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5 - The topography of intersubjective space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Benjamin Bradley
Benjamin Bradley
Affiliation:
Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
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Summary

(a) behaviour has to be derived from a totality of coexisting facts, (b) these coexisting facts have the character of a ‘dynamic field’ in so far as the state of any part of this field depends on every other part of the field. The proposition (a) includes the statement that we have to deal in psychology, too, with a manifold, the interrelations of which cannot be represented without the concept of space.

(Kurt Lewin, 1943, ‘Defining the “Field at a Given Time”’, p. 45)

What is the first thing we should assume in the science of the mind? What is our basic unit of analysis? Is it the solitary individual: ‘I think therefore I am’? Or is it ‘we’ : people in relation? Is the mind primarily solitary? Or does mental life first and foremost emerge from togetherness? Should the brain be conceived as a self-sufficient, self-generating organ? Or do brains only function to their fullest when in conjunction with other brains? Are humans essentially social? Or is my mind an island, entire unto itself?

We first arrived at the need to conceive the psyche as existing in intersubjective space by drawing conclusions from the way in which the world has significance for us above and beyond the information available to our senses. These conclusions were reinforced by the implications of social theory and complexity theory for the supra-individual orderliness of experience.

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Psychology and Experience , pp. 81 - 112
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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