The book includes a new theoretical synthesis of William Stern’s classic personology published in the 1930s with contemporary cultural psychology of semiotic mediation developed by the author over the last two decades. It looks at the human mind as it operates in its full complexity, starting from the most complex general levels of aesthetic and political participation in society and ending with individual willful actions in everyday life contexts.

“Valsiner’s proposal for a new general psychology which grounds its foundation in semiotics and develops within an epistemological dynamic, integrational and dialogue-based framework is intriguing and challenging. Aspiring to move within fragmentations and towards such a theoretical synthesis, along with the adoption of a methodology allowing the creation of adequate methods and a research evaluation process, could represent the evolutionary change that has not been observed in psychology for too long.” (Raffaele Modugno, Human Arenas, Vol. 5 (4), 2022)

Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. And Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. He has been Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark in 2013-2018 and Professeur invitee at University of Luxembourg (2013-2019).  He has published and edited around 50 books, the most pertinent of which are his monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998),  Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), and Ornamented Lives (Charlotte NC: Information Age, 2019).  He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017, for his interdisciplinary work on human development, as well as Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.