Culture, Subject, Psyche


Book Description

Rethinking relations between disciplines long held to be at odds.




The Cultural Complex


Book Description

Based on Jung's theory of complexes, this book offers a new perspective on conflicts between groups and cultures, demonstrating how the effects of cultural complexes can be felt in the behaviour of disenfranchised groups across the world.




Cultural Psychology


Book Description

This collection of essays from leading scholars in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics is an outgrowth of the internationally known "Chicago Symposia on Culture and Human Development." It raises the idea of a new discipline of cultural psychology through the study of the relationship between psyche and culture, subject and object, person and world, with special reference to core areas of human development: cognition, learning, self, personality dynamics, and gender. The essays critically examine such questions as: Is there an intrinsic psychic unity to humankind? Can cultural traditions transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion? Are psychological processes local or specific to the socio-cultural environments in which they are imbedded?




The Cultural Psyche


Book Description

As envisaged by Robert A. LeVine many years ago, the human development indicators have improved in many societies as income, healthcare and educational opportunities have been enlarged. Global transformations have led to significant decline in extreme poverty and an increase in working class and middle class families around the world in the emerging economies throughout Africa and Asia. As the technological and global influences continue to challenge the dominant narrative in academic psychology, conflated with WEIRD data assumptions, interdisciplinary research will continue to increase in value and scope, where LeVine’s classical approach in psychological anthropology, combined with psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, demography, language or area research and population studies, offers a path forward. The essays collected here in addition to honoring LeVine’s work, hold out the promise of a real convergence between psychology and anthropology or the development of a psychosocial science -- a confluence between positivism and relativism, empiricism and ethnography, and social sciences and human sciences. The scientific search for universal laws and the ever expanding search for cultural meanings in the diverse communities around the world must continue simultaneously and in conjunction with the transnational or global challenges we face today. Hybridity fostered by interdisciplinary researchers has stood the test of time as the social sciences have gradually outgrown the monolithic ways of looking at the world. The project of a psychosocial science represented by the work of Robert A. LeVine at the intersection of psychology, anthropology, demography, child development and psychoanalysis maps out some of the challenges of a hybrid discipline. Hybridity impacts not only the humanities and social sciences, but physical sciences in genetics and genomics, or applied disciplines like biotechnology and life sciences. Thus, it is important that we not lose sight of LeVine’s spirit of interdisciplinary research. Advocates for universalism, the psychologists or behavioral scientists pursuing universal laws of human nature, must collaborate with the growing number of relativistic scientists – anthropologists, sociologists, or cultural studies experts -- searching for local meanings in small-scale village communities. There will be a confluence of social and human sciences, or what C.P. Snow, the English literary critic called the ‘two cultures’ of the scientific revolution – the sciences and humanities. Praise for The Cultural Psyche "This edited collection by Dinesh Sharma of his mentor Robert LeVine's papers is uniquely positioned between psychology, anthropology and human development. As one surveys its wide-ranging and fascinating papers, one not only comes to understand the principal lines of work carried out over a half century by a remarkable scholar. At the same time, one gains a sense of the history of these lines of work, by a person who has lived through it, reflected on it, and contributed significantly to its advances. This exceptionally valuable volume not only surveys child and human development in depth and across cultures; it also points out ways in which these lines of work ought to be pursued in the years to come." Howard E. Gardner Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Human Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA "This book offers an overview of the wide-ranging contributions of one of the giants of thinking about human development, parenting, and culture of the last 50 years. ...By bringing together a large body of Bob’s writings, some of them entirely new, this volume represents only one important dimension of LeVine’s enormous influence on the thinking of today’s scholars, but in addition it should be noted how much his scholarship has shaped the work and the thinking of his many students and collaborators in ways that will persist through several academic generations." Catherine E. Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA




The Culture and Psychology Reader


Book Description

A collection of readings relevant to the development of an intercultural psychology which takes into account the different circumstances, needs, values, constructions of reality, and worldviews and belief systems that significantly shape the experience and behavior of cultural groups. The 34 papers and introductory essay are arranged in four parts: the politics of difference; development, adaption, and the acquisition of culture; self and other in cultural context; and diagnostic assessment, treatment, and cultural bias. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche


Book Description

Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and marketization have led to startling social changes in reform-era China. Mindful of the many forms of social theory that relate modernity to individualism, this volume addresses social and cultural change through the lens of psychological anthropology.




Cultural Psychology as Basic Science


Book Description

This book provides an overview and discussion of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (CPSD) as a general developmental science. It discusses the challenging interplay between the sophisticated abstract concept of a holistic-dynamic understanding of the psyche and the concrete human experience. Chapters begin by framing the specific topics discussed in the book and elaborating on the border “zone” in between individual and collective-societal meanings. Subsequent chapters and a final conclusion discuss CPSC as an abstractive conceptual enterprise. The book is divided into sections, each beginning with a chapter written by Jaan Valsiner. The individual sections focus on (I) the nature of psyche as a semiotic constructive process; (II) the primacy of affect as semiotic constructive processes, highlighting the role of the sublime as a border between mundane and aesthetic experience; and (III) the ambivalent core of the human mind, marked by the constructive and destructive semiosis for encountering the sublime as locus of novelty emergence. Cultural Psychology as Basic Science will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and professors in the fields of psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and research branches of the social sciences.




Culture in Psychology


Book Description

Presents work from within the developing framework of cultural psychology. Three sections explore the meanings of social categories, the interaction between written and visual representations and the conscious & unconscious meanings of cultural forms




Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Winner of the 2023 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize! Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis traces the emergence of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and demonstrates how the radical, cross-disciplinary dialogues that form its foundation are relevant to present-day social and cultural challenges. Psychoanalysts today are grappling with how to address a host of societal and political crises. In the 1930s, a similar set of crises led a group of progressive practitioners and scholars to engage in a radical, cross-disciplinary dialogue that became the foundation for Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. Pioneering psychoanalysts created a form of thought and practice that viewed human suffering through the wider lens of society and culture and provided a means to address the pervasive issues of racism, sexuality and politics in human experience. With contributions from leading psychoanalysts and scholars, and by making use of original sources, this book evidences the significance of this approach to understanding marginalisation today. Written in an open and accessible fashion, Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis demonstrates the importance of the early interpersonal-cultural school for the present moment. The book will appeal to a broad audience in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the history of medicine, and social and cultural theory.




Agency, Culture, and Human Personhood


Book Description

Agency, Culture and Human Personhood uses feminist theories, process and liberation theologies, psychodynamics and the problem of intimate partner violence to develop a pastoral theology of human agency. The turn to cultural context for understanding what makes human beings who they are and do the things they do, raises significant questions about human agency. To what extent is agency, the human capacity to act, self-determined, and to what extent is it determined by external factors? If we conceive of persons with too little agency we negate the possibility for change but too much agency negates the necessity for resistance movements. Hoeft argues that agency arises ambiguously from and is constituted of culture. She suggests that such a conception of agency enables the church to foster in victims, perpetrators, and congregations more resistance to violence and proposes practices of ministry that can do just that. The book will challenge deeply ingrained notions of personal responsibility and one's capacity to choose change, yet offers concrete proposals for a creating a less violent world.