Abstract
This chapter discusses González Rey’s contribution to the field of human health. Different from dominant perspectives, human health is not understood as the opposite of disease, or as an attribute, but as the quality of life processes. Firstly, González Rey’s critiques of dominant approaches to human health are highlighted, especially its instrumental character focused on individual processes and social adaptation. Secondly, González Rey’s works in the 1980s and 1990s are highlighted. Over this time, he developed the idea that somatic diseases represent integral disorders of individuals, challenging fragmented, and rationalist approaches. He emphasized the generative character of emotions that could cause damage to health, in an articulated way with his understanding of personality at that time. Finally, the value of González Rey’s current Theory of Subjectivity for the field of human health is discussed, by articulating its main concepts in an alternative representation of human health. The Theory of Subjectivity is presented as a non-rationalist critical perspective, oriented to construct simultaneously singular complex representations of human health processes and professional actions. In this perspective, history, culture and politics are articulated without neglecting the value of the individual for social processes.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of subject from the las moment of González Rey’s work will be presented and discussed in the last topic of this chapter. This concept was introduced in 1989 (González Rey & Mitjáns Martínez, 1989) as a theoretical way to overcome a determinist understanding of personality. Human action is not seen as a result of personality, but as a result of the individual who is immersed in the experience. From this perspective, human action is not configured a priori as a result of a psychological structure.
- 2.
In different texts, González Rey use the term “non-healthy personality” and even “neurotic personality” to refer to stable psychologic formations and functions that are articulated to dominant states of distress.
- 3.
“The symbolic refers to all those processes that replace, transform, synthesize, systems of objective realities in human realities that are only intelligible in culture” (Mitjáns Martínez & González Rey, 2017, p. 55).
- 4.
From this theoretical perspective, education represents a dialogical process geared towards the creation of new life possibilities that favour new processes of development (Mitjáns Martínez & González Rey, 2017).
- 5.
Subjective development expresses a motivated process that is emancipated from biological needs and adaption, representing the creative capacity of human beings, which is inseparable from the cultural dimension in which we live. It results from the articulation of different subjective configurations in multiple social spaces from where human actions emerge (González Rey & Mijtáns Martínez, 2017b). “One subjective configuration is a driving force of subjective development when it includes the development of new subjective resources that allow the individual to make relevant changes in the course of a performance, relations or other significant lived experiences leading to changes that define new subjective resources” (González Rey et al., 2017, p. 318).
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Goulart, D.M. (2021). Human Health and Subjectivity: History, Development and Unfolding. In: Goulart, D.M., Martínez, A.M., Adams, M. (eds) Theory of Subjectivity from a Cultural-Historical Standpoint. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1417-0_14
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