Chapter 18: Temporality and the Challenge to Genetic Cultural Psychology

(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865/1998, p. 155)

Time as it relates to psychology and culture refers not just to our human experience of temporality but also to the understanding of psychology as genesis. The so-called genetic method in psychology is intrinsically connected with the pioneering work of such figures as James Mark Baldwin, Heinz Werner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, but has received inspiration from a long tradition of genetic, historical, and expressivist thought, through the writing of Giovanni Battista Vico, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Fried-rich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to mention only some of the most influential thinkers whoeach in their own way saw time as an immanent structure of life. To take a genetic approach in psychology is to understand “the psyche” or psychological “stuff ” inherently in terms of time or temporality. As such, “genetic psychology” is not merely that subdiscipline of psychology that concerns itself with human development. Rather, it is a perspective on the psychological discipline as a whole, which holds that psychological phenomena, because of their inherently historical nature, require understanding in terms of their genesis or becoming. Both Kant and Goethe already saw a natural connection between the formative principles involved in cultural and artistic expression and the organism as the expression of a nonreducible whole. Yet, within developmental biology, the study of such processes as cell differentiation, morphogenesis, and metamorphosis would soon take a largely mechanistic route, while—perhaps with the notable exception of Cassirer’s work on symbolic forms (Cassirer, 1923/1953, 1925/1955, 1929/1957)—this link would be largely forgotten as well within the cultural and human sciences. Yet, while developmental sociology or developmental anthropology would never really come off the ground, the aforementioned pioneers kept the genetic method alive as a small but significant undercurrent in psychology.