From Cultural Psychology to GeroPsychology

How Is Geropsychology Culturally Possible?

The emergence of the new field of geropsychology is possible only at the intersection of processes that construct cultural meaning and recognize life-course transitions in developmental psychology. Figure 1 is a simplified scheme about three possible assumptions concerning life course.

First, traditional developmental psychology, which concerned itself with child and adolescent development into adulthood, failed to take interest in the developmental processes at the end of human life. Once the child had become an adult, she or he would be seen remaining such until death. Thus, development over the whole life course was not emphasized – even if it was not denied. This standpoint is an example of a specific cultural model of the course of human life – development to (and throughout) adulthood as a fixed being free of further development. Under that condition, any notion of geropsychology would be impossible, seeing that the psychological issues of the old age are believed to be continuous over the whole period of a monotonous adulthood.

Geropsychology becomes possible in turn when we adopt the nonmonotonic adult life course cultural model, which assumes either a positive course (“adults” become “elders”) or a negative course (“adults” become “elderly”; see Figure 1).

In all of human history, regardless of the society, it is the older-aged persons whose accumulated life wisdom becomes appreciated and trusted in communal and often political decision-making. The role of elders is systematically of interest in cultural anthropology as well. At the same time, such accumulated wisdom can be accompanied by a decline in physical functions and sometimes by mental decline. Old-age people become recognized as the “elderly” – with the -erly marking the inherent ambivalence of their status in the eyes the other (“not-yet-elderly”) persons related to them. The elderly need care from the “nonelderly”, while elders play the role of giving care (advice, support, ...) for both the “elderly” and “nonelderly.” Clearly, language use here reflects the cultural organization of people of age in their different social roles.

What Is Care and How Does It Figure in Geropsychology?

Care is a multifaceted phenomenon manifesting distinct aspects at different levels of the socioecological context including the individual, the microlevel, and the macrolevel. It is an act that some agent, whether an individual, a group, or a social institution, undertakes in relation to some other agent (including oneself, i.e., “self-care”) with the insertion of the positive value of the act itself. So, an act that can be depicted as

X does Y to Z with the consequences Q and P

becomes represented as

X cares for Z by doing Y, with the consequences Q and P.

It is precisely at the junction of this representation where the social ideologies of caring and the psychological, health-related, sociological, political, legal, and historical sciences meet. Doing Y is no longer simply doing Y, but means caring for somebody by way of doing Y. I need to get something done in my enterprise, so I hire Z to do it for me. Z gets a salary from me. I now present my profit-oriented act of hiring Z as actually my act of caring for society (and for Z and his family ...) by creating new jobs in the fragile economy. I have performed an act of caring while also satisfying my needs as an entrepreneur. Everyone wins, and I get the credit for being a caring entrepreneur.

The Universality of Caring

Doing and caring meet in the field of real-life practices: Parents care for their children, children eventually begin to care for their ailing parents, insurance companies care for their anxious customers (for a profit, of course), governments care for their citizens, and religious institutions insist that their particular deities care for the “true believers.” So care is everywhere in human societies.

Interestingly, care is always positive in its connotations, even if it involves acts of destroying the status quo. A successful act of surgery – the destruction of a tumor – is part of care for the patient’s health. The positive nature of the notion of care is based on the positive view of the future goals; at least some of the future consequences (Q or P) have to warrant act Y being implemented now. Eradication of a dangerous disease now is an act of care toward future generations.

In most societies there exist obligatory attitudes toward the elders once their health has become fragile. In Europe, spouses form another important group of family-carers of older people. Although this is often found to be the case, intergenerational care – care by younger people, usually of their own offspring – receives much more attention. The element of “obligation” or “debt” is strongly imposed on the next generation, thereby constructing care as a collective rather than an individual exercise. In tales of care for a spouse, since the focus is on care by a network of shared responsibility, separating the spouse is not commonly encountered. The notion of spouse is a cultural invention focusing on the supposed equality of marriage partners, a doubtable assumption in occidental societies and rarely observable in real life.

What Is Culture?

The notion of culture has had a long history in social thought. Two basic models have been used to bring that notion to the social sciences, and the difference between them has created a large divide in our knowledge bases.

Persons Belonging to Culture

Culture has been used to designate some group of people who “belong together” by valuing some shared features (Figure 2). Thus, all Norwegians, for example, “belong together” since they share a common language (which is only approximately true, given that there are actually two Norwegian languages) and happen to also be citizens of the same country. The Welsh “belong together” as they share the common heritage of language, music, and the area of the British Isles where they have always lived. Yet they do not form a separate country. The Basques or Catalans “belong together” by way of their shared language and customs, but not by the countries (Spain or France) in which they are situated. At the same time, the countries they are separated from “belong together” in the newly constituted conglomerate – the European Union. There, Germany is one of the major partners sharing membership in that social unit – having been disunited itself until 1870 (and again between 1945 and 1989). Each picture of unity, whether of a country, an ethnic or language group, etc., represents a case of its opposite (disunity) being embedded.

Where are the individual persons in this picture of culture? They “belong to” a culture. This form of making sense of person and culture (a per-son “belongs to” a particular culture) simultaneously denotes the commonality of such belonging (the descriptive, or classificatory, role of the use of the term) and some, generally unspecified, causal system that guarantees the relative similarity of all the persons who “belong to” the given culture. This meaning prevails in cross-cultural psychology and is consistent with the way anthropologists use the term as well as laypersons’ everyday conception of the term.

The Social Representation Theory (SRT)

SRT is an idea of Romanian-French social psychologist Serge Moscovici (1925–2014) who in late 1950s wrote a doctoral thesis on the ways in which ideas of psychoanalysis were being used in the public discourses in France. In his own words,

As such, social representations are meaning complexes that entail simultaneously abstract and often abbreviated generalizations (themata, Moscovici & Vignaux, 2001) together with socially proliferated added value to the complexes. The notions of elders and elderly are examples of such abbreviated themata: The moment we select which of the terms we use in our discourse, the immediately linked social representations of care, advice, help, honoring, etc., are all evoked in our psyche – all of which come with socially defined imperative directions for feelings toward the indicated old persons.

Representations are social in three concurrent ways (Moscovici, 2001, p. 153):

1. 1.
   They are impersonal, i.e., considered to belong to everyone.
2. 2.
   They are representations of the others, i.e., considered to belong to other people.
3. 3.
   They are personal (idiomorphic, Wagner, 1994, p. 211), i.e., felt affectively to belong to the ego.

The simultaneous presence of the personal and impersonal in the case of social representations is not a breach of logic, but a new way to look at how to build conceptual bridges between the societal and personal meaning systems. Each and every person is simultaneously old and young, and these two social representations are mutually tied, changing their relative position over the course of life. Societally speaking, a 19-year-old might not be “old enough” to rent a car, but is “old enough” to be recruited into the army. The 19-year-young person may feel she is “old enough” to drive a car.

The phenomenology of old age is filled with the use of such social representations that operate simultaneously at the societal level, in interpersonal relations, and in intrapersonal self-dialogs. A seemingly neutral, ordinary question such as “When are you going to retire?” – situated somewhere within the societal themata of the “staircase” of life-course images and legal systems of a given country – may get a defiant response “When God retires, so will I.” It is, of course, followed by the internal angry comment toward the person asking: “How can he imply that I am old and should retire!” The societal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal relations are united in the use of social representations at all levels, albeit with different values added to them (e.g., retirement is good versus retirement is awful). The work of social representations is inherently dialogical (Marková, 2003) and thus connects with the second selected field of cultural psychology, namely, that of dialogical self theory.

The Dialogical Self Theory (DST)

DST is one of the most active subfields of cultural psychology. It has been constructed from the traditional personality and motivation theories and practices of psychotherapy to become a unique theoretical system (Hermans, 2001, 2002; Hermans & Gieser, 2012; Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2009). The core of this system lies in recognizing the presence of a dialog in seemingly fixed statements. When a person states “I am happy,” this is not a monological statement about an ontological state (my-being-happy) but a statement about a dialog I am happy <> I am unhappy → “I am happy.”

Why do persons make such statements? When human beings make statements, they enlighten their dialogical self-processes. We live forward – toward the future – and our dialogs about who we are (ontological stance) are actually held with the states of who we no longer are (“I was unhappy ... now I am happy”) or expect to be (”I am happy ... but it cannot last”). The irreversibility of time is the absolute determiner of the impossibility of a static ontological look.

The DST is a holistic, structural perspective that divides the complex whole, labeled “the self,” into functional subparts of at least a two-dimensional spatial spread of mutually related components (“I-positions”) that can relocate within the given space-time field. Each of the positions is related to the voices – a term borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) which has made it possible for psychologists to return to recognizing multiple relations between parts within the whole. The DS is a “multivoiced self” within which the person is an active agent that can transcend the here-and-now context through imagination to “act as if he or she were the other” (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992, p. 29) – and as if she or he were in a different setting. The structural scheme of the DS is usually given in some version of the scheme shown in Figure 3 (according to Hermans, 2001, p. 253, redrawn here for our specific use).

The different locations of I-positions on the map are selectively related:

What is the main goal in the lives of human beings? DST has a clear answer to that question: The person is constantly involved in the construction, relocation, and reconstruction of I-positions. Such positions:

Thus, we have a two-layer system: Each I-position (theoretical abstraction) creates a “voice” (a quasitheoretical entity, both phenomenologically graspable and theoretically usable), which relates to other “voices” (linked with other I-positions).

The dialogical relations in DST also happen over time. Within the field of I-positions, one can imaginatively move to a future point in time and then speak to oneself about the sense of “what I am doing now in my present situation.” This position, at some point in the future, may be very helpful to help me to evaluate my present activities from a long-term perspective. With increasingly age, the person’s future-oriented self-dialogs become reorganized by the imaginary timespan still left to live as well as constrained by current health conditions. Simultaneously, the person is forced into a dialog with the system of social expectations (“Our grandfather is now old enough to retire” versus “I am young enough to keep on working”). Changes in living conditions such as downsizing one’s life-long living quarters or moving to a “retirement community” are further ruptures in one’s life-course which become arenas for dispute within the self <> society dialogs. The microlevel process of such dialogs is catered by the continuous creation of sign hierarchies, which is the domain of the theory of cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics.

Theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (CPSD)

CPSD is a semiotic perspective whose central concept is that of a sign (something that presents something else in some capacity). In abstract terms, Figure 4 depicts the functioning of signs within the human psyche. Any human act is made meaningful by some sign that regulates one’s conduct. Someone stumbles, regains balance, and thinks within themselves “I am getting old.” The meaning of old now regulates the person’s exploration of the environment.

Signs play double role in the organization of the ongoing flow of experience, that of giving form to the immediate ways of “being in the world,” as well as producing feed-forward orientation for the indeterminate future. The crucial feature of signs-in-action (or signs-not-leading-to action, i.e., inhibitory signs) is their operation at the borderline of the past and the future, within the time moment we call present. This distinction is created by inserting a borderline – the state of the present – into the ongoing flow of experience (duration).

This borderline (the present) represents a minimal time period between the past and the future. It becomes an abstract anchor point, an infinitely small time moment that we abstractly project onto our ever-proceeding duration, relative to which the past and the future can be defined. As all our concepts are signs we have created ourselves, so are the related meanings of the past, the present, and the future. These meanings constitute a triplet in cogenetic logic (Herbst, 1995): They can exist only together, and they depend upon the borderline (the present) having been established. If the notion of the present is not established, then no notion of the past or the future is possible.

But how can a sign, emerging and functioning in the here-and-now, regulate the future – which is in principle not knowable in advance? And remember that the sign used in the here-and-now may be abandoned after its usefulness has expired. I posit that signs set up feed-forward signals of approximate kinds (Figure 5) that catalyze the possible events during the person’s life course. These approximate signs are hypergeneralized, field-like signs – “semiotic clouds” of a kind – that are retranslated into new signs in the future. That future retranslation (contextualization) is posited to happen by setting up catalytic conditions for future experiences (Cabell & Valsiner, 2014). The signs created today and for the purposes of today do not “cause” a future event in one’s experience. Rather, they set up the “framework” for such experiences, e.g., the demand that at mealtimes children “wash your hands!” is expected to instill the hypergeneralized and internalized feeling for “I need to be clean,” which in turn translates into specific future contexts as a catalytic condition. Not only are people then likely to self-direct themselves to performing cleansing rituals, but they are also likely to metaphorically extend the deep need for meaning beyond the immediate routine (“moral cleanliness”).

The mechanism posited for organizing the – in principle unknowable – future by signs being made in the present is that of forward-oriented hypergeneralization. Signs made to function in the here-and-now (S in Figure 5) become not merely generalized (e.g., the sign S may become generalized into generic concept of “S-ness”: “this way of acting here-and-now is immoral” → the concept of morality <> nonmorality in generic terms). In the geropsychological domain, the planning of one’s own funeral arrangements is a rich arena for cultural-psychological investigation.

“S-ness” is a category created by the meaning-maker. It feeds further into even more general (hypergeneralized) state of the sign (hypergeneralized anticipatory sign) that makes the person generally prepared to face future concrete situations where the given meaning system (encoded into field-like signs of infinite borders, and therefore of total “take-over” of the human mind) may become applicable. The process of hypergeneralization involves the centrality of affective marking of the feeling into (in German Einfühlung) the anticipated situation. The rational discourse about the issues (“justice,” “morality,” “patriotism,” etc.) end at hypergeneralization, while the affective imperative (“I just feel I should act in this way in this situation”) begins to prevail. The generalized rational worldview becomes nonrationally fortified by deep affective imperatives for “being-in-the-world” as well as “being-beyond-the world.” All projections of the human mind beyond the end of one’s lifetime are results of semiotic mediation.