This book explores how psychoanalysis can enrich and complement
sociocultural psychology. It presents theoretical integrations of
psychoanalytical notions in the sociocultural framework, analyzes the
historical similarities, if not intricacies, of the two fields, and
presents papers that have tried to apply an enriched theoretical
framework in developmental and clinical empirical work. The first
section presents editors' theoretical proposition for an integration of
one particular stream of psychoanalysis within sociocultural psychology,
which emphasizes both the dialogical and the semiotic nature of
psychological dynamics. The second section pursues this theoretical
dialogue through a historical perspective. The third section pursues the
implications of this parallel reasoning. It invites researchers that
propose further syntheses between some strands of psychoanalysis and
approaches within social and cultural psychology. The contributions
collected in this section show how sociocultural psychology and
psychoanalysis can complement each other, when it comes to tracing the
emergence of meaning in actual interactive settings. Showing historical
common roots, epistemological similarities, and theoretical
complementarities, this book intends to suggests how the encounter and
reciprocal contamination between cultural psychology and psychoanalysis
could provide innovative theoretical and methodological syntheses.
Through the various contributions three directions of development emerge
as particularly promising for psychological science. Firstly, the
semiotic conceptualization of affects, emerging from several of the
contributors, appears to be a significant step ahead in the
understanding of the dynamics of sense-making. A second promising
direction of development concerns methodology. The reader will find
several invitations to rethink the way of analyzing the phenomena of
sense-making. Finally, the volume highlights how the connection between
theory and practice in psychology is not a mere matter of application.
Rather, the psychological intervention could be - needs to be - a
theoretical object for cultural psychology, as it already is for
psychoanalysis. At the same time, the intervention could be a fertile
domain where a psychological practice endowed with reflexive capability
generates new theoretical constructions.
