Jaan Valsiner
Biographic Data
| ID | 3693367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jaan Valsiner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jaan |
| FAMILY NAME | Valsiner |
| SIGNATURE | VALSINER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Clark University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3276-8343 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 130 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 202 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 116 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 14 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Symbolic Remove in Devotion: Learning With Sudhir Kakar
Sudhir Kakar leaves cultural psychology with the challenge to understand deep psychological complexity within cultural histories. A scrutiny of Kakar’s contributions leads to highlighting the general mechanisms of symbolic remove and its ways of regulating two seemingly opposite human domains—love and violence. These opposite domains are generated through the same semiotic mechanism-- the hyper-generalization process of the symbolic remove result…
Erdleben: Living with Nature
Beginnings of Developmental Science
Painting as Wissenschaft
Letters on Landscape Painting
Nostalgia for Novelty
The Moonlight Doctor: Art and Science of Carl Gustav Carus
Poetry and Music: Translations for the Soul
Friends, Adorations, and Obligations
The Unconscious as a Product of the Nervous System
General Conclusion: Where Science Lives – Landscapes of the Soul
Sketching Nature and Naturphilosophie
The Charms of Dresden
The Calming Quietude of Nature and Its Disturbances
Beyond Certificate Factory: Intellectual Innovation in Systems of Education
Dynamic Semiosis
Towards new horizons: Welcome to the future
Wundt’s logic: Old resource for new ideas
Despite recent scholarship reappraising the complexity of Wilhelm Wundt’s complete works on psychology, contemporary psychology tends to overlook the fundamental epistemological and methodological principles outlined in his less popular writings on logic when engaging in methodological discussions. This article addresses this by situating Wundt’s logic volumes in his oeuvre and demonstrating the continued relevance of his methodological insights …
Experimental Psychology: Ambitions and Possibilities
The Pandemic Atmos-Fear
Psychology has been challenged by its own terminological limitations, in which phenomena of large-scale, field-like kind force us to innovate with our theoretical tools. Phenomena with global impacts – epidemics, pandemics, famines, and the like – remain on the periphery of psychology’s theoretical efforts. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is no different. Like previous pandemics, it reveals the difficulty of dealing with phenomena on a glob…
We are all migrants
Migration is the basis for development—economic, social, and psychological. In this paper I will examine borders on migration that entail the ambivalent relating by the societal context of migration to the act of movement of the people who become migrants, and their counterparts (“counter-migrants”) who do not. My focus on the issue stems from my theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics that can deal with the process of becoming, being,…
Experimental Psychology: Ambitions and Possibilities
Striving for Synthesis in General Psychology: Lessons from India
The importance of the life-long contributions of Professor Sinha is in his search for new perspectives in psychology that would respect Indian cultural history. In that spirit, I will outline themes that are prominent in Indian cultural traditions from which universal science of human psychology could learn. All human beings relate to water and fertility, creating meaningful rituals of handling this valuable commodity. Likewise, it is deeply huma…
Understanding Vygotsky over Three Decades: A Critical Look
Respect for Thought: Jan Smedslund’s Legacy for Psychology
How Does Autodialogue Work? Miracles of Meaning Maintenance and Circumvention Strategies
In contemporary sociocultural studies, the human mind is often claimed to be dialogic. Precise elaborations of models of dialogicality are rare, however. We present a process model of dialogicality that occurs within a person's self-system (autodialogue) in the context of two kinds of tasks: making sense of ordinary happenings and understanding religious miracles. We start from the assumption that the person is involved in an ongoing self- and wo…
Integrating Psychology within the Globalizing World: A Requiem to the Post-Modernist Experiment with Wissenschaft
Cognition, Symbols, and Vygotsky's Developmental Psychology
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The First Six Years: Culture's Adventures in Psychology
The first six years of Culture & Psychologyhave been productive in the creation of an international forum of scholarly interchanges where the notion of 'culture' occurs in a number of different ways. Selected themes that can be productively developed further are analyzed: historicity; dialogical perspectives in cultural psychology; social representing; activity orientations. Attention is directed towards careful reconstruction of methodological r…
On the Social Nature of Human Cognition: An Analysis of the shared intellectual roots of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky
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Three Years Later: Culture in Psychology-Between Social Positioning and Producing New Knowledge
Since the previous editorial analysis (Valsiner, 2001) the journal has continued as an intellectually exciting forum for international and creative scholarship. For further development of the field, it needs to live up to its claim for interdisciplinary synthesis of ideas and support for new research practices that are built on the axioms of the systemic and dynamic units of analysis. Cultural psychology shares the fate of all social sciences to …
A Qualitative Analysis of Vietnamese Adolescent Identity Exploration Within and Outside an Ethnic Enclave
The place for synthesis: Vygotsky’s analysis of affective generalization
Vygotsky was a brilliant literary scholar whose role in psychology borrows substantially from his interests in and fascination with literature and theatre. The central question for Vygotsky’s theory was aesthetic synthesis – the emergence of generalized feelings in human life-experiences. The critical empirical example for the emergence of affective synthesis for Vygotsky was the short story by Ivan Bunin, ‘Legkoe dykhanie’. My task in this artic…
Data as representations: Contextualizing Qualitative and Quantitative Research Strategies
The opposition between "quantitative" and "qualitative" perspectives in contemporary social science is an organizational limitation that directs discussions of the topic away from the main issue - the adequacy of any kind of data in respect to the phenomena they represent. This is particularly complicated if the phenomena are known to include inherent dynamics, are modifiable by the research encounter, or develop towards new states of existence. …
From Clay Feet to New Psychology: Starting the Move
The Saarbrucken Tradition in Cultural Psychology, and Its Legacy
Ambivalence and Its Transformations
Humans are sign-creating and sign-using organisms. Humans use signs to organize their relation to the world, and the purpose of this chapter is to outline how new meanings emerge as the person uses signs. This chapter offers that new meanings emerge as the person attempts to overcome ambivalence. Humans make meaning in the present, but each sign addresses not only what is the case in the here-and-now but also what could be the case in the future.…
Becoming Integrative in Science: Re-building Contemporary Psychology through Interdisciplinary and International Collaboration
Social Consumption of Cannibals
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Varieties of Discursive Experience in Psychology: Culture Understood through the Language Used
Looking Across Cultural Gender Boundaries
Consistency, Praise, and Love: Folk Theories of American Parents
We are all migrants
Migration is the basis for development—economic, social, and psychological. In this paper I will examine borders on migration that entail the ambivalent relating by the societal context of migration to the act of movement of the people who become migrants, and their counterparts (“counter-migrants”) who do not. My focus on the issue stems from my theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics that can deal with the process of becoming, being,…
Consciousness as a Process: From the Loneliness of William James to the Buzzing and Booming Voices of Contemporary Science
The Many Faces of Everyday Life: Some Challenges to the Psychology of Cultural Practice
We address the issue of how cultural psychologies relate to human everyday life-worlds. Everyday life entails the extraordinary within the ordinary, and vice versa- often described as cultural practices. We present the case of an involuntary event-breaking a leg-with all its temporarily debilitating experiences. The person became involved in a series of new activities of meaning construction as a way of reorganizing her life during the recovery p…
Process Structure of Parent‐Child‐Environment Relations and the Prevention of Children's Injuries
This article outlines a theoretical perspective for conceptualizing and undertaking prevention of unintentional injuries in childhood. This structural‐dynamic conceptualization of child‐environment transaction concerns the reasoning and actions of care givers. The process of caregivers' reasoning about prevention of accidents with children consists of their integrating populational and personal knowledge with information about children's current …
The Making of Magic: Cultural Constructions of the Mundane Supernatural
What Is in a Name? Understanding the Implications of Participant Terminology
The fate of the forgotten: Chamberlain’s work reconsidered
Contemplating Self: From India to Contemporary Self-Psychology
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Construction of the zone of proximal development in adult-child joint action: The socialization of meals
This chapter integrates Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development into a field-theoretical conceptual framework based on the axioms of the theory of open systems
Naturalistic research and ecological thinking in the study of child development
Consistency, Praise, and Love: Folk Theories of American Parents
Adults' Assessments of Children's Accident Risks
It was hypothesized that the parents, the child, other people, the environment, and chance are salient causes in adults' causal schemata of accidents in childhood and that their assessments of the likelihood of such accidents in connection with the supervision of children depend on the strength attributed to these causes. In support of the hypothesis, ratings by 72 adult nonparents (undergraduates) of the likelihood that children in different age…
Process Structure of Parent‐Child‐Environment Relations and the Prevention of Children's Injuries
This article outlines a theoretical perspective for conceptualizing and undertaking prevention of unintentional injuries in childhood. This structural‐dynamic conceptualization of child‐environment transaction concerns the reasoning and actions of care givers. The process of caregivers' reasoning about prevention of accidents with children consists of their integrating populational and personal knowledge with information about children's current …
Lev Vygotsky and Pierre Janet: On the origin of the concept of sociogenesis
On the Social Nature of Human Cognition: An Analysis of the shared intellectual roots of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Cognition, Symbols, and Vygotsky's Developmental Psychology
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Construction of the Mental: From the `Cognitive Revolution' to the Study of Development
Developmental theorizing in psychology is shown to be based on axiomatic grounds that are antithetical to those of `the cognitive revolution'. Therefore it is not surprising that cognitivism has had a very limited impact upon our knowledge of developmental processes. Instead, it has had curious `side-effects'-it has kept the investigators' attention away from the processes of development, and has fortified the historically strong emphasis on the …
The Origins of Action: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives
The Proliferation of Action Theories and Their Applications Jaan Valsiner and Louis Oppenheimer Our contemporary psychology becomes satiated by references to "action" and "activity. " Over the recent
Mikhail Basov: An Intellectual Biography
Mikhail Iakovlevich Basov was born on 3 November 1892 in a village near Pskov. After receiving his secondary-school diploma, he moved, in 1909, to St. Petersburg and entered Bekhterev's Psychoneurological Institute in order to study natural sciences. The formative years of Basov as a developmental psychologist were spent at that institute—first, as a student, later, as a research associate. It was in the mid-1920s that Basov moved to other instit…
Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis
This book presents the most comprehensive introduction to the life and ideas of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) yet written. As a key to understanding one of the most potent influences on developmental theories this century, van der Veer and Valsiner explore Vygotsky's ideas in the contexts of Russian psychology and the politics of the interwar years. The authors chart Vygotsky's intellectual development through the course of his life, establishing link…
Homeless in the mind: A case-history of personal life in and out of a close orthodox community
A sociogenetic theoretical framework is applied to Berger, Berger, and Kellner's (1973) concept of cultural homelessness, extending its use beyond the sociological effects of modernity to the psychological development of persons who are closely tied to their collective-cultural contexts. The theory is grounded in the bidirectionality of cultural transmission, and the construction of culture in different cultural members. The construction of inter…
Farewell to TOM: Ben Bradley's Revolutionary Poetics and the Fuzzy World of Development
Bradley's (1993) analysis of `theories of mind' contains the beginning of a serious reconstruction of psychology from a developmental point of view. Nevertheless, such reconstruction efforts may become hostages to social rhetorics themselves, and some possible lines of theoretical construction that may avoid such danger are pointed out (e.g. systematically developmental perspective, explication of the research processes)
Irreversibility of time and the construction of historical developmental psychology
Developmental psychology has failed to emphasize the historical nature of the phenomena of development. Hence it continues to face a major conceptual problem: the time frame of developmental phenomena is irreversible, whereas our accounts of development assume repetitiveness of different kinds of developmental events across places and times. This problem was addressed by Henri Bergson in his philosophy of time and constructive evolution. Bergson'…
Developmental Concepts across Disciplines
Psychobiologists, psychologists, and sociologists often differ markedly in the method and substance of their developmental research. Yet fundamental similarities bridge these orientations in the form of concepts applicable to multiple levels of analysis. Many of these concepts were identified by Gottlieb (1991a), generalizing from research on the interplay between genes and experience in the canalization of behavior: “The principal ideas concern …
Comparisons in Human Development: To Begin a Conversation
Studying Comparisons and Development Comparisons are perhaps the fundamental heuristic tool with which developmentalists generate knowledge. Since the sine qua non of developmental phenomena is the passing of time, developmental knowledge will always involve comparisons across time points. However, given the multiple time frames that often characterize this change, temporal comparisons can be complex. How do patterns of change over ontogenetic ti…
Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context (Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)
This important volume deals with the challenges posed by comparative strategies in human development, challenges that reflect the dynamic and multilevel nature of development. Comparative strategies represent basic heuristic tools for studying the change and stability of both people and their environments. Yet developmentalists make comparisons that focus on the magnitude of differences between groups (based, for example, on age or gender), often…
Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context
This important volume deals with the issue of how to make comparisons in the field of human development. In their comparisons of various social groups, social scientists generally focus on what the differences are, rather than elucidating how and why the groups differ. Comparisons in Human Development examines ways in which different disciplines have treated comparisons and development and provides empirical examples that take a comparative, deve…
An International Journal from Africa
One Hundred Years: A Constructive Jubilee Celebration for Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget
The Personal and the Social: Mead's Theory of the `Generalized Other'
Contemporary sociocultural theories of the development of the self in society need to explain how the social becomes personal and how development can occur in each domain. George Herbert Mead' s concept of the `Generalized Other' gives an account of the social origin of self-consciousness while retaining the transforming function of the personal. Contextualized in Mead's theory of intersubjectivity, the Generalized Other is a special case of role…
Changing Methodologies: A Co-constructivist Study of Goal Orientations in Social Interactions
In psychology the need for methodological innovation along the lines of the co-constructionist paradigm is emphasised. The model of methodology outlined is a cyclical research process in which goal-oriented thinking and interven tional procedures are used by the investigator in interaction with investigated phenomena. Traditional psychology's concern with variables has led to a sepa ration of the different facets of the target phenomena and has n…
The Saarbrucken Tradition in Cultural Psychology, and Its Legacy
Dualisms Displaced: From Crusades to Analytic Distinctions
Commentaries| December 04 1998 Dualisms Displaced:From Crusades to Analytic Distinctions Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Jaan Valsiner Jaan Valsiner Clark University, Worcester, Mass., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (1998) 41 (5-6): 350–354. https://doi.org/10.1159/000022596 Article history Published Online: December 04 1998 Content Tools View…
Psychology (86 works) · Sociology (67 works) · Social Representations and Identity (63 works) · Epistemology (60 works) · Philosophy (44 works) · Social Psychology (42 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (35 works) · Computer Science (34 works) · Social science (29 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (26 works)