Pages: 6

Almost fourteen years have passed between the first insight into this book and its publication. In between, a whole nomadic trajectory of research questions, challenges, insights, travels, encounters, and reflections. I first came into contact with cultural psychology as a doctoral student who was totally dissatisfied and impatient with psychology as it was socialized in the academic context. At that time, I had the opportunity to meet Jaan Valsiner, who later became my mentor and friend, during a summer school. Later, I understood that the serendipity of that encounter was quite common among people who feel somehow out of place in the current academic culture. Cultural psychology appeared to me as a mind-opening experience, and a means to explore new territories in the way human beings think, feel, create, destroy, and relate to each other and to their environment. I was certainly predisposed to this meeting, being educated at the University of Salerno in the intellectual tradition of Pina Boggi Cavallo, whose humanistic background and deep commitment to the complexities of human experience resisted the technocratic drift of much of contemporary psychology (Marsico & Tateo, 2023).

Pages: 29

The chapter presents the fundamental concepts of cultural psychology, their definitions and use, in the perspective of semiotic dynamics. The concepts are the basic bricks that are used in the following chapter to build the conceptual structure of cultural psychology. Although some of the concepts are also used in different disciplines of social and human sciences, cultural psychology elaborates them in new ways. The concepts discussed in Chapter 1 are: cogenetic logic, sign, semiosis, meaning-making, activity, mediation, artifact, and the internalization/externalization cycle. Those are the axiomatic principles on which the understanding of human psyche and its products is based.

Pages: 22

The second chapter presents the characteristics of cultural psychology’s methodology and how to apply them in a research design. Starting from the epistemological principles – what type of knowledge can be produced, the methodological principles – what are the best plans to produce knowledge – are presented. The focus of cultural psychology is always on the genesis and development of human psychological phenomena that unfold in time and space, in relation to others but in a unique personal form. First, the concepts of temporality, dialogicality, and narrativity are discussed, showing how they shape common knowledge. Then, some of the fundamental principles of the qualitative methodology to produce knowledge in cultural psychology are provided.

Pages: 27

Culture is not something other than or outside the mind. Culture is a complex and multifaceted concept that has no substance or agency without people. In the third chapter, the concept of culture and its relationship with the mind are discussed. First, the chapter elaborates the history of cultural psychology in relation to psychology and humanities. Then, the relationship between persons and culture is illuminated by the concepts of personal and collective culture, and by the concept of window of acceptable possibilities. Afterwards, the transition between cultures is presented in a new perspective, using the new concept of proculturation. Finally, the difference between cultural psychology and cross-cultural psychology is presented, contextualizing it within the decolonization of psychology.

Pages: 21

In Chapter 4, the imaginative process is introduced as an example of how cultural psychology explores the main themes of psychology in a new light. The importance and ubiquity of imagination in everyday life and in science is discussed. First, how imagining is fundamental to knowing is elaborated. Then two main theories of imagination in cultural psychology are presented: the theory of imagination as uncoupling; and the theory of imagination as a higher mental function. Both theories understand imagination as a fundamental feature of the human psyche that develops in the context of culturally organized activities. Finally, the sociogenesis of imagination and the possibility of educating to imagination are discussed.

Pages: 18

In Chapter 5, the bordering process and the concept of borders and border crossing are presented as typical examples of how cultural psychology builds abstract process models that map onto everyday life phenomena and help to understand them. The construction, crossing, and demolition of borders is a fundamental way of organizing both psychic experience and the environment. The border is a constitutive part of the triadic fundamental unit of analysis in co-genetic logic. The chapter discusses the phenomenology of borders, their semiotic functioning and the consequences for human psychological experience. Finally, the general genetic law of border development and its role in psychological functioning is presented.

Pages: 28

Chapter 6 combines the principles discussed in the previous chapter to illuminate the way cultural psychology conceives humans relating with the environment, both affectively and existentially. Some features of the person–world relations mediated by signs are described. First, dilemmatic situations are discussed as characterized by fuzziness, contemporary presence of cognitive, affective, ethical dimensions, and mutually defining alternative courses of action. Then, ambivalence as an inherent feature of meaning-making is presented. Afterwards, the concept of tensegrity is presented, that is the structural tension produced through a constant labor required by the maintenance of the continuity/discontinuity dynamic of the self. Finally, the concept of affective logic that describes how the person affectively relates to the world is elaborated and how meaning emerges through different levels of signs generalization.