Feeling as movement from a person-centered standpoint: Going beyond William Stern

Item does not contain fulltextAccording to William Stem, psychological phenomena are only understandable in relation to a living and experiencing person. Stem defines the person as an open system which is related to the external world. However, the question how this relation between person and world can be conceptualized, specifically how person and world co-construct each other, needs further elaboration. In this paper, feeling is understood as the critical mediating process of the person-world relationship. It is shown how the world constrains the flow of feeling through semiotic devices, as, for example, feeling concepts and circumvention strategies. Yet the world does not strictly determine feeling and other psychological functions. It is always the person who actively reconstructs the world's suggestions in ongoing time, rather than simply taking them over or selecting them

A psychological analysis of a psychological phenomenon: The dialogical construction of meaning

Item does not contain fulltextIt is the task of psychologists to describe and explain psychological phenomena, though the meaning of both description and explanation varies widely. One way to deal with psychological phenomena is to transform them as soon as possible into data (by which is meant quantitative data), which then can be analysed by ready-made methods (by which is meant inferential statistics). An unfortunate result of this politically fortified procedure is that the availability of methods (for data "collection" and analysis) comes to dictate the whole research process, including the construction of the phenomenon and its operationalization. As a consequence, various opponents of this non-scientific procedure have challenged psychology with a new dogma: the need to replace quantitative methods by their qualitative counterparts. Recently appearing "new turns" in psychology (as the narrative, the hermeneutic, the discursive turn, etc.) in particular, define qualitative approaches as the via regia for psychological analyses. I argue that both "schools" are caught in the same trap: ready-made methods and belief in the superiority of one rather than the other dominate all other aspects of methodology and psychological inquiry in general. I suggest that it is the theoretically derived phenomenon that - depending on the specific research question under consideration - requires the construction (rather than the application) of an adequate method for its analysis - be it qualitative or quantitative. I give an extended example for a psychological analysis of a psychological phenomenon - the construction and reconstruction of meaning - with the help of a qualitative experimental approach

Self-construction in a nightly gathering of culture and person: Rendezvous or conflict?

Psychology has provided a variety of ways to conceptualize the relation between culture and person. In order to study the ‘work of culture’ in the person, or, as I prefer to say, the person’s ‘work on culture’, the vantage point for a psychological analysis is necessarily the person’s experiential world. According to the cultural psychologist Boesch, the person’s experiential world—the fantasmicsystem—is guided by cultural suggestions: myths. Fantasms are understood as personal, and thus novel transformations of myths. In this commentary, I interpret the four Samoan dreams presented by Mageo (2002) in two ways. First, they are examples of personally constructed fantasms, guided by a variety of conflicting and opposing cultural myths in a postcolonial world. These dreams, however, can also be understood as accounts of a multivoiced, conflicting (and thus non-dialogical in the strict sense of the term) self, which is far from integrating heterogeneous voices of the traditional and colonial past and postcolonial present. Thus, the dreams are not a peaceful dialogue between person and culture—a nightly rendezvous—but rather represent the person’s struggle and fight for selfhood and identity. Mageo provides convincing empirical evidence for the assumption that change in historical times is experienced on a personal level—in the person’s self- and identity-formation. Her idiographic analysis is an important step in finding general laws—nomoi—that are applicable to human beings rather than to variables

The concept of dialogue and the dialogical self

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Die Bedeutung von Dingen für die Identität Jugendlicher

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The dialogical self between mechanism and innovation

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