This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who
view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to
the process of existing - through construction of the human world -
here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work
that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural
psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It
comes as a next step after the "behaviorist turn" that has dominated
psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the
form of "cognitivism", kept psychology away from addressing issues of
specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking
takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of
complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings
construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious
systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter
into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and
literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities
that can be summoned to legitimate one's killing of one's neighbors or
being killed oneself.
The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of
demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the
phenomena of higher psychological functions and then look at how their
lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of
investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with
anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and developmental biology.
Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev
Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson and on traditions of
Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology.
Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to
psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists and
anthropologists alike.
