General Human Psychology

Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. And Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. He has been Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark in 2013-2018 and Professeur invitee at University of Luxembourg (2013-2019).  He has published and edited around 50 books, the most pertinent of which are his monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998),  Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), and Ornamented Lives (Charlotte NC: Information Age, 2019).  He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017, for his interdisciplinary work on human development, as well as Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

“Valsiner’s proposal for a new general psychology which grounds its foundation in semiotics and develops within an epistemological dynamic, integrational and dialogue-based framework is intriguing and challenging. Aspiring to move within fragmentations and towards such a theoretical synthesis, along with the adoption of a methodology allowing the creation of adequate methods and a research evaluation process, could represent the evolutionary change that has not been observed in psychology for too long.” (Raffaele Modugno, Human Arenas, Vol. 5 (4), 2022)

• 1. Constructing and Destroying One’s Life: Phenomenology of the human life course.- 2. Signs in Minds: Semiotic basis for the New General Psychology.- 3. Mediating Mind: Making values.- 4. Silent screaming: Voices within the Self.- 5. Disquieting societies.- 6. Constructing loyalties: Dialogues between rights and duties.- 7. Masked morality: Theatrical reality of living.- 8. Monuments and memory:  Imagination amplified and objectified.- 9. Political Sentiments: Escalation and resistance.- 10. Desires for Beauty: Aesthetics of human existence.- 11. From Wanting to Acting: Active desire for meaningful living.- 12. How to investigate complex personological processes.- 13. Final Conclusions: General  Structure of Cultural Personology.