Cultural Psychology as Basic Science

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.

• Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (CPSD)
• human semiosis
• from experiencing towards abstraction
• Aesthetics
• Sign construction and destruction
• Creativity and Innovation
• Arts and performance
• School transition
• African Culture
• Ambivalence and Adoption
• Borders
• Psyche

• LabCCom, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

  Maria C .D. P. Lyra

• Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

  Marina Assis Pinheiro

Maria C.D.P. Lyra is a Professor of Psychology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She is interested in the process of human cultural development, the dynamic features through which human beings faces change and stability throughout their lives. She received her M. A. at Cornell University, U.S.A. and her Ph.D. at São Paulo University, Brazil. She coordinates a research laboratory – LabCCom – dedicated to the study of the process of emergence and development of the subject (self) in and through communication, concentrating on its microgenetic transformations embedded in sociocultural milieu. Culture and sign dynamics are particular relevant to explore diverse themes through reconstructive memory and imagination highlighting the process of internalization/externalization. She co- edited, “Determinism and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Science” (Lawrence Welbaum, 1997), “Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences” (Springer, 2009), “Challenges and Strategies for Studying Human Development in Cultural Contexts” (Firera & Liuzzo Publishing, 2009), and presently “Imagining the Past, Constructing the Future” with Brady Wagoner and Alicia Barreiro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018/19).

Marina Assis Pinheiro is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). She coordinates the research group Psychology of Creative Processes. She is especially interested in the following subjects: creativity and imagination, art and psychology, language and subjectivity, culture and singularity.

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