Grasping the dynamic nature of intersubjectivity
pp. 171-190
in: Jaan Valsiner, Peter Molenaar, Maria Lyra, Nandita Chaudhary (eds), Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
The acknowledgement of the dynamicity of psychological phenomena ®has been progressively gaining acceptance in various branches of psychology. In some of these areas (first of all the neurosciences, psycholinguistic, but also cognitive psychology, and social psychology) the theory has greatly benefited from the adoption of conceptual models and methods of investigation provided by the Dynamic Systems theory (inter alia, Salvatore, Tebaldi, & Potì, 2008). However, in other fields of psychology, authors refer to the dynamic systems in metaphorical terms, using it as a striking image to describe the irreversibility and intrinsic creativity/autonomy of the psychological phenomena under investigation. As a result of this rhetorical strategy, in various areas related to the study of intersubjectivity (work psychology, clinical, and psychodynamic psychology as well as cultural psychology and at least partially developmental psychology) there is an evident gap between the conceptualisation of the phenomena as dynamic and the empirical investigation of it as a 'static" process (Lauro-Grotto, Salvatore, Gennaro, & Gelo, 2009—Chapter 1 in this book).