Cultural psychology of desire

Sergio Salvatore

pp. 33-49

in: Jaan Valsiner, Giuseppina Marsico, Nandita Chaudhary, Virginia Dazzani (eds), Psychology as the science of human being, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

This paper provides a semiotic theory of the desire, as the core of the general view of sensemaking as the process producing the mind—rather than the process produced by the mind. As one can find in a dictionary, the desire is usually meant as the sense of passionate search or of waiting something, for the sake of acquiring, fulfilling, and accomplishing what is felt as required for satisfying our preferences and needs. I propose a different definition. According to it, the desire is not germane to seeking, willing, commitment, need, and so forth—rather, it is the embodied semiotic dynamic providing the condition for making the object being the target of the tension we are used to consider desire (and that in this article I will denote with the term "appetite"): we do not desire what we see; rather, we see what we desire. My thesis is that such a turn of focus enables the cultural psychology to better understand the micro-genesis of the appetite towards the object.