Fighter, Corpsman, Partisan an Attempt to Typify Former Soldiers Based on their Coping and Defense Mechanisms Abstract This work strives to develop a typological classification of the use of conscious and unconscious defense and coping mechanisms based on methodically and structurally collected data from a qualitative survey of 43 former soldiers in Germany. Seven coping and defense types were identified: the Fighter, the Comrade, the Corpsman, the Strategist, the Partisan, the Self-Protector and the Infantryman. The types identified differed with regard to the accumulation, combination, and use of their conscious and unconscious defense and coping mechanisms in the superordinate areas of behaviour, relationships, emotions, reflexivity and time focus. The typological classification could offer psychotherapeutic interventions tailored to individuals and their defense and coping mechanisms, which could lead to improved therapy use and compliance.

Beyond the Anomaly: Where Piaget and Bruner Meet Abstract The aim of this work is to focus on a basic concept in Brunerian narrative theory, that of violation of canonicity, showing how it relates to other basic concepts of cognitive theories such as anomaly, expectation and relationship between constancy and variability. To reach this aim, we will firstly discuss the Piagetian theory, in particular regarding the way in which the child deals with new and interesting events moved from the need to face and produce “spectacles interessantes” by means of experiencing the violation of canonicity. We will also briefly consider some results of neurosciences studies pointing out that the constancy-variability issue is at the base of human development. Secondly, we will show the convergence between Piagetian theory and Brunerian theory of narration, producing some examples of how violation of canonicity can occur in children and adults.

Revisiting Bruner’s Legacy from the Perspective of Historical Materialism Abstract The book Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100: cultivating possibilities (2015) is a celebration and a continuing development of Jerome S. Bruner’s contribution in psychology. As a review of this book, this article aims to commemorate Bruner’s legacy by developing it further. The main content of the book is summarized into four issues: culture and language, narrative and folk psychology, dilemmas and shared dilemmas, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Hegel’s contribution to ‘social reality’ and Karl Marx’s historical materialism are introduced to discuss the relation between the individual and his world, which is fundamental in Bruner’s psychological inquiry and also a key question underlying the four issues. In the horizon of the ontological revolution launched by historical materialism, the difference between sensuous consciousness and pure consciousness and the dynamic process of social discourse interweaving sensuous consciousness and ideology is discussed and revisited. By integrating nature and society on the dimension of historicity, historical materialism can inspire psychology to understand the historical construction of human existence.

Bruner and Beyond: a Commentary Abstract The philosophy of Bruner transcends traditional boundaries in the study of the human mind with a new kind of psychology, one that frees the thinking mind from its opposition to feelings and also from the limitations of being considered an ‘inside-the-head’ phenomenon. It is with active engagement with the outside world that a child develops its understanding. In this engagement with the outside world, the developmental construction of thought is actively created through the use of symbols. The cultural context, images, and languages a person experiences are thus considered to be formative in thinking. Opposing the notion of readiness, Bruner believed children to be capable of complex thought, and the dynamics of these developments were guided by meaning-making. The significance of meaning in Psychology was resurrected in his writing. Furthermore, the notion of narrative as constructive in facilitating the organisation and management of mental processes is invaluable. In this article, we bring a commentary on two articles, one that relates to the study of scaffolding of emotion regulation by parents of adolescents and the other on the narrative understanding of selfhood of individuals with autism.

Beyond the Text Given: Studying the Scaffolding of Narrative Emotion Regulation as a Contribution to Bruner and Feldman’s Cultural Cognitive Developmental Psychology Abstract Feldman et al. (Human Development, 36, 327-342, 1993) called for a new kind of psychology, a cultural cognitive developmental psychology. We critically consider their initial studies to discuss the scope of their program. In the spirit of this program we explore the development of scaffolding of narrative emotion regulation in adolescence. We present two co-narrations of sad events between mothers and their 12- and 18-year-old offspring to exemplify these mothers’ age-sensitive strategies to scaffold adolescents’ narrative emotion regulation. We identified three kinds of narrative arguments which mothers used for scaffolding and which are apparently acquired only in the course of adolescence: Embedding events in extended temporal, biographical contexts, relating events and reactions to individuals’ enduring personalities, and re-appraising events by including more others’, external, and hypothetical perspectives. They confirm developmental observations made by Feldman et al. (Human Development, 36, 327-342, 1993) and demonstrate their utility in the context of the development of emotion regulation.

Children as Investigators of Brunerian “Possible Worlds”. The Role of Narrative Scenarios in children’s Argumentative Thinking Abstract Referring to the notion of “possible worlds”, the paper aims to investigate an intriguing aspect of children’s thinking: the function that play narrative scenarios in sharing with other partners (peers and adults) the child’s understanding of the physical and social reality. The idea of possible worlds to which this work relates, can be considered in some way as the legacy of Piaget’s pioneering research on symbolic thinking, currently referred in Harris’s perspective as “work of imagination”. Over the past few decades now, the notion of possible worlds has supported a new representation of the child’s thinking that is based on the idea that imagination allows children to explore alternative and multiple versions of reality. Among other things, imagination permits to the child to use sophisticated forms of causal reasoning and understanding of the rules of social life. By reconsidering a part of the literature on “possible worlds” and presenting two empirical observations, this paper wants to draw attention to the central role played by explorative thinking in child’s argumentative activities. Angelo, the three-year-old who is the protagonist of the episode reported, is a child like many: constantly relating to the social world, attentive to what is happening around him and, in particular, to the events in which he finds himself involved. Surprisingly equipped to position himself and act in the routines that he knows, but also capable of adopting effective strategies with respect to events that he cannot foresee and that are built constantly, and in a manner situated during interpersonal events. From a certain point of view, he acts in a competent way in the present, but thanks to previous experiences he seems equally ready to anticipate the activities that follow each other in the many scenarios of reality and fiction of which his daily experience is made up. In the example above, Angelo shows a precise interpretation of the situation (evidently based on previous experiences) and provides a solidly argued answer to his mother’s request. The reference to the socio-material context fully supports his argument with the use of a perceptive fact that is difficult to contest. As highlighted by the short sequence presented, the dialogue between Angelo and his mother undoubtedly takes on the characteristics of an argumentative activity. As in a court debate, the child/lawyer explores the relationships with the other participants, offering to the jury “material” evidence. This will allow him both to challenge his mother’s point of view and to defend his own authoritatively. To give an account of the variety of thinking strategies that Angelo exhibits and also to illustrate the exploratory function of argumentation in children, this paper will explore the idea that during social interaction each participant builds narrative versions of the world from his own point of view. As Bruner (2002) wrote, possible worlds offer the possibility of throwing new light on the “real” world. On a theoretical level, this rapid exchange in the family can be defined as an illustration of sophisticated thinking activities (partly argumentative) in a three-year-old child. In fact, only a few sequences of observation of the unstoppable activities of Angelo are sufficient, as they are of any other child in everyday life situations, to obtain a large number of useful elements to understand the active role of younger generations in challenging the rules of social worlds and in reproducing and creating new cultural forms during social interactions (Corsaro 1997). More specifically, this paper aims to showcase firstly how this way of acting in the physical and social reality emerges early in children’s development, especially in situations where they have to defend their point of view or try to convince someone to do something. Secondly, it wants to show that these early thinking strategies are displayed by children mainly as activities of exploration of narrative scenarios (possible worlds) that emerge during social interactions. In order to answer these central questions for the study of thinking in children, this paper will a) analyse the notion of “possible worlds” as Bruner refers to it, b) present two transcripts of social interactions that allow clear examples of the children’s thinking activity, and c) discuss studies that support the acceptance of early cognitive activity in children and the multipurpose and flexible nature of child’s learning capacities (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1998).

Language Games and Social Cognition: Revisiting Bruner Abstract This paper discusses the notion of language games as cultural practices in children’s early linguistic and socio-cognitive development. First, we trace the emergence of this concept in Jerome Bruner’s experimental and theoretical work at Oxford University in the 1960s, work that was informed by the thinking of Wittgenstein and Austin, amongst others. Second, we provide a systematic historical account of how Bruner has influenced more recent research traditions in developmental psychology, especially in the field of social cognition. Finally, we hone in on one specific approach within this field developed by the Laboratory for Developmental and Educational Studies in Psychology at the University of Milano Bicocca.

Beyond the Meaning Given. The Meaning as Explanandum Abstract The paper starts from the recognition of Bruner’s contribution to the development of psychological science. It is claimed here that to proceed in that direction requires the building of an analytical notion of meaning. This analytical notion should distinguish between meaning-making and sensemaking, namely between the processes of elaboration and use of meaning (meaning-making) and the processes that makes the meaning emerge to be lived as psychological reality (sense-making). In order to discuss this distinction, two main issues are addressed – the limit of the hypostatized view of meaning and the dynamics of presentification through which meaning is endowed with value of life. These two issues are complementary – together they push psychology to search for a theoretical and methodological framework where meaning can be investigated as an emergent psychological phenomenon, and not only taken for granted as a premise.

Contemporary Dialogues between Rorty’s Pragmatism and Cultural Psychology: a Reading of Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100 Abstract The book Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities immerses the reader in an epistemic, historical, and affective portrait delivered by authors from various fields and distinct perspectives on Bruner’s work, in celebration of his hundredth birthday. If, on the one hand, it is possible to say that Bruner’s life story intertwines with the history of Psychology itself, on the other hand, it is possible to recognise the author as a great ironist, according to Rorty’s perspective, in his way of approaching the transformation process in psychological science. The present paper constructs a pragmatics dialogue with Bruner’s Cultural Psychology discussing contemporary Western society in its way of understanding cultural diversity and communality citizenship. In times of media customisation and the fluid and agile environment of virtual communities, bubbles have become arenas for the reification of beliefs and meanings based on validation by peers and not by the dialectical, transformative tension towards their possible opposites. The present discussion builds up a reflection concerning possible affective-semiotics process in contemporary culture, highlighting Bruner’s grammar on intersubjectivity and narrative interpretation of reality on the basis of Rorty’s pragmatics-ethical philosophy.

A Different Conversation: Psychological Research and the Problem of Self in Autism Abstract Observations about peculiarities in the autistic population concerning type and frequency of references to subjective states, and lack of perspective taking, have been on the whole referred to as the paradox of the autistic self, i.e. a co-presence of ego-centeredness and weak self-referentiality (Lombardo & Baron Cohen 2010). Prevalent approaches in autism ascribe these peculiarities to high order disfunctions caused by neurological factors, such as defective self-encoding processes. Two narratives told by an adult man with Asperger during counselling are examined with Conversation Analysis; the analysis identifies features that may lead to descriptions like the paradox of autistic self, but also reveals competences related to perspective-taking and narrative construction. Drawing on Bruner’s narrative theory, as well on recent interactional research on autism and the psychology of self, it is suggested that a relatively limited practice with narrative co-construction might be at the origin of the peculiarities observed. A socio-developmental approach to the understanding of autism not only can provide explanations compatible with first and second person accounts of life with autism, but can also open new paths for researching ways of self-construction that are less reliant on social interaction. The article finally challenges assumptions in psychological research about the ability of humans to access their internal states, and discusses how such assumptions can deter understanding of atypical populations.