Chapter 4: The Semiotic Forms of Continuity and Discontinuity in the Narrative Process: The Psychological Tension Between the Idiographic and the Nomothetic

The intense dialogue and work in recent years offered by the Yearbook of Idiographic Sciences Series—edited by Salvatore and Valsiner—has marked an important international milestone: to bring attention back to the relevance of idiography for the scientific development of psychology. This editorial effort has shown that it is not a question of ideological opposition against the nomothetic approach but of seeking forms of fertile interweaving between idiographic and nomothetic approaches. Dialectically, we can say that one exists because the other exists, that is to say that the two approaches are not at all disjoint but belong to the same tension whose extremes are made up of two ideal and impossible forms. Within this continuum, there are many variations, and they are not definitive choices assumed by the researchers. They are often different phases and passages of the same cognitive, epistemic, and theoretical path. Each of us continuously reorganizes one’s own research work by focusing both general and particular perspectives on phenomena.