Ole Dreier

Persons in Structures of Social Practice

In this article I argue for grounding psychological theories of persons in relation to structures of social practice. I introduce crucial features of such a theory of persons which is based on critical psychology and invite contributions to its further development. The theory emphasizes that persons are participants involved in personal trajectories in relation to structural arrangements of social practice. It is intended to lead to a richer and worldlier psychology. It also leads to a different understanding of professional psychological practices and of their users. To illuminate this, I present key insights from a study of clients attending therapy. Client changes do not occur only in therapeutic sessions but also in and across the contexts in which these clients live their lives in structures of social practice. In this respect, though, the structural arrangement of secluded sessions with intimate expert strangers significantly affects the mode of working of therapy in the social practice of its clients.

Personality and the conduct of everyday life

The main purpose of this paper is to present a theory of persons that is rooted in the way persons conduct their everyday lives. The approach and the key concepts in the theory are presented in the second, central part of the paper. This theoretical approach to personhood is unusual. Current research on personality recognizes that personality must be studied in the interplay between person-situation-behavior. In the first part of the paper I present some of the core issues in those studies. The theoretical approach aims at resolving these issues. These issues are one of the two major sources of inspiration for the theoretical approach. The other important source of inspiration are studies of psychological interventions. In the third part of the paper I present a study that illuminates how the theory may provoke and enrich our understanding of interventions.

Interventions in everyday lives: How clients use psychotherapy outside their sessions

The purpose of psychotherapy is to help clients address and overcome problems troubling them in their everyday lives. Therapy can therefore only work if clients include it in their ongoing lives to deal with their problems. Detailed, systematic research is needed on how clients do so in their everyday lives outside their sessions. A design of exploratory case studies on this topic is presented in this article. The main outcomes of such a case study on family therapy are then laid out in general terms. They highlight how treatment practices and clients’ ordinary everyday practices interact when clients change their everyday lives to overcome their troubles. They also highlight what it involves for clients to accomplish this. It is concluded that we need more research on how to understand intervention; on the interaction between interventions and clients’ conduct of their everyday life; on sessions as a particular, secluded part of clients’ ongoing everyday lives, and on how to consider therapists’ procedures and conduct of sessions accordingly.

INDIVIDUALITETSPROBLEMET I DIALEKTISK MATERIALISTISK BELYSNING

I artiklen praesenteres nogle grundtraek ved en historisk og dialektisk materialistisk opfattelse af, hvordan man kan begribe det enkelte enestaende individ. Artiklen vil vise, at dette er muligt uden at ende i en rent individualistisk og subjektivistisk opfattelse af individet.

Review: The Meshing of Learning and Identity in Education STANTON WORTHAM, Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 306 pp. ISBN 0—521—60833—3 (pbk)

In his book on learning in education, Stanton Wortham draws on an interdisciplinary background of sociocultural approaches to learning and cognition in psychology, the sociology and anthropology of education, and research on language and communication. This research has criticized a decontextualized cognitive model of learning in the classroom and stressed its sociohistorical mediation. It also views the classroom as a special context with a particular layout, artifacts, activities, and relations. But the time has now come, Wortham argues, to bring academic learning and non-academic social processes in the classroom closer together. So he focuses on how ‘social identification and academic learning ... can overlap and partly constitute each other [and he] shows how subject matter, argument, evidence and academic learning sometimes intertwine with and come to depend upon social identification, power relations and interpersonal struggles in classrooms’ (pp. 1–2). His arguments are grounded in rich empirical analyses of extensive materials gathered over an academic year in a single Grade 9 English and History class in an urban US high school. Wortham insists that an analysis of this topic must include two dimensions. First, we must analyze how categories and processes on different ‘timescales’ play a part in local constructions of knowledge and identity. In the local practice of the classroom, participants draw on historical cognitive models and models of identity, such as models of race and gender, to construct particular local cognitive models and models of identity on the timescale of particular events and over the timescale of an academic year. So, Wortham aims to identify how ‘classroom-specific habitual patterns of social identification and academic learning developed’ (p. 9) across events in an academic year. Second, we must study the ‘trajectories of learning’ and identification of individual students in the classroom across the academic year in order to grasp how their specific learning and identities develop. The historical cognitive models and models of identity are sociocultural phenomena which frame the interpretation of signs in the classroom, recur across events, and persist across time and space. Wortham sees culture as circulating so that ‘many competing models, categories and practices emerge and become recognizable, they get

A. N. LEONTJEV: VIRKSOMHED OG PERSONLIGHED

Leontjevs verksamhetsteori introduceras och dis-kuteras genom en analys av de tre viktiga be-greppen: Verksamhet, medvetande och person-lighet.