Persons as dialogical-hermeneutical-relational beings – New circumstances ‘call out’ new responses from us

Publication date: Available online 24 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): John Shotter Shifting from a world of already-made-things to a world of things-continually-in-the-making changes everything. Psychology, like all other sciences, tries to proceed by analysis, by breaking down a living, unique, always developing organic whole into a set of general, already-existing, nameable elements. But as Bakhtin makes clear, in discussing how Dostoevsky portrays the inner dynamics of people worrying over how to act for the best in living their lives, such an itemization of merely observed behavioural characteristics leads to a degrading reification of a person's unfinalizability, of their still-developing nature. Below, I first examine the Cartesianism that still seems present in much of our thinking in social inquiry today. I then turn attention to the primacy of our living movements out in the world and their responsiveness to events occurring around us. While finally turning to the fact that, as living beings, what ‘goes on inside us’, is not so important as ‘what we go on inside of’. Although Dostoevsky portrays this indivisible, flowing reality, in terms of a set of discontinuous fragments —because that is the nature of our experience in everyday life — as hermeneutical-dialogical-relational beings, we have a basic capability of organizing them into unitary wholes which sit in the background to everything we think and do.

Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 24, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research