Borders, Tensegrity and Development in Dialogue

Doping Existential Despair: Mindful of the Exotic Lure

The paper builds on (von Fircks, E. Integr. psych. Behav. Sci. 2023) article on mindfulness meditation analysed in a Meadian perspective. First, the selective appropriation of some concepts by hegemonic psychology is critically discussed. Then, the consequences of adopting the whole philosophical system of Eastern perspectives are envisaged. Finally, a proposal for a truly ecological shift in the study of self is proposed.

Viktor von Weizsäcker's Notion of Pathic: Affective Liminality, Modalization of Experience and Illness

The work presents and discusses Viktor von Weizsäcker's notion of pathic. This concept developed over the course of thirty years represents the culmination of his theoretical thought. The pathic (das Pathische) is closely related to the meaning of 'pathological' and to the meaning of 'suffering'. Yet the pathic does not designate neither a condition of mere illness nor a condition of passivity. Pathic can be considered as the essential nature of the becoming in contrast with the ontic existence. The pathic assumes the changing form of five modal expressions ('will', 'can', 'may', 'shall' and 'must'). The pathic refers the way through which the liminal relationship of the living being with the world and its becoming is expressed. Life is a modal tension between the coming into the world and the coming out of it, so the pathic is the mutable subjective form of this tension. The pathic is the core notion at basis of the foundation of a new medical anthropology where the intersubjective doctor-patient relationship is of the most importance.

Development through Borders: Photogrammetry of a Moving Experience

Recognizing the variety of borders that gather and divide our world, such as geographical, temporal, social and psychological, the study highlights that the transit across these borders drives changes and continuities that contribute to human development. The research emphasizes the relevance of reviewing both the individual singularities and the shared aspects of border crossing experiences. The matching of these approaches allows building theoretical models referring to those experiences. Thus, this article aims to review borders crossing as a developmental and abductively generalizable process. Through the analogy between Abductive Generalization and photogrammetry, the study proposes an innovative way of representing these complex experiences. Three ways of border crossing - spatial displacement, imagination and social interactions - are explored in terms of their developmental potential. Using a case study of psychologists in a humanitarian non-governmental organization - NGO, an abductively generalized model is presented highlighting the spatial, cultural and psychological dimensions involved. In addition, the study proposes a three-dimensional helical model of development inspired by photogrammetry, incorporating principles of this technique to improve the understanding on the border crossing process. By recognizing mesogenetic influences, such as institutional and cultural dimensions, the article puts forward an interdisciplinary approach to understand development through border crossing. The models presented may potentially drive future research and interventions in Semiotic Cultural Psychology, enriching the promotion of human development in different border contexts. The study fosters the extension of this work by including several perspectives, methods and paradigms.

The Movement Between Agreement and Disagreement in Self Positions Through a Musico-Logical Metaphor

In this article, I use a metaphorical concept in order to propose an interpretation for the dialogical relationship that occurs between I-positions in the human self. Metaphor is a useful tool for scientific production and its heuristic value has been demonstrated in several fields of knowledge. I claim a musico-logical metaphor to explain dynamic dialogic processes that occur when I-positions are in agreement or disagreement relationship. These dialogic processes are based on tension and release and, in a complementary way, can result in contradictory, tautological, or contingency relations between I-positions. These relations were categorized using concepts from Music and Logic, thus creating a theoretical model composed of metaphorical concepts. To provide evidence of how a musico-logical metaphor might contribute to the interpretation of relations between I-positions in the system of self, I discuss a case study of a rural worker and analyze how child labor marked his life trajectory throughout different moments. The musico-logical metaphor might contribute to dialogical processes understanding that occur at the border of the agreement-disagreement dyad in the system of the self, since this metaphor proposes to identify, from a cogenetic understanding, dialogic interactions between I-positions located in this border, thus transforming the agreement-disagreement dyad into a triadic agreement-border-non-agreement set.

The affective logic of race: A cultural psychological analysis of racial signifying practices

In this article, we use the theoretical framework of affective logic to discuss the underlying cultural psychological aspects of racial signifying practices. We provide an analysis of the controversies around the music video “Vai Malandra,” by Brazilian pop singer Anitta, as a case study. Departing from the theoretical assumption that our primary relationship with the phenomenal world is affective (though culturally mediated), we argue that our personal trajectories and emotional reords provide our experiences with an affective dimension that both precedes and influences any logical assessment of reality and that makes our sense-making processes unique. Thus, we suggest that, in the arena of racial signifying practices, we must always look beyond the person’s ability to critically position themselves racially to consider the affective dimension of the relationship between the personal and the cultural as a fundamental element in the production of racial discourse.

Dramatizing Living-in-the-World: Affective Generalization in Drama-in-Education Workshop

Drama-in-Education workshops (DiE) emphasize on balancing between teacher's delicate structuring and participants' spontaneous exploration and creation in dramatic activities and thus can be a powerful liminoid space to scaffold and facilitate young people's development. Still, more researches are needed to dig into and understand such a dynamic and complex process happening in the workshop. In this article, we presented the theoretical background of conceptualizing drama as a hybrid cultural-aesthetic form to identify its potential in educational guidance. The perspective of developmental cultural psychology was introduced to frame DiE practice as a catalytic process working on releasing and transforming participants' developmental forces. The hierarchical levels of semiotic mediation in cultural psychology can help to capture participants' affective and cognitive generalizations in semiotic forms and to perform a micro-genetic analysis of the flow of participants' subjective experiences. We also provided a step-by-step analysis of a DiE practice working with young Chinese immigrants to illuminate our theoretical proposal.

The Impact of Non-normative Academic Trajectories of Higher Education Students over Their Self-development

The expansion of the higher education system in Brazil, from the 1990s, led to an increase in the number of enrolled students, from lower income backgrounds and other historically excluded groups. In public universities, however, this expansion was focused mainly on the enrollment of students. In general, it was not followed by consistent institutional policies that supported them throughout their academic trajectories. In this article, we start from the understanding that there is an expected trajectory for these students, which reflects a normative conception of human development, structured by values and beliefs related to the objectives of education. However, human trajectories do not coincide with stages and results institutionally expected. From the analysis of the biographic narrative of a black student who filed applications for (re)enrollment in a public university after two compulsory dismissals for non-compliance with academic performance standards, relying on the Dialogical Self-theory, the Educational Self-theory, and the Trajectory theory, we conclude Sara’s pace of achievement of academic results does not correspond to the university normative standard, requiring specific pedagogical support; that the disruptive events experienced throughout her trajectory at university are eventually understood by her as opportunities for self-development; and finally, the study points to the necessity to overcome the exclusive meritocratic logic that preponderates over public universities currently, which omits the dissonance between norms and success conditions, given the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of students.

Self-Construction in Immigration - I-Positioning through Tensional Dialogues to Powerful Foreign and Native Voices

This paper explores proculturative semiotic dynamics underlying self-construction in emigration that reveals various forms of the self's positioning through the processes of relating to the native and foreign socio-cultural environments. The self is conceptualised as the heterogeneous entirety of voices and self-related positions which are hierarchically organised. Hierarchical organisation implies the dominance of certain voices and I-positions at the expense of silencing others. Moreover, external societal voices promote hegemonic social representations which are represented as promoter I-positions/signs in the self-structures and have the power to regulate individuals' mental activity. Therefore, it is argued that selves' relations to the environment are not always symmetrically dialogical. The compelling power of hierarchically ordered external meaning systems that are conceptualised as "objective culture" is illustrated in the best manner when a person occurs in emigration where the native organisation of voices and I-positions is being semiotically ruptured due to the meeting with a foreign configuration of a hierarchy of external I-positions and gets "attacked" by alien promoter signs. External promoter voices and I-positions have the power to take the dominant position and establish asymmetric relations with other self-related elements. They can significantly influence intra-psychological negotiations by vocalising hegemonic social representations which exist in any community. The case study of a Georgian emigrant's living in Germany vividly reveals the wave of self-transformations which she undergoes after the liberation from the pressure of native promoter signs and engagement with the German ones. Specific microgenetic experiences leading to the transformations at the ontogenetic level are highlighted. Symmetric and asymmetric forms of communication are conceived as particular instances of relating. This paper vividly reveals the significance of the exploration of the forms of dynamic relations between various components of the self and socio-cultural environment and entailing intra-psychic and external negotiations for better understanding of the nature of humans' epigenetic development.

No Obvious Home: the Public’s Dialogical Creation of Home During the Third Wave of Decolonization

The global crises we currently face, ecological, refugee-related and dealing with austerity arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic share a common feature. Together they have the capacity to call into question shared understandings of what constitutes the physical, political and psychological boundaries of home. Consensual understanding (social representations) of home, if unexamined, risks retaining primordial, stable, bounded and historically continuous dimensions. The focus of this article, to this end, is the public’s understanding of home. The “un-homing” techniques used by populist leaders are brought into dialogue with how citizens, as dialogical selves, talk about home. The contours of common-sense on belonging are being informed; it is proposed by a third wave of decolonization. Stimulus-led interviews (N = 76) were conducted in England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Sweden. Dialogical analysis shows the public use two social representations relating to (i) freedom of movement and (ii) how the world is organized. These social representations decolonize home beyond national/transnational boundaries towards the transglobal. Citizens, irrespective of degree of migration, navigate future (in) securities using intergenerational dialogue. This serves to anchor transglobal migration-mobility to intergenerational continuity and the possibilities of travelling together through life. Public dialogue, when diffracted into a spectrum of positions on home, has the capacity to counter black/white, us/them, xenophobic protectionism within nationalist populism. In conclusion, scientific studies which reveal the depths of public capacity may become centrally important to post-pandemic recovery.

Ambiguity and Ambivalence: an Issue for the Subjective Dynamics in the Relation between Language and Affection

This article stems from an interest taken in discussing the usage of the terms ambivalence and ambiguity, which are very present in Psychology's publications and savoir faire. It is important to reiterate that in common sense and even in scientific publications these terms are often used as synonyms or notions of little conceptual delimitation. The relevance of such differentiation is proposed once these notions participates of the emergence of the new in human subjective experience, and, in a methodological approach, ambiguity and ambivalence are dimensions that leads the researcher goes beyond a repetitive sterile description of the subject's speech, moving towards new perspectives of the psychological data. This paper aims to retrieve the qualifying power of such notions by making a broader reflection on the functions of language in the production of interpretive realities. We also propose to bring up a reflection about ambiguity in the construction of meaning and to reiterate ambivalences as inherent to human nature, its affective record and the process of human becoming. As a way to explain the proposed themes, we will analyse an excerpt from the documentary "Últimas Conversas", produced by the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, in which high school students from public state schools in Rio de Janeiro tell their stories, speaking of dreams and shared challenges. The character Rafaela was selected for this article because of the emergence of unspeakable emotions from her narrative about an expected future as a promise of reconciliation with the alterity of her life story.

Imagination and mobility in the city: Porosity of borders and human development in divided urban environments

We focus on the notion of borders to explore how mobility and immobility in the city affect the relationship between human development and urban culture. We define borders as a relational space made of territoriality, representations and different possibilities of mobility and immobility. Drawing on research in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, we suggest a systematic approach to the analysis of borders and identify the socio-institutional, spatial and symbolic elements that make them more or less porous and thus more or less amenable to human mobility. We highlight the association between porosity in city borders and human development and illustrate the model contrasting two favela communities in Rio de Janeiro. We show that participation in the socio-cultural environment by favela grassroots organisations increases the porosity of internal city borders and contributes to the development of self, communities and the city. To focus on borders, their different elements and levels of porosity means to address simultaneously the psychosocial and cultural layers of urban spaces and the novel ways through which grassroots social actors develop themselves through participation and semiotic reconstruction of the socio-cultural environment.

Transitions of bonding: The borders between hidden roots and visible roads in life course

The article explores the phenomenon of transition in a particular human passage, which entails two affective processes, the experience of parenting and the transformation of the couple's bond. Transition is analyzed as a field of self-movements and transitional-field-of-the-abject (Hermans and Hermans- Konopka 2010) where new self-positions are co-constructed around oneself and the relationship with 'the other' through sharing meanings. The article describes processes of abandoning self-positions, which entail spatial and temporal movements, opening up possibilities to build a conception towards a communal self. Transition is discussed in terms of the indeterminacy of expanding horizons (Boulanger International Journal for Dialogical Science, 10(2), 9-33, 2017a, International Journal for Dialogical Science, 10(2), 117-130, 2017b) where uncertainty and semiotic tension are the drives for life experience and self to evolve. The phenomenon defined as tensegrity (Marsico and Tateo Integrative Psychological Behavior, 51, 536-556, 2017) enables the process towards new meanings of self and the other. The article elaborates on the life-course addressing the dynamics of actual self-regulation and transgenerational resources as crossing axes (Canevaro 1999).

"Systematic Semiotic Organisation and Anthropologisation of the Science of Soul - Towards Cultural Psychology"

Zagaria et al. identified fundamental issues and inconsistencies in the understanding of the fundamentals of psychological science. This paper attempts to trace the roots of the inconsistency and incompleteness of definitions of basic psychological concepts in the historical development of psychological science that led to the fragmentation of psychology into the various reductionistic and monological "schools of thoughts". A systematic approach is proposed as a way for a reconsideration of the understanding of mental processes in a holistic way that could serve as the starting point for the proper theoretical reflection of the catalytic interplay between subjective (intentionality), situational and cultural factors. It is argued that the anthropologisation of psychology and bringing back the focus on phenomenological aspects of experiencing which are characterised by intra-individual, cross-situational and inter-cultural variety is especially significant for the rebuilding of the integrity of psychology. The principle of "organic selection" is proposed as the basis for individual subjectivity and innovations throughout the irreversible ontogenetic developmental dynamics that allows individuals to jump beyond the phylogenetically prescribed schemata.

Considering the practices of the classification of societies – A step towards indigenization

The reasonability of the construction of classificatory rankings of societies and related theoretical implications are considered in this paper. I argue that existing classificatory rankings are based on the essentialist views and represent societies as homogenous entities whereas they ignore intra-societal variety. Moreover, the quantitative methodology and methods which underlie those rankings are based on the etic approach and use concepts and indicators which are constructed in the west and don’t reflect indigenous socio-cultural dynamics. Besides, existing rankings simply equalize particular aspects to the whole societal development. For example, gross domestic product is equalized to the level of societal development; however, it actually can’t fully reflect even the situation in the economic field. Though it can be still reasonable to use such impersonal indicators as gross domestic product or longevity which are based entirely on impersonal data and are free from subjective interpretations, for the exploration of general tendencies in particular fields, however, we should restrain ourselves from invalid generalizations. Krys et al. proposed to elaborate culturally sensitive approach, however, still remained in frame of the etic approach, whereas I argue that the only way for the comprehensive and deeper assessment of the level of societal development is to construct a fully emic and indigenous approach that implies the usage of only locally constructed concepts during the definition of indicators. Those indigenous concepts most probably won’t be translatable to other languages that make the aim of the creation of a unified scale theoretically impossible; however, this is the only way for getting valid results at least concerning particular societies with current methodological apparatus. The solution to this issue requires further theoretical development and methodological innovations.

Models of semiotic borders in psychology and their implications: From rigidity of separation to topological dynamics of connectivity

In this article, I discuss some implications deriving from different models of the notion of border, starting from interdisciplinary contributions and in particular from semiotics, psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, and topology. The starting point is a reflection on the notion of sign, as a device used to realize at the same time both a first form of discretization and to instantiate a system of relations with the environment. The article goes on to describe the importance of borders for the construction of human experience and for the processes of psychic and relational development. Lastly, the differences between three different forms of conceptualizing borders are discussed: rigid boundaries, permeable boundaries, and topological boundaries of the Möbius strip type. For each of the three models, the different implications will be presented and discussed.

Dialogues in Infertility: Exploring the Potential for Psychological Adaptation

The objective of this paper is to detail the process of psychological adaptation for a woman navigating the world after a diagnosis of age-related infertility. Infertility is a medical condition, but it occurs within a social and cultural context, thereby creating social and psychological dimensions. Discrepancies between a woman's fertility ideals and her reality may be related to both personal preferences and contributing social factors. The discussion will be based on longitudinally collected interview data. Drawing on the Dialogical Self Theory, the paper will focus on intra-psychological dynamics (dialogues) and will analyze the adaptation process in terms of I-positions. Based on idiographic analyses the conclusion is that adaptation takes place by taking subjective personal control over the uncertainty of infertility. By integrating new I-position into intra-personal phenomena, the core "I" will be united with new qualities and is seen as an authentic elaboration resulting from the formation of personal, subjective meaning in a uniquely personal developmental trajectory.

The Semiotic Construction of the Sense of Agency. The Modal Articulation in Narrative Processes

The sense of agency is an ongoing process of semiotic construction of the action starting from the affective, cognitive, intersubjective and cultural matrix of experience. A person narratively constructs the sense of her agentive experience and in doing so does not refer exclusively to the "what", but also to the "how". There is always a specific "modus" to experience one's own action. We present the psychological notion of the Modal Articulation Process (MAP), namely the way through which a person orients and configures in a contextual frame the sense of her actions by means of modal operators of necessity, possibility, impossibility, contingency, but also knowledge, will, capability, constrain and opportunity. The notion of Modal Articulation Process is proposed as a semiotic, dynamic and recursive process that articulates narratively many aspects of the agency: the relational positionings and the way of experiencing them, the constraints and the resources present in the socio-symbolic context, the inherent temporality of every human phenomenon. Although the study of modal operators has an ancient and solid tradition of research in the fields of modal logics, analytical philosophy and narrative semiotic disciplines as well, yet in the field of the psychological sciences - except for a few authoritative isolated cases (Kurt Lewin, Rom Harrè, Jaan Valsiner) - there is not a great deal of attention on the relevance of these symbolic devices and their function in constructing the sense of action in a narrative way. Indeed modal articulation processes are at stake both during daily common routines and during exceptional turning point experiences that request a reconfiguration of the sense of one's own agency (e.g. the experiences of illness demand a new modal re-articulation). Our discussion is aimed at deepening and developing the notion of modal articulation, its functions and its specificities.

"Well Now we Have Entered University and So On, but". Autodialogue and Circumvention Strategies in Reflections about Being a University Student

In higher education, there is nowadays a production of discourses about the negative effects of academic life on the well-being of the students. In the specific Danish context, we wondered how to understand the process involved in coping with problems and decisions of everyday life. To investigate this question, we present an empirical study on the microgenetic processes unfolding when students discuss their experiences with peers. We develop Josephs and Valsiner's (Social Psychology Quarterly, 61,(1), 68-82, 1998) concepts of circumvention strategies and autodialogue. The study covers 2 focus-group discussions among 2nd semester psychology students aged 20-25, attending the same psychology course at a Danish university. The students were presented with a dilemmatic situation, that they are required make sense of, based on minimal information, by integrating it in their own representations, expectations and life experiences. Our analysis suggests that the students' investment of meaning in themselves and others often occurred through autodialogical negotiation. In such negotiations, circumvention strategies offer the students a solution, enabling them not to get stuck in a dilemma between two oppositional ways of relating to a certain issue, or offers them a new and less upsetting perspective. These findings suggest that reaching a conclusion about themselves and their experience is not just a clear-cut process of making a statement, but a dynamic and complex process in which multiple perspectives and meanings are in play.

Adaptation in a dialogical perspective—From acculturation to proculturation

This article aims to provide a reconsideration of the adaptive processes unfolding while meeting novel cultural elements in a dialogical perspective. The mainstream acculturation studies are criticized for seeing sociocultural transformations in a mechanistic and essentialist way and the term of proculturation is proposed instead, to emphasize constructive and subjective nature of human adaptation to novelties. Proculturation develops when a person faces any kind of novelties. It is a continuous process. Each proculturative experience inevitably makes imprint on personality, as any meeting with new ideas is interpreted subjectively and becomes part of a cognitive and affective experience. Proculturation can be initiated even without leaving home as globalization and modern mass media spread cultural elements from culture to culture easily throughout the whole world. Cultures overlap and constitute worldwide web of meanings. I propose ways for the integration of dialogical self theory (DST) and social representation theory (SRT). The term of social representation should be integrated in DST by replacing the term of meta-position as they serve essentially the same meaning in their theories respectively. In this way, dialogical self (DS) obtains processual dimension mediating through the personal and societal processes. Human subjectivity is contemplated as the stem of a semiotically mediated system of persons, cultures, and societies.