Chapter 10: Kierkegaard, Kitchen, Complementarity and Cultural Psychology: A Thought Experiment

Cultural psychology is to be regarded as an alternative in psychology. Valsiner’s paper on “Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key” is an example of this. How important this is, is probably not to be easily noticed, because cultural psychology is apparently both marginal and modest. But in fact this lecture, and Valsiner’s extensive intellectual activity for some decades, represents an epistemological change in the understanding of psychology in general. The provided understanding can be summarized in different ways, but based on this paper, one version could be: “the unification of stability and instability by means of complementarity.” These thoughts are not completely new, yet they have rather formed a type of undercurrent in the development of the intellectual modernity for the last 300 years. What can be regarded as new however is rather the fact that the substantial consequences of this undercurrent are brought up to the surface. In this respect, Denmark and its intellectual history has played an important, but slightly ignored role in the effort of shaping this undercurrent.