A Human Through the Prism of Jointness. The Possibility of a General Psychology

Abstract

The paper raises the question of the possibility of creating a general psychological field of research. The condition for the beginning of such research is a sufficiently complete general model of psychological phe­nomena. The assumption is made that the work of identifying suitable psychological universals has already been done as a part of cultural-historical psychology. We summarised the investigations, starting with L.S. Vygotsky’s idea of a psychological “unit”. With the help of some modern theories, the assumption is substantiated that joint meaning field is the essence of the human in man. The history of the “integral unit of the human lifeworld” construction in the F.E. Vasilyuk’s school and its transformation into a scheme of jointness is described. By analysing F.E. Vasilyuk's notion of “experiencing”, the activity-dialogical model of jointness is extrapolated and filled with “meaning”. This model is proposed as a suitable tool for generalis­ing psychological knowledge. An assumption is made about resonance as a fundamental mechanism of joint­ness formation. In this paper we describe the properties of the prism of jointness and question its sufficiency for the beginning of general psychological research.