Jaan Valsiner

Aalborg University · Department of Communication and Psychology

The article discusses Vygotsky's attitude towards Gestaltpsychology. It is a translation of chapter 8 of Understanding Vygotsky (1991)

We posit that at the root of every meaning-making process is the Gestalt explosion. In classic psychology since the 1890s the notion of Gestalt is conceptualized in dynamic but stable terms. We point to the process of breaking the Gestalt and formation of a new one. For this central purpose the context of the polar lights has been connected to a ph...

In Collaborative Realities, I will introduce and critically reflect collaborative realities, methods and practices probed during the artistic research project visions4people, that was realized in a cooperation between weißensee academy of art berlin and the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Campus Charité Mitte by high degree students f...

Teaching methodology in various social sciences is a complex problem that starts from the ambiguity about what is meant by the notion of methodology. In contemporary practices, the meaning of the terms has usually been associated with the notion of methods that are viewed as discrete tools applicable in research in their own terms. This is inadequa...

Psychology has been challenged by its own terminological limitations, in which phenomena of large-scale, field-like kind force us to innovate with our theoretical tools. Phenomena with global impacts – epidemics, pandemics, famines, and the like – remain on the periphery of psychology’s theoretical efforts. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is...

In this article, we examine the place of culture in the human sciences with specific reference to psychology and the cultural histories of India. Despite the depth of scholarly writing on the intimate and inextricable ties between culture and psychological processes, core advancements and definitive positions in psychology have remained elusive. Th...

We suggest that theoretical models in the social sciences would benefit from uses of nature’s images that map the complexity of the phenomena to be investigated. Such abstractions would better maintain the open-systemic character of the psychological and social phenomena in all their complexities. Particularly central in such complexities are dynam...

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...

Human attention to various sounds is selective. We pay attention to some sounds—but not others. We create some sounds—and avoid making others. How have we got to such acts of silence-breaking and—on to enjoyment of various sound patterns as we produce them? How would a sound—a neutral event—becomes affectively valued—between the designations of noi...

An artist captures affective meaning in everything—an occasional glimpse of a landscape, a naked body that becomes a nude presentation, and in the spur of moment in its musicality. Human beings turn perceived moments immediately into affectivated ones—they fill in the current moment of Einfühlung with affective meanings that go beyond the present s...

The notion of disquiet is obviously a version of opposites of quiet. It has major philosophical and epistemological implications for our knowledge (The notion of disquiet is developed in full in the work of Livia Simão (The other in the self: a triadic unit. In: Valsiner J (ed) Oxford University Press, New York, pp 403–420, 2012; Simão and Valsiner...

Wartime and peacetime transform into each other with some periodicity, challenging both ordinary people and persons in political roles with ever-changing demands for control over resources and public orders after lawless times of devastations, and resistances to new orders. Any society is a dynamic system where new internal (intra-society) and exte...

Approaching serious research in psychology is by far more rigorous than the efforts by a Catholic priest to investigate the state of affairs of the consenting beguine. The Methodology Cycle sets up very strict rules for how research can proceed—starting from its intuitive basis of curiosity. Development of educated intuition is the goal of preparat...

Human ways of living are theatrical. People invent social roles, enter into these, decorate themselves with role markers, and act in accordance with the roles. The ease with which ordinary American students can take on the roles of prisoners and prison guards in an artificial experiment and act towards one another forgetting the usual dignity of re...

Human societies are complex webs of mutual obligations organized by the power relations between the participating actors. Yet behind their enormous complexities, all societies come to the simple basic hierarchical order. How are social norms maintained? Fathali Moghaddam and Rom Harre have introduced the concepts carriers and reductons to illustrat...

The New General Psychology developed in this book is interdisciplinary—it unites the personological tradition of William Stern with the science of making and using of signs—semiotics. The complex phenomena described in Chap. 1 can be analyzed as semiotic phenomena—general psychology of creating, using, and discarding sign complexes. By using signs,...

Values are the highest level organizers of human lives. Yet they are ephemeral—as all non-existing objects they subsist (rather than exist) and therefore can play their overwhelming role in everything human beings feel, think, and do. We are guided by our own generated meanings that have lost real material existence by way of becoming hyper-general...

The general process of the dynamic links between remembering and forgetting involves constant coordination of the imaginary future (“how would it all be then?”) and coordinating it with past. In this chapter an analysis of various cultural tools—large monunments and small figurines—that serve as memory devices, is given. Such value-suggestive monum...

How do we want something? What is the psychological system that makes wanting in different forms an act of change of the present status quo? Why do we all not become thieves or road robbers when overwhelmed with the feeling “I want THAT”(what another person or society has). Our internalized social norm system makes such act impossible. Yet the norm...

Jaan Valsiner is one of the most well-known and well-respected cultural psychologists of our day. We invited him to provide a synthetic commentary on the collection of texts found in this book, and we were delighted when he accepted our invitation. We were also a bit surprised when he stated that, in the light of the powerful nature of the book’s c...

I find the conceptual field where Oriental and Occidental perspectives in psychology meet in the analysis of borders within systems—looking at the specific mechanisms under which these borders can inhibit or enhance the exchange relations between parts within the whole. The Occidental science has selected a non-fruitful pathway to knowledge that pr...

Social sciences are crucial in our understanding of the increasingly globalizing ways of living in the twenty-first century. Rapid technological advancements in our societies—“East” and” West”, “North” and “South”—are paralleled with resistances by traditional social orders to them. Local social norms and political control systems that sometimes er...

Our knowledge is trapped in the discourse about causality. This trap is set by the common language notions of something causing something else and its penetration into scientific domains. The crucial feature of the phenomena in the social sciences is the flexibility for intentional coordination of conditions of personal and collective cultures with...

This volume was born in a six-semester collective teaching effort in Norway, but its implications go far beyond the mundane expectations of a “mandatory course” on philosophy of science to any cohort of social science aspirants for Ph.D. degrees. What is at stake in our twenty-first century is the new nature of knowledge construction in the social...

In this article, I review main directions in innovative ideas that have been presented on the pages of Culture & Psychology over its 25 year history. The field of cultural psychology has become established and gains increasing prominence over the years covered—yet its future depends on careful development of the specific theoretical ideas catalyzed...

In this chapter I undertake an intellectual journey to the realm of generalization in irreversible time. The coverage leads us to a rather paradoxical conclusion—in order to create any knowledge, the knowledge maker has to act on the basis of unique, transient, phenomena that occur in the flow of irreversible time. To accomplish the making of gener...

This book investigates whether, how and where the cultural milieu of European societies has changed as a result of the socio-economics crisis. To do so, it adopts a psycho-cultural approach, which views the cultural milieu as a set of meanings, placing the generalized image social actors have of themselves, the world, events and their relationships...

The analyses and discussions developed throughout the volume are based on the Semiotic Cultural Psychological Theory (SCPT). SCPT integrates relational psychoanalysis, Dynamic Systems Theory and pragmatic semiotics within the more general framework of socio-cultural psychology. SCPT conceives mental processes as ongoing dynamics of sensemaking. Sen...

Cultural psychology is the new effort to overcome an old problem in psychology as a science — its irrational effort to imitate the so-called ‘hard’ sciences by reducing complex phenomena to elementary constituents and attempt to ‘measure’ imaginary properties of the mind through quantitative methods applied to summary indices accumulated across var...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189885.].

In schools and kindergartens much of education happens in "secondary places" – locations in the territory of the educational institution that are not meant for direct instruction purposes, but where all participants necessarily encounter in their daily lives. We analysed entrances, corridors and staircases from the perspective of semiotic encoding...

Suur osa koolis ja lasteaedades omandatavast haridusest jõuab lasteni kõrvaliste kohtade ehk selliste paikade kaudu, mis asuvad küll haridusasutuste territooriumil, kuid ei ole otseselt õppetegevuseks ette nähtud. Samas puutuvad kõik kooliskäijad nendega oma igapäevaste toimetuste käigus tahes-tahtmata kokku. Hiina lasteaedades ja koolides saadud e...

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questi...

Position of the symbolic universes on the MCA main factorial dimensions. Factor 1 vs. Factor 2. (PDF)

Multiple correspondence analysis. Description of the 3 main factorial dimensions. (DOCX)

Questionnaire Views of Context (VOC). (PDF)

Position of the symbolic universes on the MCA main factorial dimensions. Factor 1 vs. Factor 3. (PDF)

In this paper we discuss the semiotic functions of the psychological borders that structure the flow of narrative processes. Each narration is always a contextual, situated and contingent process of sensemaking, made possible by the creation of borders, such as dynamic semiotic devices that are capable of connecting the past and the future, the ins...

Educated intuition is at the very core of all science. The first question for a researcher is—what research questions are worthwhile to ask in the first place. Intuition here comes first—yet it is educated, not naïve and not “pure.” There are many layers of personal-cultural needs that turn an ordinary person into a scientist. Here the scientist an...

The crucial starting point for this book is the idea that methods are a sub-part of methodology that functions as a cycle and that it is in the coordination of all parts of the cycle that creating and using any particular method may make sense for knowledge creation. In this chapter I outline some ways in which such theory-based methods have been,...

The primary method of psychology needs to be introspection. Yet any introspective evidence, to be of value to science, needs to be explicated into the public domain—“shared” between people and generalized from scientific knowledge creation. In this chapter I outline the original Wurzburg method of Karl Buhler and its transformation by Brady Wagoner...

Extrospection is introspection turned outward—from the experiencer (ordinary observer or scientist). Its process is thus similar to that of introspection—it is constructive of the knowledge of the object of extrospection. In the human world of experiencing, the results of the extrospection become introspectively consolidated. A questionnaire is an...

Generalization from single cases to generic processes that make these cases possible has a time-honored tradition in science. Astrophysical generalizations are based on unique cases of self-organizing systems: galaxies, planetary systems, and single planets or comets. General biological principles—such as those of immunology (where one needs to exp...

Three basic rules (derived from the axioms outlined in Chap. 1) are outlined:1.All human psychological processes unfold in irreversible time (the rule of time). 2.All human psychological processes—while being based on the unity of the body and the psyche—are being generated in relation with the environment (the rule of the open systems). 3.All huma...

Resistance is a notion that can be viewed both from a common-sense perspective and from a scientific one. This volume contains a diverse range of empirical evidences of common-sense resistance in different cultural conditions. In each case, there is linkage with theoretical dimensions. These experiences facilitate a focus on resistance as a potenti...

We introduce a semiotic and dynamic perspective to investigate and discuss – from a psychological point of view – the process of affective regulation through the mediation and articulation of signs. In order to avoid a simplistic, linear and reductive appraisal, affective phenomena are presented as quasi-structured fields (“affective fields”), whic...

old article describing the ZPD idea, better one is its new re-write

Il libro offre una panoramica delle idee, delle radici storiche e dei potenziali ambiti di ricerca di quella sofisticata proposta teorica che, sotto l’etichetta di psicologia culturale, intende rifondare la psicologia come scienza dell’uomo. Valsiner sottolinea infatti come la psicologia si occupi dell’esperienza dell’essere umano e del suo agire n...

Over the twentieth century, psychology has adopted the scheme of causal thinking that involves the S → R (stimulus → response) basic structure. It brings into the thinking of psychologists the axiomatic acceptance of linear causality (“S causes R”) without a focus on elaboration of how the supposed process of causing actually operates. In the exper...

Psychology of human being is the science of goals-oriented actions that transcend the border of the present, and incorporate the past and the future in the process of development (" The Yokohama Manifesto "-Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato and Dazzani, 2016). Semiotic mediating devices—signs of various forms that operate in dynamic configurations...

William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890, pp. 194–197) warned psychologists against their own habits of assuming that other human beings are like they are. He outlined “three snares” which he considered as obstacles for psychology becoming a science: 1. The misleading influence of language, 2. The confusion of one’s own standpoint with t...

Three innovations are necessary in psychology if it were to become person-oriented: (1) looking for the universal in the particulars, (2) accepting the irreversibility of developmental life events, and (3) conceptualizing transformation of complexity in terms of qualitative structures of dynamic hierarchical order. Psychology can only be a science...

Valsiner, J. Companion text for A semiotic approach to creativity: Resources for re-conceptualization. In V.-P. Glaveanu (Ed.), Palgrave handbook of creativity and culture research. London: Palgrave, 2016

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultura...

All human conduct is purposive and dynamically regulated. In psychology the notion of purpose has been rejected as a notion that might bring religious moments into psychology. In biology the acceptance of purposefulness becomes inevitable as the new genetic science concentrates on the pre-adaptation of the genome to the expected possible future env...

In this Editorial, I take a rare look back - at the 20 years of making the journal. It has been an experiment in navigating the (re)emerging field in between different historical and contemporary tendencies in psychology, as well as with neighbouring traditions in anthropology, history and biology. All this has happened under social conditions that...

The notion of God (or any version of deities in any societies) is not a theoretical concept in scientific psychology. It is a notion that needs to be explained itself—from the perspective of psychological theories. Religious phenomena are crucial for scientific psychology. When seen from the perspective of cultural psychology, all religious systems...

Presentation in Kyiv 2014 on how context of science has changed

Knowledge is noisy in our

Psychology as a self-aspiring, ambitious, developmental science faces the crucial limit of time-both theoretically and practically. The issue of time in constructing psychology's theories is a major unresolved metatheoretical task. This raises several questions about generalization of knowledge: which is the time length of breath of psychological t...

Against the prevailing view that progress in science is characterized by the progressive accumulation of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962 introduced the idea of revolutionary paradigm shifts. For Kuhn, everyday science is normal science in which scientists are engaged in problem solving activities set in the cont...

A social representations approach offers an empirical utility for addressing myriad social concerns such as social order, ecological sustainability, national identity, racism, religious communities, the public understanding of science, health and social marketing. The core aspects of social representations theory have been debated over many years a...

Families are social units that expand in time (across generations) and space (as a geographically distributed sub-structures of wider kinship networks). Understanding of intergenerational family relations thus requires conceptualization of communication processes that take place within a small collective of persons linked with one another by a flex...

Vygotsky was a brilliant literary scholar whose role in psychology borrows substantially from his interests in and fascination with literature and theatre. The central question for Vygotsky’s theory was aesthetic synthesis - the emergence of generalized feelings in human life-experiences. The critical empirical example for the emergence of affectiv...

Disputes about the origins of psychology in the history of the discipline are functional not for our understanding of the past, but as normative signs that regulate the construction of ideas in the future. We introduce the notion of open-ended normativity that regulates the development of a given discipline towards its future. Hence the question of...

Although the investigation of persons should be natural for psychological science by its inherent logic, this has not been the case in the history of the discipline, where selected other species - rats, dogs, pigeons, and chimpanzees - have been made to "stand in" for human beings. Consequently the knowledge of human psychological processes has bee...

This chapter contains a commentary to the historical coverage of the issue of agency by Roger Smith and Luca Tateo, and introduces the need to use history of psychology as the basis for future theoretical advancements in the field (rather than a “museum of old ideas”). The habitual treatment of history in textbooks along the lines of “history and s...

This book, The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality, began from our quest to achieve three goals for the discipline of psychology, and more specifically, as elaborated within a semiotic cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is a new–“up and coming” (Cole, 1996, Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge: Harvard Universi...

Theoretical models of catalysis have proven to bring with them major breakthroughs in chemistry and biology, from the 1830s onward. It can be argued that the scientific status of chemistry has become established through the move from causal to catalytic models. Likewise, the central explanatory role of cyclical models in biology has made it possibl...

Cultural psychology is in need for a general theory that includes coverage of both the real actual and the possible realms of psychological phenomena, and of the relationship between the two. The tradition of Gegenstandstheorie developed in Graz in the beginning of the 20th century by Alexius Meinong has direct relevance for theory construction and...

Culture and Psychology has by now been around for two decades. As its Editor, I like to look forward, rather than backward, to consider what might be necessary for further advancement of the area. While the discourses in the different subdomains of cultural psychologies(1) have stabilized over the two decades, elaborations of relevant cultural phen...

While everyday life is necessarily using common sense for solving practical problems, it is not sufficient for psychology's advancement of generalized knowledge. Our recognition of the conceptual-methodological unfeasibility of the common-sense foundation of psychology raises the necessity of developing a theory of intervention that considers the p...

This Editorial is a "leftover"-or maybe a "dessert"-from my recent treatise on how cultural psychology can lead the rest of the discipline out of the loops of "dust-bowl qualitative empiricism"1 that is beginning to take form in the social sciences. Cultural psychology of today operates at the intersection of these social tendencies, running the ri...

The newly emerging interdisciplinary area of cultural psychology has largely addressed issues of conduct and cognition. A semiotic perspective is assumed here to investigate phenomena of affective self-regulation through signs. The phenomena of affect are presented as quasi-structured affective fields, which undergo differentiation through semiotic...

How do we understand and explain phenomena in psychology? What does the concept of “causality” mean when we discuss higher psychological functions and behavior? Is it possible to generate “laws” in a psychological and behavioral science―laws that go beyond statistical regularities, frequencies, and probabilities? An international group of authors c...

Twenty years is a long time in the lives of the authors of a treatise – but a minuscule period in the development of core concepts in a science. When we addressed the issue of the zone of proximal development (ZPD in the English version, but zona blizhaishego razvitia – ZBR – in the original Russian) two decades ago (Valsiner and van der Veer, 1993...

Drawing on philosophy, the history of psychology and the natural sciences, this book proposes a new theoretical foundation for the psychology of the life course. It features the study of unique individual life courses in their social and cultural environment, combining the perspectives of developmental and sociocultural psychology, psychotherapy, l...

Cultural psychology is a sub-part of general psychology that is built on the axiom that all human cognitive, affective, and behavioral forms of existence are regulated by socially constructed meanings. From that starting point cultural psychology overcomes the limitations of behavioral and cognitive traditions in psychology, restoring the study of...

A most interesting area in transitivity / intransitivity relations consists of relations like dominance / subordination, superiority / inferiority, preferences, etc. If A dominates B and B dominates C, must it be so that A dominates C? If A is superior to B, and B is superior to C, must it be so that A is superior to C? What happens if superiority/...

The goal of cultural psychology is to explain the ways in which human cultural constructions-for example, rituals, stereotypes, and meanings-organize and direct human acting, feeling, and thinking in different social contexts. A rapidly growing, international field of scholarship, cultural psychology is ready for an interdisciplinary, primary resou...