (Valsiner, 2020) and involves semiotic fields in the process of affective generalization culminating in hyper-generalized meaning systems that are the basis for human deeply affective ongoing relating with one’s world (Valsiner, 2021).
- 2.
Contemporary cultural psychology involves a number of examples of creative synthesis in this direction. Alberto Rosa’s actant-based semiosis, Tania Zittoun’s and Luca Tateo’s theoretical elaborations of imagination processes, Olga Lehmann’s theorizing about silence, Giuseppina Marsico’s guiding psychology to look at “border zones,” Nandita Chaudhary’s relentless reminding us about limitations of Occidental cultural contexts, Lado Gamsakhurdia’s proculturation theory, and Enno Freiherr von Fircks’ new synthesis of Daseinssemiosis are all innovations that have occurred in the last three decades in the new framework of cultural psychology.
- 3.
“I observed psychological life concretely, and in this way I was protected from those ivory tower schemes and abstractions that we all too often encounter in the name of psychology. It was through this work that I came to understand the person as the center of a unitas multiplex” (Stern, 1927, p. 145—in Lamiell & Deutsch, 2000).
- 4.
The examples of such accumulations are scales of measurement of various kinds (intelligence, personality, etc.) where complex meaningful materials (items) are thrown together in a nonstructured artificial whole (a “score”).
- 5.
German original in Stern (1935, p,. 102): Person ist Ganzheit, d.h. nicht Einfachheit, ondern unitas multiplex. Das ist durchaus wörtlich zu nehmen. All das Viele, das in der Person enthalten ist, an ihr ständen, Geschehnissen, Teilen, Phasen, Schichten, gehört zur Ganzheit, ist ihr nicht nur äusserlich angeklebt, stützt oder bedingt sich gegenseitig; dieses Zusammenklingen der Vielen zum personale Ganzen, und der Person mit dem Werte macht das menschliche Leben möglich
- 6.
As it was done in Zittoun et al. (2013)
- 7.
Forms of introception—loving, understanding, creating, and consecrating (Stern, 1938, p. 73)—require the notion of consciousness in enacting intentions. On the basis of self-observation (introspection) grows the self-orientation to the personal feeling in oneself and its intentional guidance.
- 8.
Here we can think of Georg Simmel’s insistence that wars are being prepared in peacetime, and peace efforts are being created at wartimes.
- 9.
Gamsakhurdia (2019, 2021) extends the basic developmental perspective—creation of novelty—to the movement of people across societies. Hence the common sense and politically bound assumption that people who migrate from society A have to become assimilated in society B that accepts them overlooks the relevance of such migration for society B that benefits from the migration flow.
- 10.
Hence the centrality of idiographic science in the study of development (Molenaar, 2004; Salvatore, 2016; Salvatore et al., 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Lamiell, 1998). All human development—from birth to death—is that of individual persons who internalize different aspects of their societal inputs in personally unique ways,
- 11.
- 12.
As a biological example by now well known—80% of the genome of human beings are not specifiable as functional currently in any state.
- 13.
Poddiakov and Valsiner (2013) emphasized the centrality of intransitive cycles in biological systems.
- 14.
This was not so in the middle of the twentieth century. It took Hans Krebs and his team 14 years to realize that the basic biochemical energy chain—now called “Krebs’ cycle”—was of cyclical form (Krebs, 1953).
- 15.
The only thinker in the twentieth century who consistently tried—yet failed—to develop this kind of general logic was James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934). His genetic logic was the antecedent for various empirical research programs—those of Jean Piaget’s developmental investigations (Valsiner, 1996, 2001) and the aesthetic synthesis focus of Lev Vygotsky—but his theoretical quest remained without follow-ups (Valsiner, 2009, 2010). It remains to be remedied in the twenty-first century.
- 16.
Constructive theorizing that leads to new ideas is a necessity imperative in contemporary psychology (Teo, 2020) in order to give form to the rapidly expanding flow of empirical investigations. This is particularly important as psychology in its history has been the “hostage” of the ideological “war” between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Valsiner, 2012) which has obscured the investigation into its Renaissance cultural-historical roots (Klempe, 2020).
References
Baldwin J M, (1892). The origin of volition in childhood. Science, 20, 511, 286–287.
Gamsakhurdia, V. L. (2019). Proculturation: Self-reconstruction by making “fusion cocktails” of alien and familiar meanings. Culture & Psychology, 35, 2, 161–177.
Gamsakhurdia, V. L. (2021), Theory of proculturation. London: Routledge.
Klempe, S. H. (2020) Tracing the emergence of psychology 1520–1750: A sophisticated intruder to philosophy. Cham, CA: Springer.
Krebs, H (1953), The citric acid cycle. Nobel Prize Lecture on December, 11. Stockholm: Nobel Committee.
Lamiell, J. T. (1998). ‘Nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’: Contrasting Windelband’s understanding with contemporary usage. Theory & Psychology, 8, 23–38.
Lamiell, J., T., and Deutsch, W. (2000). In the light of a star: An introduction to William Stern’s critical personalism. Theory & Psychology, 10, 715–730.
Maruyama, M. (1963). The second cybernetics. American Scientist, 51, 164–179.
Maruyama, M. (1978) Prigogine‘s Epistemology and Its Implications for the Social Sciences: Current Anthropology, 19, 2, 453–455
Maruyama, M. (1992). Entropy, beauty and eumorphy. Cybernetica, 35, 3, 196–199
Maruyama, M. (1999). Heterogram analysis: Where the assumption of normal distribution is illogical. Human Systems Management, 18, 53–60.
Molenaar, P. C. M (2004). A manifesto on psychology as idiographic science: Bringing the person back into scientific psychology, this time forever. Measurement, 2, 4, 2ß1–218–
Poddiakov, A. N., and Valsiner, J. (2013). Intransitivity cycles and their transformations: How dynamically adapting systems function. In L. Rudolph (Ed.), Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences (pp. 343–391). London: Routledge.
Rodriguez Higuera, C. J (2016). Just how emergent is the emergence in semiosis? Biosemiotics, 9, 157–167.
Salvatore, S. (2016). Psychology in black and white. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers.
Salvatore, S., Valsiner, J., Strout-Yagodzinsky, S., and Clegg, J. (Eds) (2009). YIS: Yearbook of Idiographic Science 2008. Vol 1.. Rome: Fireira Publishing.
Salvatore, S., Valsiner, J., Travers Simon, J., and Gennaro, A. (Eds). (2010a). YIS-2: Yearbook of Idiographic Science 2009. Roma: Fireira & Luzio.
Salvatore, S., Valsiner, J., Travers Simon, J., and Gennaro, A. (Eds). (2010b). YIS-3: Yearbook of Idiographic Science 2010. Roma: Fireira & Luzio.
Stern, W. (1917). Die Psychologie und der Personalismus. Leipzig: J. A. Barth.
Stern, W. (1935). Allgemeine Psychologie. DenHaag: Nijhoff.
Stern, W. (1938). General Psychology. New York: Macmillan.
Teo, T. (2020). Theorizing in psychology: From the critique of a hyper-science to conceptualizing subjectivity. Theory & Psychology, 30(6), 759–767.
Valsiner, J. (1984). Two alternative epistemological frameworks in psychology: The typological and variational modes of thinking. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 5, 4, 449–470.
Valsiner, J. (1986). Between groups and individuals: Psychologists’ and laypersons’ interpretations of correlational findings. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), The individual subject and scientific psychology (pp. 113–152). New York: Plenum.
Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester: Wiley.
Valsiner, J. (1996). Whose mind? Human Development, 39, 295–300.
Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Valsiner, J. (2001). Constructive curiosity of the human mind: Participating in Piaget. Introduction to the Transaction Edition of Jean Piaget’s The child’s conception of physical causality (pp. ix-xxii). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies. New Delhi: Sage.
Valsiner, J. (2009). Baldwin’s quest: A universal logic of development. In J. W. Clegg (Ed.), The observation of human systems: Lessons from the history of anti-reductionistic empirical psychology (pp.45–82). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2010). A persistent innovator: James Mark Baldwin reconsidered. Introduction to J. M. Baldwin, Genetic theory of reality (pp. xv-lix). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2012). A guided science. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2018). Ornamented Lives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2020). Sensuality in Human Living: The cultural psychology of affect. Cham, CH: Springer Nature (Springer Briefs- Theoretical Advances in Psychology)
Valsiner, J. (2021). Hyper-generalization by the human mind: The role of sign hierarchies in meaning-making processes. Hans-Kilian-Preis 2017. Giessen: PsychoSozial Verlag.
Zittoun, T., Valsiner, J., Vedeler, D., Salgado, J., Gonçalves, M. and Ferring, D. (2013). Melodies of living. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Valsiner, J. (2021). Final Conclusions: General Principles of Cultural Personology. 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_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75851-6_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-75850-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-75851-6
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)