Abstract
Psychological phenomena take place at the border between person and environment. Indeed, psychology as a whole may be seen as a science of human liminal constructions, a science concerned with the dynamic relationships that exist between people and what surrounds them and with the constant border crossing that defines the arena within which all human development takes place. From this perspective, the central question becomes: how do humans deal with such transitions throughout the course of their lives? Cultural psychology offers a way of addressing, theoretically and empirically, the epistemological and social dimensions of this question. In addition, we argue that mereotopology—the theory of the relations of part to whole and of part to part within a whole—provides a conceptual framework of enormous potential for appreciating its unexplored ontological underpinnings, thus contributing to the foundations of psychology as a developmental science of the inherent uncertainty that accompanies all individual and social becoming.
The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science to be as vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can; and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the development of every science, a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility
(William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, p. 6).
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Marsico, G., Varzi, A.C. (2016). Psychological and Social Borders: Regulating Relationships. In: Valsiner, J., Marsico, G., Chaudhary, N., Sato, T., Dazzani, V. (eds) Psychology as the Science of Human Being. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21094-0_19
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