Articles  Vienna
The mainstream of psychology and the search for universals in the realm of trans-cultural psychology
The relationship of psychology to the topic of culture as well as to cultural and historical contiguity of psychic phenomena is itself only comprehensible from its cultural legacy and its own historical development. The cultural and historical formation of psychic phenomena has been traditionally less heeded or not even heeded at all in the realm of psychology. In its inception, it quite consequently endeavoured to establish itself as a scientific discipline with the help of a mathematical foundation.
The psychologists of the late 19th century were all quite well aware that the exact scientific methodology can only be applied to ‘elementary psychological processes’. As a result, ‘higher psychological functions’ were not accepted in psychological laboratories. In this spirit, the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, also left at advanced age the laboratory he created and applied himself to the ambitious project of a ten-volume “Peoples' Psychology”, for which he considered his previous methodical efforts as insufficient.
In the mainstream of psychology, which was more and more successfully profiled as empirical science, ‘culture’ was long since considered as a disturbance variable which had to be experimentally controlled in favour of the universality of research findings. These controls are roughly equivalent to efforts to prepare psychological tests which prove to be ‘culture fair’. In the case of intelligence, ‘educationally independent’ layers of intelligence will be sought, which are intended to be surveyed with the model of non-verbal materials. Trans-cultural psychology, the beginnings of which roughly date back to the period after the 2nd World War, also perceives itself to be obligated to such an assurance of the universal validity of psychological theories. Once turned into the study of emotions, a typical trans-cultural study design could examine the differences in the cognitive interpretation of the physiological emotional states between Asians and North Americans. While doing so, this implies that the elementary basis of emotions is culturally invariant and that cultures differ at all events through different cognitive interpretations of a principally identical condition. A trans-cultural examination would also stop at the ascertainment of differences, without having to endeavour to an explanation of its origin.
Criticism of trans-cultural psychology
An objection to such an approach can be exemplarily illustrated in the psychological attachment theory (see Slunecko, 2002, P. 172 contd.). The attachment theory assumes that depending on the consistent and loving affection of the mother or another primary attachment figure to the child, an attachment style is fixed, which can be characterised as either ‘securely bound’, ‘anxious-reluctantly bound’ or ‘insecure-evasive’. The compilation of the respective attachment style occurs experimentally with the help of the ‘strange situation’. In this case, the child is left alone by the attachment figure in a room, in which the child then remains with the experiment director. Securely bound children who feel secure in relation to the accessibility of the attachment figure should sadly take note of their disappearance, but then become diverted. Upon the return of the attachment figure, the child should turn towards this person with great joy at seeing him/her again. In contrast, anxious-reluctantly bound children usually react excessively emotional to the absence of the attachment figure, and hardly allow themselves to be calmed by this person after their return. This discloses the uncertainty about the accessibility and affection of the attachment figure. Finally, insecure-evasively bound children have experienced so little affection that the expectations – that their desire for love would principally come up against rejection – have solidified. These children hardly react to the disappearance of the attachment figure and their return, and perhaps even acknowledge the return with hostile aversion.
Parallel findings from Brazil as well as Japan exist in relation to this theory, which is standardised to North American and European children. When seen in superficial terms, Brazilian street children were discovered to have an astoundingly higher percentage of securely bound children, particularly since in the strange situation they behaved like securely bound children would do (Ingleby, 1989). However, Slunecko (2002, P. 173) points out that the children are certainly not securely bound. The strange situation is absolutely not strange for them. “On the contrary, these children live in a very different (for us unfortunate) variation of childhood, or do not even live in a childhood realm at all, because childhood – if one listens to authors such as Ariès (1962) or Kessen (1983) – is a cultural invention in the aggregate.” This is in addition to absolutely contrary findings from Japan, according to which Japanese children react entirely more stressed at the absence of the attachment figure (Miyake et al, 1991). Again, this does not mean that these children are generally insecurely bound. On the contrary, Japanese children are in a close binary unit with the mother for a much longer period of time, and are thus absolutely not accustomed to being left alone (Slunecko, 2002). Scheper-Hughes (1998) supplements these findings on attachment behaviour with a field study in Brazil, in which it is shown that even the motherly love – which is repeatedly introduced as biological and thus universally applied behaviour – is subject to cultural contiguity.
Trans-cultural psychology thus negates the respective cultural and historically rooted realities in which human experience and behaviour are constituted separately. Moreover, it negates the complex interplay of social practices and cultural elements in which psychological realities are first caused. It acts on the assumption of its own – likewise culturally conveyed – understanding of psychic phenomena, and transports this understanding into the cultures to be examined. It is only peripherally mentioned that the cultural term is always unilaterally set in terms with nationality. This tendency to place one’s own thought pattern as a cognitive scheme above other cultures is also manifested in the methodology. At the same time, questionnaires are traditionally compiled and predetermined in the cultures to be compared, in which case not just translation problems prove to be a methodical difficulty. In 1931, the Russian psychologist Alexandr Luria discovered in his field studies in the remote villages of Uzbekistan and Kirgizia that his participants could not even start with his questions (in Luria, 1992). The request regarding self-description and listing of one’s own personality traits merely confused them. The task to categorise things abstractly also made no sense to them. Evidently these operations – so routine to us – have no place and no existence in the communities examined by Luria.
Subjective cultural psychology
Luria criticised the trans-cultural psychology throughout his life. Like his mentor, Lev Vygotskij (e.g. 1978), he saw himself as obligated to a historic-materialistic foundation of psychology. Vygotskij advocated the embedment of ‘higher psychological functions’ in the language. According to his conviction, humans differ from their nearest relatives, the anthropoids, through the unique concurrence of the use of tools and language or the use of signs in the wider sense. Humans are thereby distinguished with being able to process and change nature. But at the same time they themselves are altered in the complex, specific human process of ‘mediated action’. Mediated action means use of tools as well as signs, and is particularly characterised through an alienation of immediate stimulus-response patterns. Vygotskij was perhaps the first psychologist who experimentally proved the linguistic foundation of such elementary processes as perception or memory. Moreover, his orientation is radically ‘developmentally psychological’ in the sense that he rejected the study of psychic phenomena without explanation of their genesis as unscientific. A scientific theory may not only describe a phenomenon, but it must also be able to explain it. Therefore the particular development of the phenomenon has to be traced and understood.
However, Vygotskij conceptualised humans with the help of a ‘strata model’. The early stages of human evolution are supposed to be accordingly similar to those of their animal relatives. Only language and the use of tools trigger the memorable change which produces humans. According to Vygotskij, this change can also be traced in the ontogenesis of the child, which is why the study of child development is such a priority for him. According to his approach, the phylogenesis can be reconstructed from the individual ontogenesis. Particularly as a result of that he triggered peculiar movements in some streams of contemporary cultural psychology. Meanwhile, in addition to trans-cultural psychology, that form of cultural psychology which is represented through the magazine “Culture & Psychology” has established itself as the most internationally successful. In this periodical there are more and more theories and studies in recent years which are oriented towards Vygotskij (e.g. Zittoun et al, 2003). Paradoxically, this variant of cultural psychology is not first and foremost interested in cultural phenomena or culturally specific developments of human experience and behaviour, but in the manifestation of culture in the individual, which Vygotskij described with the term ‘internalisation’. And so the axiomatic starting point for such a form of cultural psychology is the individual; narrative interviews with individuals as the method of choice reflect this on the methodical level (Josephs, 2002). Furthermore, the research interests of this cultural psychology concentrates on that terrain of ‘mediated action’, which Vygotskij described with ‘use of signs’, and in turn particularly referred to linguistic activities in this connection.
Media-theoretically inspired cultural psychology in Vienna
It is absolutely remarkable that international subjectivist cultural psychology has evolved into a subsequent Vygotskij reception, but hardly comes to terms with his student Luria. His approaches, on the other hand, have been taken up in another theoretical tract — namely in the media theory, and this is in turn reflected in the context of those works which deal with the fundamental differences between cultures characterised orally and in writing (Ong, 1982). Luria consistently continued to pursue the developmental psychological approach of his mentor, but dissociated himself from his fixation with ontogenesis. He is first and foremost interested in the cultural-historical genesis of psychological processes, and even warns against subjectivist psychology.
Cultural psychology in Vienna (Slunecko, 2002, 2003; Slunecko & Hengl, 2006, in print; Ruck & Slunecko, in preparation a, b, c) also concurs in some respects with the form of cultural psychology inspired through Vygotskij. And so it is also obligated to a developmental psychological approach, insofar as developmental psychology is understood as the central placement of the genesis of psychic phenomena. Its research interests are also concentrated on ‘mediated action’. It comprehends the interplay of man and culture as ‘dynamic constitution’ (Slunecko, 2002). And so man and culture neither concur, nor can they be comprehended separately from one another. As soon as a new cultural element is grasped by people, this grasps back and changes the entire previous organisation of the psychological, physical, social and cultural apparatus. It then constitutes the human world of living with all of its previous elements. Viennese cultural psychology ultimately has its own scientific-theoretical characteristic. Psychology itself also emerged from a specific cultural constellation and always carries the premises of its origin with it.
These approaches were originally developed from McLuhan’s media theory (1962), in which case the genesis of psychology has been particularly spelled out as a discipline and the western concept of subjectivity has been spelled out with the help of the media language and writing (Slunecko, 2002; Slunecko & Hengl, 2006, in print). In contrast to international cultural psychology, however, it not only focuses on predominately linguistic or textually constituted use of signs. And so Slunecko (2002) referred to the alienation potential of the medium stone, and subjected this to a detailed study in the transitional field between man and ape.
Moreover, the Austrian reality TV format ‘taxi orange’ has been interpreted as a documentation of a contemporary emotional situation and subjected to a compact description (Slunecko, 2003). Intensified attention is currently paid to the role of images (Ruck & Slunecko, in preparation a, in preparation c; moreover, in the winter semester 2004 and the summer semester 2005 Prof. Dr. Thomas Slunecko held a dissertation seminar pertaining to sociological image interpretation, which was supplemented in the winter semester through a theoretical dissertation seminar pertaining to the role of images in science under the direction of Prof. Dr. Thomas Slunecko and Dr. Michael Huter). But the most momentous difference is shown in the starting point for scientific analyses. Whereas international subjectivist cultural psychology researches the ontogenesis of the individual and intends to find references to cultural processes there, cultural psychology in Vienna turns towards cultural elements themselves, and attempts to read changes of psychic phenomena from these references.
Nora Ruck earned her master’s degree at the University of Vienna and is currently involved in the dissertation phase. In her dissertation work she deals with the concept of the ‘Dialogical Self’. There is a detailed discussion of this work on Thomas Slunecko’s homepage (in German).
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