Cor Baerveldt

Patient characteristics as predictors of primary health care preferences: a systematic literature analysis

To identify associations between various cultural and demographic factors and patients’ primary health care preferences.

Culture, Emotion and the Normative Structure of Reality

A central concern for a psychology of culture is the question of how people come to commit themselves to ‘shared’ forms of understanding. Although the ‘shared’ or social nature of human understanding has received ample attention in different forms of cultural psychology, what is lacking is an account of the normative ‘force’ or compellingness of cultural forms. We argue that both phenomenology and social constructionism have failed to acknowledge the inherently normative dimension of social and cultural life. For an alternative grounding of cultural psychology we turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty. We show that at the end of his life Merleau-Ponty was working on a theory of meaning that acknowledges the normative dimension of our affective engagements in the world as well as the affective dimension of our normative engagements. We argue that this theory may be a powerful alternative for a social constructionist approach to culture.

Enactivism and the Experiential Reality of Culture: Rethinking the Epistemological Basis of Cultural Psychology

The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, by focusing exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this experience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an alternative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide the epistemological basis for a cultural psychology that explains how experience can become socially patterned in the first place. Cultural life forms are then considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.

Bakhtin’s realism and embodiment: Towards a revision of the dialogical self

How can we understand socially constituted selfhood? H. Hermans has addressed this question with the notion of the Dialogical Self that he draws from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We focus on Bakhtin’s discussion of realism in relation to how he has been interpreted by Hermans. This notion of realism (which we coined ‘‘expressive realism’’) highlights how sociality is inseparably related to embodied experience, thus making way for a sociocultural psychology that takes into account life as it is experientially lived. We point out how Hermans’ vision of the Dialogical Self neglects such embodied experience. This discussion leads to the claim that Bakhtin sees the self as social insofar as our most primary embodied experience is social, where Hermans anchors the sociality of self in inter-subjective exchange. Accordingly, an extension of the Dialogical Self is offered through discussion of these points.

Mixed up perspectives: Reply to Chryssides et al. and Daanen and their critique of enactive cultural psychology

In earlier contributions to Culture & Psychology we have put forward enactivism as an epistemological alternative for representationalist accounts of meaning in relation to action and experience. Critics continue to charge enactive cultural psychology of being a solipsistic and a materialist reductionistic epistemology. We address that critique, arguing that it consistently follows from misunderstanding in particular the enactivist notion of “operational closure,” and from mixing up two observer viewpoints that must be analytically severed when describing living, cognitive systems. Moreover, Daanen (2009) argued that in particular Heidegger’s phenomenology can help to reconcile enactive cultural psychology and social representation theory. We reply that although enactivism is indeed close to phenomenology, Daanen fails to appreciate Heidegger’s much more radical break with a philosophy of consciousness to anchor meaningful Being. Consequently, representationalist accounts cannot be salvaged, least of all by invoking Heidegger.

Constructivism Contested: Implications of a Genetic Perspective in Psychology

Constructivism is an approach to knowledge and learning that focuses on the active role of knowers. Sanchez and Loredo (Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 43:332–349, 2009) propose a classification of constructivist thinkers and address what they perceive to be internal problems of present-day constructivism. The remedy they propose is a return to the genetic constructivism of James Mark Baldwin, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. In this article we first raise the question of whether thinkers like Baldwin, Vygotsky, Maturana and Varela are adequately depicted as constructivists, and subsequently argue that constructivism is caught in an overly epistemic version of the subject/object dichotomy. We then introduce a genetic logic that is not based on the Hegelian dialectics of negation and mediation, but rather on the idea of the recursive consensual coordination of actions that give rise to stylized cultural practices. We argue that a genuinely genetic and generative psychology should be concerned with the multifarious and ever-changing nature of human ‘life’ and not merely with the construction of knowledge about life.

The veil and the search for the self: From identity politics to cultural expression

Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli and Howarth compare the reasons for wearing the veil of Muslim women in a Muslim majority society, Indonesia and in a society with a Muslim minority, India. They conclude that particularly Muslim minority women display a variety of reasons and strategies with regards to the headscarf, which according to Wagner et al. serve in the construction of identity and as a means of opposition against stereotypes and prejudice. Taking the case of Muslim women in Western societies, I argue that the language of identity, stereotypes and prejudice is insufficient for understanding the agency of women donning the veil. Instead I propose a genetic cultural psychological approach focused on the cultivation of affect and the acquisition of durable bodily dispositions through cultural training. The veil is part of an entire expressive style and discursive accounts are only a minor part of that style. Recognizing that style – unlike propositional accounts – is inherently ambiguous and polysemic allows us to see how Muslim women are creating for themselves the space of an agency that is not primarily defined in terms of opposition or of other peoples demands for proper reasons.

The ontology of the “in-between” and the genetic legacy in psychology

A true psychology of language and self requires a radically dialogical ontology that goes beyond the dialectics of self and other and the logic of me–other exchange. Bertau’s notion of the in-between and Lipari’s notion of interlistening are highly suggestive of such a dialogical ontology. This article attempts to connect those notions to a history of genetic thought going back to Goethe’s Lebensphilosophie. Following the implications of this tradition leads to a different interpretation of Vygotsky’s work on thinking and concept formation than the one offered by Larraín and Haye. The article concludes by evoking Merleau-Ponty in further support of an ontology of the in-between that reveals expression both in its generativity and in its depth. With an allusion to Karsten, genuine depth can be seen as expressed precisely through a refraction of the self as expression and the self as expressed.