The topic of subjectivity in psychology: Contradictions,paths and new alternatives

This paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.     

Vygotsky,Wittgenstein, and sociocultural theory

This paper considers the use made of Vygotsky's work by many who take a sociocultural perspective and, in particular, by those who use his work to advance a particular view of second language acquisition and the ‘silent period’. It is argued that Vygotsky's account as represented in Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1986 ) needs to be thought of as consisting of two distinct aspects: first, the observations he made (or claimed to have made) and, second, the theoretical account he proposed to explain them. It is shown that some of Vygotsky's observations are problematic but that, even if they are accepted, Vygotsky's theoretical account suffers from fundamental difficulties. Thus the support claimed from Vygotsky in accounts of second language acquisition is misplaced, first because of those difficulties and, second, because many who claim support from Vygotsky, do not need or even use his theory but instead focus their attention on his empirical observations and assume incorrectly that if their own empirical observations match Vygotsky's, then Vygotsky's theory can be accepted. Wittgenstein's later philosophy is shown to provide a perspective which dispels confusions about, and gives us a clearer insight into, the issues.     

The Concept of the Cultural-Historical Development of the Mind and its Prospects

Vygotsky's concept of the cultural and historical development of the mind, which he worked out together with his coworkers and students, never achieved finished form. It did, however, contain basic ideas that, when later systematically developed, opened paths toward knowledge about what Vygotsky considered to be the most important problem of psychology — knowledge of the human personality.     

Let's not get tied into knots: a response to Newman, (2018)—Vygotsky,Wittgenstein and sociocultural theory

The September 2018 issue of this journal included an article by Newman, (2018) that challenges research carried out on second language acquisition (henceforth, SCT‐L2) informed by the psychological theory proposed by L. S. Vygotsky. We would like to respond to Newman's critique, which he problematizes as three “knots” that he then undertakes to untie through analysis of Vygotsky's writings contained in Vygotsky's two most popular works, Thought and Language and Mind in Society. We first summarize Newman's knots and his approach to untying them. We then present our response to each of these in turn.     

Towards a Lacanian Group Psychology: The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Trans‐subjective

Revisiting Lacan's discussion of the puzzle of the prisoner's dilemma provides a means of elaborating a theory of the trans‐subjective. An illustration of this dilemma provides the basis for two important arguments. Firstly, that we need to grasp a logical succession of modes of subjectivity: from subjectivity to inter‐subjectivity, and from inter‐subjectivity to a form of trans‐subjective social logic. The trans‐subjective, thus conceptualized, enables forms of social objectivity that transcend the level of (inter)subjectivity, and which play a crucial role in consolidating given societal groupings. The paper advances, secondly, that various declarative and symbolic activities are important non‐psychological bases—trans‐subjective foundations—for psychological identifications of an inter‐subjective sort. These assertions link interesting to recent developments in the contemporary social psychology of interobjectivity, which likewise emphasize a type of objectivity that plays an indispensible part in co‐ordinating human relations and understanding.     

金融诈骗罪主观要件探析

金融诈骗罪破坏国家金融管理秩序,侵犯财产所有权。其犯罪构成与刑法规定的其他犯罪一样,必须同时具备犯罪客体、客观、主体、主观四个要件。金融诈骗罪的行为人主观上是否必须具备“非法占有目的”以及金融诈骗罪的主观罪过形式是认定此类犯罪必须正确把握的问题。“非法占有目的”是所有金融诈骗罪必备的主观要件,而不是选择要件。金融诈骗罪行为人的主观罪过形式只能是直接故意,不能是过失,也不能是间接故意。     

Abstracts

Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory. This paper attempts to demonstrate, at least for the passions, that while emotions are important elements of common sense psychological thought, they are not psychological, neural, or mental entities. People talk of emotions, we claim, in two sorts of cases: Firstly, when it is believed that someone has done something that she shouldn't because she has been overwhelmed by desire (a motive) and secondly, when someone is found to be compelled to devote cognitive resources to an act she knows she will never carry out. In this case motivational states command attention and cognitive and physiological resources, distract us, even though they will not issue in action. In either case pointing to an emotion is pointing to a partial, aborted, or misdirected desire. We discuss why emotions are considered important in common sense and professional psychology though they do not exist. This paper explores new avenues of research on social bases of cognition and a more adequate (than those extant) framework to conceive the phenomena of the human mind. It firstly examines Bartlett's work on social bases of cognition, from which three pertinent features are identified, namely multi-level analyses, evolutionary perspective and embodied mind approach. It then examines recent works on social origins of cognition in ethology and paleoanthropology, and various forms of the embodied mind approach recently proposed in neuroscience and cognitive science. The paper concludes that extending the embodied mind approach would provide the most potent framework to enable, amongst others, the conceptual integration of the biological, psychological and social bases of the human mind, which have in the past been treated mainly as competing alternatives. A conception of parental experience is proposed to enhance the move of the study of parenting into the interpersonal realm by describing parental subjectivity from the parent's point of view. Explanations are based on that which the parent can be accountable for, on parental dialogues with observers/clinicians about their dialogues with their infants. This conception of parental subjectivity is compared with other conceptions which define parental subjectivity as the mental apparatus of the parent and not as representing the evolving relation of the parent with the infant, and with explanations which consider parental reports in terms of the parent's psychodynamics and cognitive abilities rather than in terms of the on-going dialogues between themselves and their infants. The paper introduces a typology of parental dialogues with observers/clinicians about their dialogues with their infants, within the context of the non-verbal nature of the infant's communication. The findings from empirical examinations of this typology are presented, and their implications for the proposal that the study of parental relations with their infants should consider the parent's accountability are discussed.     

Kurt Lewin's Leadership Studies and His Legacy to Social Psychology: Is There Nothing as Practical as a Good Theory?

This paper re‐examines Kurt Lewin's classic leadership studies, using them as a concrete example to explore his wider legacy to social psychology. Lewin distinguished between advanced “Galileian” science, which was based on analysing particular examples, and backward “Aristotelian” science, which used statistical analyses. Close examination of the way Lewin wrote about the leadership studies reveals that he used the sort of binary, value‐laden concepts that he criticised as “Aristotelian”. Such concepts, especially those of “democracy” and “autocracy”, affected the way that he analysed the results and the ways that later social scientists have understood, and misunderstood, the studies. It is argued that Lewin's famous motto—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is too simple to fit the tensions between the leadership studies and his own views of what counts as good theory.     

价值的科学——韦伯社会科学方法论再探

面对现代社会中理性与非理性、主观与客观、事实与价值之间的紧张,马克斯·韦伯的社会科学方法论力图在对立双方之间搭建起关联并在研究中往复运动,借助包含价值的历史个体和理想类型,通过超越主客观对立的价值阐释,说明历史、文化与社会的各种独特现象,发现各民族和时代中人们的价值理想,理解先辈如何去坚持和实践它们,进而指导现代人在今天继承和实现这些价值。历史和社会科学,既要用理性的方法培养学人清明的理智,也要使人看到超越理性的价值信念,从而帮助人在高度抽象的现代社会中,以理性的态度去守护和坚持各种文明的价值核心,避免走向僵死的理性和狂热的非理性两个极端。     

A Study of the Influence of Sociohistorical Conditions on Child Development (Comparative Investigation, 1929 and 1966)

In the late 1920s, primarily in connection with L. S. Vygotsky's theory concerning the social and historical antecedents of the development of the mind, there was great interest in comparing the development of children reared in different social and cultural environments. One such study was A. R. Luria's Speech and intellect of rural, urban, and orphan children (Moscow, 1930). Zaporozhets, and then Luria, made trips to Central Asia as a part of this research effort. Although cross-cultural studies of human development enjoy some popularity in Western European and American psychology, this is one of the rare published accounts of such work from the USSR.     

胡风主观战斗精神与创作主体的哲学美学阐释

胡风的以主观战斗精神为核心范畴的文艺思想有其哲学和美学基础。这种哲学美学基础的形成既有着复杂的自身历史文化和现实社会的背景 ,也有着作为理论话语资源上的复杂的理论背景。但胡风确实又力图根据马克思主义经典作家的有关思想来理解文艺的哲学和美学问题。本文通过考察胡风关于作为主体的人的论述和作为创作主体的艺术家的论述 ,对他的主观战斗精神与创作主体的观点进行哲学和美学的阐释。     

Subjectivity in debate: Some reconstructed philosophical premises to advance its discussion in psychology

The topic of subjectivity has been treated peripherally by philosophy. It has appeared in philosophy not as a specific human phenomenon, but attached to other concepts without specifying its ontological definition, such as intersubjectivity, the place of the Other in the emergence of the self, consciousness and so forth. This paper reconstructs some of the overlooked moments and ideas of several classical philosophers, such as Marx, Dewey, Merleau Ponty, Cassirer and Foucault, in order to identify in their works important antecedents to advance a different concept of subjectivity. The concepts and questions which are raised by those philosophers and which are revived in this paper have remained overlooked both by philosophy and psychology because of the lack of any representation of subjectivity capable of making them more visible. The ontological monopoly of language and discourse in explaining all human phenomena, taken together with the critique of theoretical systems and of epistemology, has found in social constructionism its strongest expression in psychology. The value of theoretical systems in generating intelligibility about complex and configurational phenomena is recovered, along with the need to develop new epistemologies capable of generating intelligibility on such systems. Finally, I argue that a new theoretical and epistemological avenue is opened up for the development of psychological thought.     

SPECIAL ISSUE： IMPORTANT ISSUES IN MARXIST PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA：Historical materialism and the path to social actuality

揭示并切中当今的社会现实，是马克思主义哲学研究目前所面临的根本任务。黑格尔通过对主观意识及其外部反思的尖锐批判，第一次在哲学上揭示出理解社会现实的可能路径。马克思批判地继承了黑格尔哲学的这一遗产，其批判的成果不仅瓦解了理念与现实的思辨唯心主义联盟，而且彻底重建了社会现实的本质性向度。在这个主题上，对马克思主义哲学的康德主义解释势必意味着取消社会现实的那一度，意味着返回到主观意识的哲学，因而也势必意味着历史唯物主义的实际解体。通达社会现实的道路乃是历史唯物主义的生命线，而这一学说的真理性也只有在这条道路上方才能够持之不坠。     

Certain Aspects of the Study of Social History (Historical Social Psychology)

One of the scholarly disciplines, the utilization of whose method and subject matter would, in our opinion, offer very fruitful prospects for historical research, is social (societal) psychology. The subject matter of social psychology is dual. In the first place, its tasks include study of the conditioning of the individual's mentality by his membership in a society, class, or social group. Social psychology concerns itself with those aspects of the mental set and emotional behavior of man that take shape as a consequence of his life and activity in a group. In the second place, social psychology studies the behavior standards of groups and societies, the psychological reactions of groups or masses of people. We know that the emotional behavior of a group is not merely the sum of the emotions of the individuals comprising it. On the one hand, the mentality of the individual and its manifestation in the group are not analogous to the intellectual life of the individual in isolation.     

Why We Need a Biopsychosocial Perspective with Vulnerable,Oppressed, and At-Risk Clients

This article considers why we need to take a biopsychosocial perspective in assessment and treatment of individuals. Using psychological concepts drawn from drive theory, ego psychology, object relations, attachment theory, self psychology and relational theory, the author makes explicit the need to connect these ideas with social and biological contexts. Arguing that psychodynamic theories contain the social as well as the psychological, the author traces Freud's social commitments, the role of critical race theory, the importance of social contexts in shaping development while also considering the effects of neglect, trauma and abuse on the developing brain. Holding in mind all of these positions, is what makes clinical social work truly the impossible profession.     

Scaffolding and the zone of proximal development: A problematic relationship

For nearly four decades, a variety of social science disciplines have assumed that the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and the metaphor of scaffolding reflect more or less the same process. However, we will argue that any similarity is at best partial and at worst superficial. Equating the processes adds nothing to Vygotsky's general theory and in fact may weaken and dilute the robustness of the theory. To make the non‐equivalence case, the paper first presents an overview of Vygotsky's approach to psychology that includes an expansive discussion of the ZPD not only as the activity in which instruction leads development, but also as the key to his approach to experimental research. This is followed by a critical review of the relevant statements that have appeared in the literature on the nature of scaffolding, its presumed link to the ZPD and that brings to the fore the inadequacies of the metaphor itself that disqualify it as an equivalent process. While the ZPD can be understood to include the kind of interaction that is described in the scaffolding literature, it is a much broader and far more robust process than scaffolding, as is made apparent when the two processes are compared, which is the focus of the concluding section of the article. In the comparison we summarize the analyses presented, especially with regard to the implications and relevance of the metaphors underlying each concept.     

论当代中国文化的价值定位

文化最基本的、最核心的价值应定位于建构民族心理、形成民族性格、锻铸民族之魂,即塑造与自己时代相适应的社会主体.面对中国现代化的现实境遇,中国文化建设面临着十分复杂而又艰巨的任务从历时态上看,它要超越传统农耕文化,实现社会主体的现代化;从共时态上看,它要跨越后现代主义文化危机,塑造科学理性与人文精神相统一的新型的社会主体.     

The Psychological Subject and Harré's Social Psychology: An Analysis of a Constructionist Case

Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory.