Each of the three great schools of developmental psy chology represented in this vo1ume--psychoana1ytic, cogni tive-developmental, and Vygotskian--diverges in important ways. But more recent changes in each discipline have led to new possibilities for theoretical integrations. Each ori entation has begun to focus upon the problem of "meaning construction," that is, how a person's subjectivity and con sciousness is created through his interaction with signifi cant others. Each discipline also discovered that as it switched to meaning and interpretation as the foci of their work, they had to...

This book is an outcome of my bicultural experience as a student and teacher of psychology in India and North America. As a student in India, the psychology I learned in the classroom was totally Western in its perspective. A book on Indian economics, called Bharatfya Arthasastra, written by the late Pal)Q. it Dindayal Upadhyaya, inspired me to look into the sources of the Indian intellectual tradition for an indigenous per spective within the discipline of my training and research. The late Balsastri Hardas suggested K. K. Kolhatkar's Bharatfya Manasasastra, a book that translates and...

This volume aims to build on the approach to cultural psychology originally developed by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky and his colleagues Luria and Leontiev by providing qualitative methods such as interview techniques and content analysis as empirical tools for exploring the cultural aspects of psychology, and specific guidelines for formulating, conducting, and analyzing interviews on cultural aspects of psychology.

The author proposes that the four earliest British North American colonies in the United States promoted the development of distinct regional identities and that this cultural legacy affected identity development as well as behavioral patterns differently in each region. He compares data from the North American colonies to the situation in England and discovers that the findings in the latter's eight standard regions are very similar to those in the United States.

Some 10 years ago, Leo Apostel presented an analysis of developments taking place in genetic epistemology and artificial intelligence, and re marked that the two disciplines appeared to be converging, without one dominating or assimilating the other. In his view, significant formal and experimental progress would be required in the post-Piagetian era: ge netic epistemology would need to take into account developments in artificial intelligence, while remaining an independent discipline at the frontiers of biology, logic, and psychology. The work of David Leiser and Christiane Gillieron, both...

Although many books are written about bereavement, very few are written about the fear of one's own death and most of these focus chiefly on terminal illness. In contrast, this book looks at the ways in which the fear of death operates on a back burner throughout our lives and how it influences the choices we make and the paths that we follow in life. The author presents a moral hierarchy' of behavior used in coping with the fear of death and dying.

In the past four decades or so, the so-called psychology of religion after having been deemed extinct, impossible or unlikely has risen to prominence again: the number of publications is rapidly growing, an impressive secondary literature (handbooks, introductions, etc.) is available already, infrastructure has been developed (a number of new journals devoted to the subject have been founded, organizations have been established, increasingly funding is going to the area), attracting many new researchers. Organizations like the American Psychological Association are now publishing in the field...

This book presents new insights into Freud's famous "discovery" of the unconscious and the subsequent development of psychoanalytic theories. The authors explore the original context in which these ideas arose and the central debate about mind as matter or something that transcends matter. In the course of this examination, it is demonstrated that Freud was influenced not only by the 19th century scientific milieu, but also by ancient cultures. While it is known that Freud was an avid collector of ancient artifacts and generally interested in these older cultures, this book systematically...

George Hall - teacher, historian, engineer, and computer analyst - uniquely draws upon the competing perspectives of traditional science, the exciting new science of chaos, and the burgeoning and important tenets of complexity theory, catastrophe theory, and fuzzy logic to look for a common theme. All of these perspectives, he finds, are fundamentally united by a common theme: the crucial patterns of elements and their dynamic change over time. Order - be it the growth of a fetus or the rumbling shift of continents - evolves because these patterns are themselves the blueprint and the...

This book focuses on what other volumes have only touched on, that is the factors that contribute to the rise of certain persons and ideas in the field of psychology. Bringing together noted experts in the field, it describes the process of intellectual reconstructions that determines how we view historical events, and why some ideas die only to be reborn again, as well as why new ideas can quickly topple traditional views.