Introduction
When one is a developmental psychologist, how is it possible to study a phenomenon as complex as the historical transformation of an island together with the experience of its inhabitants? How can we both try to understand the history of the division of Cyprus and at the same time how it affects the everyday lives of people? And how, then, can we conceive that these persons whose lives are deeply shaped by the conflict may imagine new possible futures?
To address such difficult questions, Charis Psaltis proposes a research program, or rather a theoretical approach, that he refers to as genetic social psychology. In his words, ‘It is the grasp of the totality of an object of study through an investigation of its development through time’ (see Part I of this volume). The core question raised by such an approach is: How to conceptualise a complex phenomenon, made of components of different sorts (institution, ideologies, walls, people), that obey different forms of processes and yet interact? Various meta-theories have proposed ways to conceptualise complex systems in psychology, based on various ontologies and epistemologies (Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner, Moen, Elder and Luscher1995; Doise & Valentim, Reference Doise, Valentim and Wright2015; Engeström & Sannino, Reference Engeström and Sannino2010; L. B. Smith & Thelen, Reference Smith and Thelen2003). One criterion for the choice of such models is how well they respect the requirements of the type of explanation to be given to a phenomenon under study. Here, Psaltis wants to address development (of the child, the person, intergroup dynamics, the country) and how these various actors conceive the others – both in terms of cognitive understanding and meaning-making. This thus requires a model that captures the temporality – the historicity, or the genesis of the phenomena at hand – and its complexity at different scales (Lemke, Reference Lemke2000). In his project of a genetic social psychology, Psaltis proposes to integrate various strands of psychology along the tripartite concepts of sociogenesis, microgenesis and ontogenesis. He applies it to the case study of Cyprus and its long-standing division. His analysis aims at integrating the sociogenesis of the social representations of the out-group – Greek Cypriots vs Turkish Cypriots, the microgenesis of intergroup contacts and the ontogenetic narrative of his own biographical trajectory
In this chapter, I first propose to retrace three conceptual variations of the tripartite model, and I highlight conceptual ambiguities they maintain around the issues of affects, and their model of the subject. Second, drawing on these two points, I emphasise the role of affects in the case study reported by Psaltis, and I argue that it needs an adequate model of the person. Third, as an opening, I propose to engage a dialogue with sociocultural psychological approaches; a dialogue across case studies may bring us to develop a more integrative understanding of how humans develop in a changing world.
Articulating Sociogenesis, Microgenesis and Ontogenesis: A Triple Genealogy of Concepts
For his project of a genetic social psychology, Psaltis draws on the work of Gerard Duveen, who precisely devised a simple system to address the genesis of social representations in people, in interactions and in the social world with the notions of sociogenesis, microgenesis and ontogenesis. This tripartite concept has a great heuristic power, but it also has some limits. Looking closer at their genealogy, it appears that similar conceptualisation came to be in the 1990s, but with different roots. Although they partially overlap, they also differ – and interestingly, it is in their divergences that lay the weaker points of the proposal.
A First Genealogy of a Tripartite Concept
As carefully retraced by Psaltis (Part I in this volume), in the early 1990s, Duveen proposed to articulate the contributions of social psychology, especially Serge Moscovici’s social representations (Moscovici, Reference Moscovici and Duveen2000, Reference Moscovici and Duveen2008), and of developmental psychology in the double lineage of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. He defined the project of a ‘genetic social psychology’ by which he meant that both cognitive schemes à la Piaget and social representations could be seen as structures ‘as a particular moment in development’: ‘a structure is the relative enduring organisation of a function, while the realisation of a function implies its organisation in a structure’ (Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Lloyd and Duveen1990, p. 5). Looking at the genesis of these structures, Duveen and Lloyd identified
Sociogenesis, which concerns the construction and transformation of social groups about specific objects, ontogenesis, which concerns the development of individuals in relation to social representations, and microgenesis, which concerns the evocation of social representations in social interactions.
In this tripartite analysis, the authors focus on the construction of social representations. Sociogenesis demands a diachronic analysis, they underline, to examine how diverse groups meet social representations and transform them, and how these evolve historically. In ontogenesis, the authors propose to examine how a child constructs a given representations, or how people meet them as part of certain groups; it is about ‘how social representations become psychologically active for individuals’ (Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Lloyd and Duveen1990, p. 7), and how these participate to the construction of social identities. Finally, ‘there is a genetic process in all social interaction in which particular social identities and the social representations on which they are based are elaborated and negotiated’ (Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Lloyd and Duveen1990, p. 8); this is microgenesis, and it may involve conflicts of perspectives, new coordination and occurs through language.
For Duveen and his colleagues, the three forms of genesis are always related. Note that if some of their examples are about social representations – for instance, how a child gets to consider gender – other transformations concern knowledge in general. For instance, they suggest:
Let us assume that we are dealing with an Einstein or Freud proposing a radical new interpretation of the human situation or human experience. Through various forms of social interaction (publications or lectures) the scientist tries to communicate his theory to colleagues. The communication will have been successful to the extent that other scientists will have understood the concepts proposed and also accepted that these concepts are well founded and not in error. The outcome will be ontogenetic transformations in the representations held by these scientists as individuals, as well as sociogenetic transformation in the representations held by the scientific community as a social group.
Finally, they suggest that ‘microgenesis constitutes a motor, as it were, for the genetic transformation of social representations’ (Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Lloyd and Duveen1990, p. 9), an idea that has then been taken on by others (Duveen & de Rosa, Reference Duveen and de Rosa1992; Gillespie & Cornish, Reference Gillespie and Cornish2010; Kadianaki & Gillespie, Reference Kadianaki and Gillespie2015).
Thus, if the tripartite concepts proposed by Duveen were meant to encompass the development of knowledge in the child, à la Piaget, and of social knowledge, as in Moscovici, it could potentially include any form of formal or informal knowledge, scientific or social – as long as it can somehow be described in terms of a structure, or at least of a form of system, held by a group, unfolding in an interaction or organising a person’s thought.
Duveen’s tripartite organisation has been inspirational; it has become a methodological standard in the studies of social representations (Flick et al., Reference Flick, Foster, Caillaud, Andreouli, Gaskell, Sammut and Valsiner2015) and a theoretical guidance in social and cultural psychology (Gillespie & Cornish, Reference Gillespie and Cornish2010; Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun, Cornish, Gillespie, Aveling, Wagner, Sugiman and Gergen2008).
An Alternative Genealogy of a Tripartite Concept
The research of a complex analysis of developmental process was of course also conducted by others. Before Duveen’s proposal, it was the case of Lev Vygotsky, who was aiming at combining an analysis of historical development and ontogeny. By ontogeny, a term used many times in his Notebooks (Zavershneva & Van der Veer, Reference Zavershneva and Van der Veer2018), Vygotsky meant both the development of specific functions and the development of the child, as the study of ontogeny meant ‘the problem of the child’s thinking; the problem of instruction and development’ (Vygotsky, 1932, in Zavershneva & Van der Veer, Reference Zavershneva and Van der Veer2018, p. 279). According to Vygotsky, ontogeny is related to ‘the development of ideology’ (Vygotsky, 1929, in Zavershneva & Van der Veer, Reference Zavershneva and Van der Veer2018, p. 122); in that sense, it seems closer to what Duveen would call sociogenesis.
In their long-standing analysis of Vygotsky’s contributions (Valsiner & Van der Veer, Reference Valsiner and Van der Veer2000; Van der Veer & Valsiner, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1988, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1993, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1994), Jaan Valsiner and René Van der Veer mention the three forms of processes also in the early 1990s. Ontogenesis – a term used by Vygotsky – thus designates the development of the child via the mastery of sign systems inherited from previous generations – that is, culture (Van der Veer & Valsiner, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1993). The study of ontogenesis is linked to actual occurrences of problem solving or interactions. Thus ‘Vygotsky’s consistent emphasis on taking a developmental perspective of psychological phenomena, be they those of child development (ontogenesis) or adults’ and apes’ problem-solving (microgenesis), is an approach well worth continuing today’ (Van der Veer & Valsiner, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1993, p. 398). Hence, Van der Veer and Valsiner connect ontogeny to microgenesis, but it is not clear whether the latter term exists in Vygotsky (as indicated by Psaltis, the term can be found in Werner & Kaplan [Reference Werner and Kaplan1963] and others).
Finally, historical or ‘ideological’ development itself is not called sociogenesis in Vygotsky. According to Van der Veer and Valsiner, sociogenesis designates in his work what has often been called the first law of social development, that ‘higher psychological functions emerge first in the collective behavior of the child, in the form of cooperation with others, and only subsequently become internalized as the child’s internal functions’ (Van der Veer & Valsiner, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1993, p. 317) – an idea they trace back to the work of Mark Baldwin and Pierre Janet (Van der Veer & Valsiner, Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1988):
We now are in the position to summarize Vygotsky’s concept of sociogenesis. All higher psychological processes (thinking, volition) rest on the application of social means to the self. These means are mastered in a social relationship between two people (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986, p. 53)Footnote 1 and afterward will become internalized by the individual child. They were first used to influence others and afterward to influence the self. Words are by far the most powerful social means. “Sociogenesis is the key to higher behavior”
Hence, in this reading of Vygotsky, sociogenesis has a very different meaning than in Duveen’s integration of Moscovici and Piaget. Of course, not reading the Russian original, it is difficult to know if Vygotsky was actually using the term ‘sociogenesis’ or a term that has been thus translated later.
A Third Origin of the Tripartite Concept
Interestingly, there is a third line of tripartite concepts, which are rarely brought in the discussions in social and cultural psychology. It is the one pursued by Geoffrey Saxe, a developmental psychologist that studies mathematical cognition in diverse countries and within contrasting cultural systems. His work, initially anchored in Piagetian scholarship, was developed in dialogue with North American cultural psychology and their early reading of Vygotsky (Cole, Reference Cole1996; Scribner & Cole, Reference Scribner and Cole1986; Wertsch, Reference Wertsch1998). In his obituary to Piaget, Saxe emphasised the author’s double interests in sociogenetic processes, as sociohistorical development of ideas, and ontogenesis (Saxe, Reference Saxe1983).Footnote 2 Although he had long studied children’s mathematics (Saxe, Reference Saxe1981, Reference Saxe and Brainerd1982), he started to present his work along three levels of genesis only in the late 1990s, where he presented his approach as developmental as follows:
A core assumption is that novel cognitive developments emerge in individuals’ efforts to structure and accomplish goals in practices. The focus is on three levels of analysis, each of which concerns the interplay between cultural forms, such as number systems, and cognitive functions, the purposes for which forms are used as individual structure and accomplish practice-linked goals. The analyses concern processes of (1) microgenesis, or cognitive changes that occur as individuals transform cultural forms into cognitive means for representing and accomplishing goals in practices; (2) ontogenesis, or shifting relations between individuals’ uses of particular forms and functions in practices as they grow older; and (3) sociogenesis, or changes that occur in cultural forms as individuals’ representational and strategic accomplishments become valued by other members of a community and spread to serve variant functions in individuals’ practice-related goals.
Here, the tripartite concept is applied to functions, recreated by individuals in culture, thus transforming that cultural environment. Microgenesis is used in reference to Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986) and Werner and Kaplan (Reference Werner and Kaplan1963) ‘to refer to a process by which forms – with the cognitive functions they afford – are transformed into means for accomplishing emerging goals in the activity’ (Saxe, Reference Saxe2012, p. 19 n. 11). Sociogenesis applies to the transformation of a skill or an operation; it ‘involves the microgenetic activities of multiple sites that, collectively, constitute a process in which representational forms and functions and reproduced and altered in a community over time’ (Saxe, Reference Saxe2012, p. 29). Sociogenesis is thus understood as a form of diachronically and synchronically distributed activity, also defined as ‘the reproduction and alteration of collective forms of representation in community networks through historical time’ (Saxe, Reference Saxe2015, pp. 477–478).
Hence, in his own synthesis of the Piagetian tradition and Vygotskian-inspired cultural psychology, Saxe comes to a proposition very close to that of Duveen; as neither of the two authors quotes the other (to my knowledge), it is impossible to know if they were aware of each other’s work.
On Three Possible Confusions
These three lines of readings of the complex social and cultural development of the person and their minds have many overlaps, among which are a fundamental developmental take and a sense that human psyche and knowledge can only be understood as a social process, in time. However, these three lines of thinking have also used some notions with partly or fully conflicting meanings, which is important to underline here. I will highlight three possible confusions, some more important than others, and with different implications.
First, ontogenesis seems to designate at times the development of the child, and at other times the development of a specific function, or of a form of knowledge. Eventually, what should be studied: the genesis of social representations (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017), of cognitive function or perations, or of social knowledge, identities, and scientific knowledge? These slight divergences are not a deep problem; they relate to the long-standing question of ‘what it is that develops’ (Perret-Clermont, Reference Perret-Clermont1993). They also demand a reflection on the types of knowledge that are considered socially and culturally cultivated, and on how these are differentiated and categorised (Zittoun, Reference Zittoun2022, Reference Zittoun2023). And there, for instance, one may wonder why scientific knowledge and social representations are always emphasised while ignoring other modes of more literary, artistic or affective knowledge. It is important to underline that these modes of knowledge were at the heart of the Vygotskian enterprise (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1931, Reference Vygotsky1971, Reference Vygotsky2004; Zittoun & Stenner, Reference Zittoun and Stenner2021); they are still only rarely addressed in this line of research (but see Sánchez et al., Reference Sánchez, Haye and Sebastián2022). Here, the knowledge Psaltis addresses is of a different kind; it is historical knowledge, anchored also in daily narratives and fictions. Although history can be constituted as formal, secondarised knowledge (Rochex, Reference Rochex1998), it does not obey the logic of mathematical sciences. This will need to be further examined.
Second, if this first concept of ontogeny applies not to skills or knowledge but to a person, then who is the subject of psychology? As it is well documented, Jean Piaget turned to the study of the ‘epistemic child’, which implies that his studies considered interpersonal variations and idiosyncrasies – even of his own children – as negligible (Morgado, Reference Morgado, Quelhas and Pereira1998). To this, various authors have tried to oppose a socio-psychological child (Psaltis, Reference Psaltis2011), a clinical child (de Ribaupierre, Reference de Ribaupierre1976) or a more global subject (Inhelder & de Caprona, Reference Inhelder and de Caprona1997). In contrast, Vygotsky was clearly leaning in favour of a psychology of the person as a whole. He thus proposed in 1927, ‘Psychology is the science of mental life. But what is mental life? The answer is psychology as a whole’ (Zavershneva & Van der Veer, Reference Zavershneva and Van der Veer2018, p. 109). He would come back to this point as he was further defining ‘Psychology as the science of mental life’ around 1933:
Life not in the biological sense, but in the sense of a biography, a life description. After all, it is not breathing and blood circulation that form the topic of a biography, of one’s existence, of a drama, of a novel, but the events of a human life, i.e., the problem of the psychologie concrète comes first.
This is an attempt that seems to be worth pursuing (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2020; Zittoun, Reference Zittoun2019) and to which I will also return.
The third confusion is the most problematic. Sociogenesis at times designates the development of the competence of the person via social mediation, as read by Valsiner and van der Veer (Reference Van der Veer and Valsiner1993), or the development of knowledge or competences across persons in a given society (Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Lloyd and Duveen1990; Saxe, Reference Saxe2012, Reference Saxe2015), a confusion identified and discussed by Duveen (Reference Duveen1996), or the historical development of a society as a whole (Psaltis, Part I in this volume). Clearly the same term is being used here to designate different phenomena. I believe Duveen’s, Saxe’s, and Psaltis’s views are compatible as they apply to collective transformation, and so I will align with their positions and will reserve sociogenesis to speak about the development of the social world.
Hence, this first exploration of the concepts constituting the project of a genetic social psychology brought us to clarify one use of the notion of sociogenesis, and to highlight two under-theorised issues: the role of affects in knowledge; and definition of the person, or the subject of such a psychology. Going deeper into Psaltis’s case study of Cyprus, I propose to highlight their importance.
Affects and the Person in Complex Case Studies
Psaltis proposes to apply the tripartite genetic reading to Cyprus: at the sociogenetic level, he retraces the history of the division of Cyprus in a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot part, retracing the rupturing events in 1963–1964, leading to the war of 1974 (a ‘historical trauma’), with the recent opening of checkpoints 2003, until the present situation. With it, he shows the development of two conflicting social representations of the island, and of the other group (via historical consciousness, narratives, remembering, projects, etc.). He finally shows the progressive transformation of an ‘ethical (imaginative) horizon’ associated to the change of leadership, the implementation of new educational programs (2008), the initiatives toward bicommunal committees, etc. At a microgenetic level, he recalls the intergroup reconciliation process that took place through intergroup contact or reconciliation history teaching. He thus shows the difference between superficial compliance to the other’s perspective and the long-term transformation of representations. Finally, at the ontogenetic level, he presents his autobiographical trajectory and the development of his ideas, from his early experiences as a child of a displaced family to the progressive transformation of his representation of the past and the other groups, thanks to interpersonal relations, dialogues and the use of various knowledge as resources, before he himself took an active role in an initiative towards a reconciliation between the two communities.
The overall analysis is courageous and inspiring and demonstrates the relevance of the analytical proposition. Given his theoretical background, Psaltis sees knowledge as way to overcome the conflict: reconciliation should be achieved through an acknowledgement of historical facts, as well as the other group’s perspectives. It should thus be a work on the cognitive understanding of history, as a culturally constructed body of knowledge, and a reduction of social representations that polarise the relation to the out-group.
The history retraced by Psaltis is a dramatic one; it is that of a close war on an island, translated into forced mobility, people losing their houses and properties, confrontation between armed forces and intergroup tensions. Reading both children testimonies and Psaltis’s autobiographic narratives, one cannot help but notice the strong impact these experiences had on families – on the generation that experienced the war and expropriation, and on their children that grew up with the sense of loss. It is of course not a surprise that these experiences are associated with negative social representations of the out-group; and it is of course a fundamental work undertaken by Psaltis and his colleagues to bring people to be able to reconstruct these representations in the hope of a reconciliation. In addition, the situations brought to the fore by Psaltis strike me for their strong emotional and embodied aspects; yet these aspects are absent of his theoretical exploration. Interestingly, this unquestioned aspect also corresponds to the two questions we raised: the role of affects and the model of the person that can be integrated in a tripartite reading of development. In what remains of this chapter, I will quickly address them; I will argue that a full sociocultural psychology, or social genetic theory, ought to address them.
Affects in Complex Case Studies
First, let us consider affects. People experiencing situations, interpersonal encounters, and social and political discourses are not only cognitively treating the information; they actively make sense of the situations they meet, the conduct of people they interact with, and the discourses they are confronted by. Primarily these encounters are always and also affective: we ‘feel into’ situations as much, or perhaps more, than we grasp them (Fonagy et al., Reference Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist and Target2005; Valsiner, Reference Valsiner2020). Importantly, potentially affective meanings circulate at all levels – socio-, micro- and ontogenetic. Think, nowadays, at the impact of news about the pandemic situation, or the war in Ukraine; they provoke affects in the audience, which are discussed and lead to actions. The affective nature of the semiosphere has recently been demonstrated by various authors in cultural psychology (Neuman, Reference Neuman2014; Neuman et al., Reference Neuman, Hames and Cohen2017; Salvatore et al., Reference Salvatore, De Luca Picione, Bochicchio, Mannino, Langher, Pergola, Velotti and Venuleo2021; Valsiner, Reference Valsiner2019, Reference Valsiner2020). The affectivisation of the semiosphere is not detached from the affective life of people. Single persons have emotionally loaded experiences, and these may find echoes in the experiences of other persons; in addition, social discourses may feed into these affective experiences, as well as be nourished by them (Zittoun, Reference Zittoun1996). Affects circulate at onto-, micro- and sociogenetic levels and among them.
Let us go back to some of the elements mentioned by Psaltis. At the ontogenetic level, he mentions in his autobiographical narrative that he was aged one year when the 1974 war took place, and his Greek Cypriot family had to abandon their house and properties. He may not remember that forced movement, yet he remembers his father’s anxiety when listening to the radio, and his visits to relatives in a zone patrolled by soldiers:
I was terrified of the Turkish soldier who patrolled there and resided in one small house, that belonged to my aunt, with the UN soldier. I remember, years later, to have repeating nightmares until my early adulthood: me being chased by a Turkish soldier in that strip of land and/or the Turkish army moving further forward to kill the whole family and myself.
Experiences of terror for a child – that is, overwhelming experiences of fear that a child cannot contain or elaborate – are traumatic and likely to appear as repetitive dreams (Abraham & Torok, Reference Abraham, Torok and Rand1972; Kaës, Reference Kaës1993; Tisseron, Reference Tisseron1995). In a family, parents have experienced the same events but with their own perspective, life history and capacities to make sense of them, and possibly contain them. These experiences – intense fear oriented towards a soldier of the out-group – can also be amplified in everyday encounters; Psaltis thus reports the teacher’s hateful discourse against the Turkish Cypriots, as they met his early life experiences. These can also be amplified by social discourses, historical narratives and the media – and here note that Psaltis speaks of a ‘cultural trauma’. Hence, the children Psaltis interviews 30 years later still report some aspects of this affective load, which, we can hypothesise, was transmitted in families and the semiosphere. For example,
My homeland was enslaved by the Turks because Turks came and took away from us our prettiest cities, we made a lot of war and thus we were enslaved. The war, when the Turks came, it was horrific because they took our mother from her house and forced her to leave Morfou with only the clothes she wore.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore this systematically; what I wish to underline is the core role of affective dynamics in human development. Psaltis identifies them as part of the attitude toward the out-group in terms of prejudice vs positive attitude, distrust vs trust or lack of empathy vs empathy. In contrast, I wish to say that these are more than attitudes or valences of social representations; they are associated with vital memories (Brown & Reavey, Reference Brown and Reavey2015), are structuring for the person, infuse the people’s encounters with others and can be amplified, guided or constrained by social discourses. As an ontogenetic process, it takes a lot of time to unpack, deploy, elaborate and transform such experiences, as Psaltis himself retraces (also see Zittoun, Reference Zittoun, Wagoner, Brescó de Luna and Zadeh2020). The implication of this is, I believe, that complex case studies built at three levels need to account for these affects and their circulation, as they play a pivotal role not only in people’s lives but in interpersonal encounters, intergroup dynamics and social transformation – and backwards, in all dialogical possible directions.
The Person in Complex Case Studies
If affects have to be taken seriously in complex case studies analysed from a social genetic or sociocultural perspective, then one has to hold a consistent theory of the person. If the subject of psychology is a purely epistemic or cognisant one, it is impossible to account for these affective dynamics, and the fact that they play a key role in actual thinking and representing. Vygotsky’s plea for a science of the living person with their biography, evoked earlier in this chapter, is more convincing here. Let us again turn to the case described by Psaltis. In Cyprus, anyone arriving on the island from the airport and driving to Nicosia, the capital, can see a beautiful landscape unfolding, with the city and the forest and hills beyond. Only on the hill, a giant Turkish flag has been embedded in the landscape; one can thus immediately, quasi-physically experience the national conflict. Nicosia, an old and majestic city, is cut in two by a wall, and one can cross to the other side only by passing through a military-guarded checkpoint and crossing a buffer zone patrolled by UN soldiers. The buffer zone, and so probably the ‘ghost towns’ mentioned by Psaltis, is a disquieting experience for anyone coming from a European region at peace.Footnote 3 Living in a divided city and island can thus be physically experienced in one’s daily life. In other words, the subject of a psychology that aims to account for the interplay between socio-, micro- and ontogenetic process needs to be a person with an embodied mind, who feels, acts, remembers, imagines as well as makes sense and reasons. Hence, when Psaltis recalls that ‘there is no place in genetic social psychology for individuation’ (see Part I in this volume), I would respond: the genetic social psychology can only account for human development if it accounts for both the development of knowledge and the development of person who builds, experiences, feels and lives through that knowledge.
Opening: Integrative Developmental Psychologies
Genetic social psychology is a scientific project which positions itself in a genealogy of approaches articulating studies of cognitive development with social dynamics (Carugati & Perret-Clermont, Reference Carugati and Perret-Clermont2015; Duveen, Reference Duveen, Smith, Bockrell and Tomlinson1997, Reference Duveen1998; Perret-Clermont, Carugati, et al., Reference Perret-Clermont, Carugati, Oates, Oates and Grayson2004; Perret-Clermont, Pontecorvo, et al., Reference Perret-Clermont, Carugati, Oates, Oates and Grayson2004; Perret-Clermont, Reference Perret-Clermont, Psaltis, Gillespie and Perret-Clermont2015; Psaltis et al., Reference Psaltis, Gillespie, Perret-Clermont, Psaltis, Gillespie and Perret-Clermont2015). Rooted in the same sources, sociocultural developmental psychology has, over the past 20 years, addressed a comparable question: How does the person develop in their changing sociocultural environment (Valsiner, Reference Valsiner2021; Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun, Duveen, Gillespie, Ivinson and Psaltis2003; Zittoun & Gillespie, Reference Zittoun, Gillespie, Bamberg, Demuth and Watzlawik2022)? Sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse has many similarities with the project of genetic social psychology; foremost, it also analyses developmental dynamics at the scale of socio-, micro- and ontogenesis (Brinkmann & Kofod, Reference Brinkmann and Kofod2017; Gillespie, Reference Gillespie2021; Power et al., Reference Power, Zittoun, Akkerman, Wagoner, Cabra, Cornish, Hawlina, Heasman, Mahendran, Psaltis, Rajala, Veale and Gillespie2023; Valsiner, Reference Valsiner2021; Wagoner, Reference Wagoner2017; Zittoun, Reference Zittoun2016; Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun, Valsiner, Vedeler, Salgado, Gonçalves and Ferring2013). In contrast to genetic social psychology, though, it emphasises semiotic dynamics, the circulation of signs, at all levels of individual and collective experiences, rather than simply cognition; doing so, it opens the space for the primacy of affects in human experience, as well as for a diversity of modes if sense-making and imagining (Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun, Valsiner, Vedeler, Salgado, Gonçalves and Ferring2013). However, comparably to genetic social psychology, sociocultural psychology has recently privileged case studies to progress both empirically and theoretically (Demuth, Reference Demuth2018; Molenaar & Valsiner, Reference Molenaar, Valsiner, Salvatore, Valsiner, Strout-Yagodzynski and Clegg2008; Salvatore & Valsiner, Reference Salvatore and Valsiner2010).
In our own work, like Psaltis, we tried to apply such understanding at the scale of case studies, with regional case studies – studies at the scale of a hill, an island or a canton (for instance, Pedersen, Reference Pedersen2022; Zittoun, Reference Zittoun2019; Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun2022). We consider in sociogenesis any historical or sociological transformations that enable us to understand the constitution of the phenomena we study and that guide people’s experiences. In microgenesis, we analyse situated activities, interactions, negotiations, meaning-making occurrences, etc. And through ontogenesis, we reconstruct the development of the person, usually bringing to the fore the transformations of their understanding or activities through time – sense-making, imagination, relationship to the past, etc. In order to account for the circulation of meaning and power across these temporal scales, we proposed a dialogical framing (Cornish, Reference Cornish2020; Marková, Reference Marková2017; Marková et al., Reference Marková, Zadeh and Zittoun2020). For instance, we currently work on a regional, dialogical case study of the transformation of the landscape of care at the scale of a Swiss canton. We thus study the sociogenesis of a new policy regarding housing modes for older persons, the microgenetic negotiations as people inhabit their homes, explore their environment or are engaged in shared activities in daily lives or in institutions, and, more longitudinally, the ontogenetic transformation of the person (Cabra & Zittoun, Reference Cabra and Zittoun2022; Grossen et al., Reference Grossen, Gfeller, Cabra and Zittoun2022; Zittoun et al., Reference Zittoun, Cabra, Gfeller, Grossen, Iannaccone, Cattaruzza and Schwab2024). Working on the experience of older persons in a highly politicised debate, affects become central – both at the collective and the individual level; and when we study the trajectories of older person, we must account for the whole complexity of their embodied, affective and biographical experience. We are thus faced with the same challenges as Psaltis: to account for affects and the person from an integrative perspective.
To conclude with an opening, then, I believe that complex, integrative approaches to developmental psychology are necessary to understand lives in complex and changing societies. In that sense, complex endeavours such as genetic social psychology, or sociocultural psychology, will best progress by engaging in a dialogue, possibly around case studies, and on crucial concepts, for it is reasoning through case studies – that is, theorising in dialogue with the world – that remains one of the most powerful ways to advance our understanding of human development in changing worlds.
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