Chapter 6: Integrated and Integrating Experiences: Proust’s Art of Life and van Gennep’s Rites of Passage as Scenes for “Integrating Experiences” à la Zittoun and Gillespie

This article responds to Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie’s (henceforth Z&G) impressive and stimulating paper “Integrating experiences: body and mind moving between contexts.” In Psychology without foundations,Steve Brown and I (2009) bemoaned the lack of experientially grounded theoretical imagination amongst contemporary psychologists. We suggested that the discipline has grown old before its time by shirking necessary theoretical risks in favor of safe conceptual imitations and dull methodological repetitions. Z&G have supplied a breath of fresh air. They have grasped the nettle of the core psychosocial problem of integration and synthesis and in so doing they have not shrunk from tackling head-on the two binaries which have plagued the discipline since its inception (that between mind and body and that between person and society). Not only this, they have illustrated the fecundity of their approach by way of an immensely rich case study of the life story provided by “June” in her wartime (WWII) contributions to the U.K. Mass Observation Archive. That their approach builds upon inspirations from Cultural Psychology is testimony to the worth of that sub-field as a fertile space of possibilities.