Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Learning from experience
- 3 From here to synchrony
- 4 What to make of coincidence
- 5 The topography of intersubjective space
- 6 The two axes of psychological explanation
- 7 Pictures of psychical change
- 8 Research among equals
- 9 Validating the curriculum
- 10 Conclusion
- List of references
- Index
5 - The topography of intersubjective space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Learning from experience
- 3 From here to synchrony
- 4 What to make of coincidence
- 5 The topography of intersubjective space
- 6 The two axes of psychological explanation
- 7 Pictures of psychical change
- 8 Research among equals
- 9 Validating the curriculum
- 10 Conclusion
- List of references
- Index
Summary
(a) behaviour has to be derived from a totality of coexisting facts, (b) these coexisting facts have the character of a ‘dynamic field’ in so far as the state of any part of this field depends on every other part of the field. The proposition (a) includes the statement that we have to deal in psychology, too, with a manifold, the interrelations of which cannot be represented without the concept of space.
(Kurt Lewin, 1943, ‘Defining the “Field at a Given Time”’, p. 45)What is the first thing we should assume in the science of the mind? What is our basic unit of analysis? Is it the solitary individual: ‘I think therefore I am’? Or is it ‘we’ : people in relation? Is the mind primarily solitary? Or does mental life first and foremost emerge from togetherness? Should the brain be conceived as a self-sufficient, self-generating organ? Or do brains only function to their fullest when in conjunction with other brains? Are humans essentially social? Or is my mind an island, entire unto itself?
We first arrived at the need to conceive the psyche as existing in intersubjective space by drawing conclusions from the way in which the world has significance for us above and beyond the information available to our senses. These conclusions were reinforced by the implications of social theory and complexity theory for the supra-individual orderliness of experience.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Psychology and Experience , pp. 81 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005