Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key

Cultural Psychology is a radical new look in psychology that studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. With the increase of globalization and multicultural exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. Encounters with others fundamentally transform the way we understand ourselves. No longer can we ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues.

This first volume in the series features an address by Prof. Jaan Valsiner, which is followed by ten commentary chapters and his response to them. In his lecture, Valsiner explores what Niels Bohr’s revolutionary principle of ‘complementarity’ can contribute to the development of a cultural psychology that takes time, semiotics, and human feeling seriously. Commentators further discuss how complementarity can act as an epistemology for psychology; a number of new methodological strategies for incorporating culture and time into investigations; and what cultural psychology can contribute to our understanding of imagination, art, language and self-other relations.