Chapter 19: Temporality and Generalization in Psychology: Time as Context

“How many times must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” I paraphrase the famous Bob Dylan song to introduce the topic of this chapter: time is not a given natural event nor a solipsistic experience; rather it is the socially constructed context of human psychological life. This context is made of both synchronic and diachronic continuities and discontinuities (Tateo & Iannaccone, 2011). It is constructed at different levels, corresponding to the progressive distance from the individual immediate experience. I will draw a model based on the hints from Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (1979, 2004) and Doise’s levels of explication (1986), in which time is considered at different levels (microtime, mesotime, esotime, and macrotime). For a long time, psychology put aside the time dimension from its field of interest (Valsiner, 2011), as far as time is a complex problem to deal with. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea developed that the individual psychological experience of time does not necessarilycorrespond to the actual temporal displacement of events. For instance, Benussi (1913) observed the phenomenon of temporal displacement. He provided evidence that “a series of events, which are therefore in sequence on a physical time gradient, does not necessarily correspond to the series of events that inhabit phenomenal time” (Sinico, 1999, p. 75). Also, William James described the psychological experience of time as synthetic apprehension, in which past and future join to produce the experience of