I create you to control me: A glimpse into basic processes of semiotic mediation

Miltenburg and Singer outline a direction of analysis of therapy processes that go beyond the realm of therapy and touch upon basic processes of human cultural development. Human beings regulate their conduct by creating hierarchically organized and often personified semiotic means to regulate their ongoing relationships with the environment. These means allow for changing, maintaining, and aggravating current psychological states. The structure of these control mechanisms entails multiple levels that regulate one another, aside from organizing thinking, feeling, and action. I will argue that personal contruction of goal orientations becomes a necessary super-organizer of such complex system of personal-cultural means, such that examination of phenomena of volition returns to the stage of the theater of psychological research as a centrally relevant topic.