Biographical Ruptures and Their Repair

Biographical Ruptures and their Repair: Cultural Transitions in Development represents the efforts of bridging theoretical, methodological, and practice oriented issues revolving around the notion of biographical ruptures and their repairs from cultural psychological perspectives in order to bring novel understandings to the debateof what it means to be a developing human being in an ever changing world.

While persons develop in their every day interactions, they are bound to experience different forms of ruptures, which then must be managed individually. Contrary to mainstream psychology ruptures and repairs are here not necessarily understood as a personal experience, which then must be overcome through various coping strategies, but rather as an experience, which necessarily emerges out of the complex interrelatedness of intra-psychological, inter-personal, and societal processes. Moving along these different levels of analysis, each of the 13 chapters of this book contributes to the general cultural psychological understanding of ruptures from their own particular standpoint. The notion of ruptures and their repairs are thus discussed from e.g. classical developmental psychological theories, while following chapters then challenge such developmental approaches. Ruptures in relation to racial interpellations are discussed using the documentary method and these analyses are then further developed in a following chapter with social representations theory. On the object level ruptures are pointed to within popular music videos to further develop the documentary method, which is then taken up in another chapter and discussed from a Ganzheitspsychological approach.

The current book thus does not only represent a conglomerate of various theoretical, methodological, or practice oriented approaches to ruptures and their repairs, each adding with their own expertise a little part to a better understand of the phenomenon in its whole. It further demonstrated a lively debate between leading specialists and practitioners from different disciplines and countries discussing theoretical and methodological issues, but also ethical and moral ones, each from their own cultural psychological viewpoint. This book will interest anyone who is interested biographical rupture and their repairs from a cultural psychological, developmental, social psychological, or psychotherapeutic viewpoint.