A key concern of genetic social psychology is to understand the possibilities for change through different kinds of contact between members of groups in protracted conflicts. This is pursued through an interacting multilayer lens that takes the individual self as a unit, set within a particular intrapersonal, intergroup and societal ideological context. The role of asymmetry is central to the contact hypothesis, yet it is often ignored in determining how each group perceives and understands the other and acts on that contact whether through planned or random meetings that results in positive, negative or ambiguous outcomes. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict stands at the base of the chapter, using empirical findings from a range of settings to discuss the role of intergroup prejudice affecting contact and how this might usefully map onto the processes of microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis of social representations of the conflict. This conflict situation is compared and contrasted with the one described by Psaltis (this volume) to arrive at a general model of intergroup conflict and contact within the framework of genetic social psychology.

This chapter discusses the important but not duly recognised role of values as organising principles of social representations. Social and political psychological theories of values are presented and connected to genetic social psychology. Specific values are related to the basic significant structures presented in Chapter 1 (submission, domination, co-operation) in the context of intergroup conflict. Their role in facilitating change or resisting it is discussed in detail. The role of values is also crucial for the study of sociogenetic change, since the literature relating to cultural evolution and comparative international studies like the European Social Survey (ESS) offers key insights about expected changes in values in historical time related to processes of economic development, urbanisation and religiosity. Given that certain values like conformity regulate part-whole relations and predictably social influence processes of alignment with ingroup norms, theorisation of values can also reveal relationships between the form and content of social representations.

Total loss of consciousness is nowadays mostly framed as a global alteration of brain activity. In antiquity, doctors often alluded to this symptom with compound terms of psuchê or anima, and they understood the body and the soul to be involved - to different extents - in the phenomenon. Consequently, by exploring how they conceived this condition, it is possible not only to better understand their idea of consciousness, but also to get a hint of how the envisaged the relation between body and soul.

In his ambitious project of a genetic social psychology, Charis Psaltis proposes to integrate various strands of psychology around a case study, along the tripartite concepts of sociogenesis, microgenesis and ontogenesis. The case study is that of Cyprus and its long-standing division, and the analysis aims at integrating the sociogenesis of the social representations of the outgroup – 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 variations of the tripartite model, and I highlight conceptual ambiguities they maintain around the issues of affects and their model of the subject. Second, I indicate how sociocultural psychology has developed in parallel to the genetic social psychology proposed, and how both approaches seem to concur on the importance of studying complex case studies. Third, drawing on the two previous 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. I finally conclude than a better integration of the two lines of theorisation may lead us to a richer theory of human development.

Unlike the other presentations, Galen associates both forms of total loss of consciousness, lepipsuchiê and sunkopê, with an affection (whether direct by sympathy) of the heart. Namely he localises the problem in the seat of the spirited part of his tripartite soul. Nevertheless, the loss of pneuma provides a link with the affection of the rational soul, whereby both conditions cause total loss of movement and perceptions. The idea of the soul as a life principle is also present in this author, because although total loss of consciousness is associated with the temporary depletion of pneuma (and finishes when it is replenished), the separation of the soul does cause death.

Post-Hellenistic authors took some Hippocratic ideas and terminology to build their own theories about the different forms of losing consciousness, and about the relationship between body and soul. Also, they presented a clearer distinction between the two forms of total loss of consciousness (to the extent that they described a new disease, where the body was primarily affected but not the soul). Celsus’ description of fainting suggests that his idea of soul was influenced by Epicurean corpuscular theories with a rational and an irrational component. Aretaeus, in his turn, was majorly concerned with the mechanisms that produced fainting, where he included a tangle of ideas that included loss of heat, loss of tension, affection in the blood or in the heart, and sometimes, the separation of the soul. However, his idea of psuchê was rather erratic, and his way of organizing mental capacities was not consistent throughout the treatise.

Galen conceived sleep and wakefulness as a continuum that depended on the mixture of qualities within the ruling part of the puschê (the hêgemonikon) located in the brain. Naturally, in his system whenever pathological sleep occurred the doctor needed to determine if the brain was affected directly or by sympathy (from another organ), and the precise imbalance of qualities that needed to be counteracted by their opposites. His idea of mind was very accurately and hierarchically structured: it resided in the logical part of the soul, located in the brain, and several diseases with impaired consciousness compromised its normal functioning.

This chapter employs Psaltis’s genetic social psychological theory to trace the evolution of my research on youth’s critical understanding of conflict and violence. First, I discuss my research on critical thinking and relate it to an ontogenetic perspective on the cognitive challenges that students face in understanding interpersonal conflicts and social controversies. This is illustrated with an analysis of an ostracism incident in a middle school in the US. I explain the limitations I faced with the cognitive approach, as it could not account for how identities or social asymmetries informed students’ critical thinking. The second section explains how the previous quandary led me to adopt a discursive approach that situated students’ performance in their relational and social contexts. I discuss the similarities between this work and the microgenetic perspective, offering examples from a revised analysis of the ostracism incident and from a case study on an online discussion about racism and police brutality among American high school students. Last, I introduce my current research on the narrative normalization and de-normalization of violence, and apply it to the memory and history of violence in the Spanish Basque Country. I draw parallels with a sociogenetic perspective that focuses on the societal level in which collective narratives are produced, disseminated, disputed, and transformed.

This chapter provides the second case study of the use of singular compositional abduction based on scientific attempts to determine the biological basis of the Hermann grid illusion. First reported by Ludimar Hermann in 1872, the illusion was first explained in terms of local points of simultaneous contrast. In 1961, Gűnter Baumgartner fleshed out the proposal arguing that the illusion might be explained in terms of activity instances of retinal ganglion cell firings. Further, Lothar Spillman performed experiments intended to support this proposal, whereas Jeremy Wolfe, Peter Schiller, and Christina Carvey described experiments meant to challenge it.

The first chapter offers a genealogy of the idea of genesis in various philosophers and social scientists starting from the pre-socratics up to the recent work of late Gerard Duveen. The vision of genetic social psychology and key theoretical influences are discussed in detail. The triadic model of subject-object-other is the unit of analysis of this proposal, and an articulation of different levels of analysis is proposed in our effort to understand the relationship between the process of microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis. It highlights the importance of the work of Hans Furth and Lucien Goldmann as key influences on Gerard Duveen and his own vision of an integrative social developmental psychology that combines ideas from Piaget and Moscovici. In this chapter I also discuss the work of other researchers interested in ideas relating to these two great theorists of the social sciences.