This book provides an overview and discussion of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics
(CPSD) as a general developmental science. It discusses the challenging interplay between the
sophisticated abstract concept of a holistic-dynamic understanding of the psyche and the
concrete human experience. Chapters begin by framing the specific topics discussed in the book
and elaborating on the border zone in between individual and collective-societal meanings.
Subsequent chapters and a final conclusion discuss CPSC as an abstractive conceptual
enterprise. The book is divided into sections each beginning with a chapter written by Jaan
Valsiner. The individual sections focus on (I) the nature of psyche as a semiotic constructive
process (II) the primacy of affect as semiotic constructive processes highlighting the role
of the sublime as a border between mundane and aesthetic experience and (III) the ambivalent
core of the human mind marked by the constructive and destructive semiosis for encountering
the sublime as locus of novelty emergence. Cultural Psychology as Basic Science will be of
interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and professors in the
fields of psychology anthropology history philosophy and research branches of the social
sciences.
