The best way to characterise the pleasure of thinking is to retrace its development. Chapter 2 thus approaches the pleasure of thinking from the perspective of developmental psychology. After a presentation of the meta-theoretical frame of a sociocultural, constructivist, developmental approach, the chapter first presents the classical observations made by Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget, both of whom identified manifestations of pleasure in young children. Second, the chapter examines the literature based on close analysis of parent-infant observations, which shows that from 3 or 4 months of age, children may experience playfulness, a shared pleasure in humorous situations, and the positive experience of being the author of their actions. Third, it presents literature on curiosity, humour, and interests in the preschool years, which reveals that children’s curiosity can be cultivated into interests. In school years, fourth, pleasure is often considered at the margin of the classroom, but also in relation to mathematics and, incidentally, in interactions. In the final section, the chapter rereads longitudinal data, retracing the conditions in which children may develop pleasure in learning and thinking.

Thinking encompasses a very wide range of phenomena. Chapter 6 first comes back to a study focused on the pleasure of thinking itself. Pleasure is then examined in three modes of thinking: sense-making, reasoning, and daydreaming. Second, as acts of thinking are always situated in specific activities and anchored in various domains of experience, the chapter distinguishes various domains of knowledge: all are complex semiotic systems, culturally mediated, which can be more or less culturally shared and formalised. Third, the chapter examines trajectories of thinking in many systems of knowledge, formal or informal; starting with daily modes of thinking and their pleasures, it examines the pleasures of thinking in professional thinkers before exploring a specific form of sense-making connected to personal experiences. Altogether, this chapter shows that trajectories of thinking are dynamic and that they intermesh elements from a diversity of knowledge systems, moving along various modalities of pleasure.

This chapter adopts a longitudinal perspective on the evolution of activities of thinking in different domains, following people’s engagements; it thus gives a glimpse into the evolution of pleasures of thinking in the course of life. First, it examines specific trajectories of engagements and shows how the pleasure of thinking may have played a key role in people’s choice to maintain and pursue an interest, chosen or accidentally met, for instance in gardening or in billiards. Second, it retraces the trajectories of thinking and their pleasure in long-term, lifecourse commitments, for instance in the lives of Kurt Lewin and Henri Tajfel. Finally, based on recent interviews and observational data, the chapter explores the development of the pleasure of thinking in older people.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

In order to theorise the pleasure of thinking, this book builds on sociocultural psychology. Chapter 4 first goes back to Lev Vygotsky’s propositions on thinking, which open possible ways to address affects in thinking. In the second part, it explores the work of three contemporary theoreticians, all building a semiotic cultural psychology: Jaan Valsiner, who has developed the Vygotskian heritage into a new and creative semiotic cultural psychology, notably drawing on Charles Peirce and open dynamic system theory; Sergio Salvatore, whose semio-dynamic approach also draws on psychoanalysis; and Yair Neuman, who pursues this dialogue with biology and the sciences in his computational cultural psychology. These innovative, albeit demanding, approaches will give us the elements to build a more integrative theoretical framework in the next chapter.

This concluding chapter sums up the main findings of this exploration of the pleasures of thinking. If there is something that can be fundamentally playful and enjoyable in thinking, alone or with others, then our theories of mind need to be built in such a way that affects are already part of what makes our thoughts thinkable. Such a way of understanding thinking also grounds it in our bodies, our relationships, and the world in which we live. Second, the chapter questions for the last time the implications of this pleasure: is all pleasure in thinking good? And what about unpleasure? This calls for ethical reflection, which eventually leads to a defence of pleasure in thinking. Third, the chapter explores some implications of this stance and, in particular, directions for promoting the pleasure of thinking. Finally, it emphasises the contribution of these propositions to a sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse and indicates how this could be further explored.

Many people have had the experience of thinking with pleasure, or of the pleasure of thinking, but can we substantiate the idea that thinking can be pleasurable? This first chapter explores non-psychological productions to search for evidence of the pleasure of thinking in the visual arts, in philosophy – mainly in the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt - and in the self-writing of a few authors, among them Sigmund Freud and the novelist Chaim Potok. This enables to identify five modalities of the pleasure of thinking. The chapter then poses the theoretical frame for the book, a sociocultural and developmental psychology, and highlights its ontological and epistemological axioms. Two concepts are defined: on the one hand, the concepts of thinking, including reasoning, sense-making, and daydreaming; on the other hand, the concept of pleasure. The methodology used for the book is then exposed – an abductive integration of theoretical work with the secondary analysis of existing work and of data collected in our past work. The outline of the volume is finally presented.

Thinking is an activity that has a trajectory. Through the previous chapters, five modalities of pleasure of thinking have been identified: (i) a core and fundamental curiosity; (ii) a semiotic activity of binding experience in more or less complex wholes, or functional pleasure; (iii) the occasional joy of finding a solution thanks to our background capacity to engage in relatively free semiotic explorations, that is, the pleasure of discovery; (iv) the dialogical pleasure of the shared activity of thinking; (v) the awareness of the activity and its pleasure, a meta-pleasure. These five aspects can be experienced in a more or less playful way and lived more or less bodily – in modulations that partly depend on the actual setting as well as on cultural norms and guidance. Chapter 5 proposes a model of the person to account for such trajectories of thinking. It first emphasises four principles we need to hold about mind based on our exploration; it then proposes an integrated model of mind; and it finally qualifies trajectories of thinking and their pleasures.

Identity is a dynamic. It changes across time and contexts. This presents a methodological challenge because established methods (interviews, surveys, experiments) are not ideal for tracking people across time and as they move between contexts. Increasingly, however, people leave textual traces of their identity in diaries and letters, that document changing identities across time and place. Since ancient Greece, autobiographical writings (letters, confessionals, diaries) have been a literary technique for people to explore and display their identities; subsequently, such self-writings offer researchers precious access to the situated and dynamic identities of others. We approach identity from a developmental, sociocultural, and dialogical perspective, and we thus consider diaries, letters, and blogs as providing a precious window on the development of identity. Specifically, we conceptualize self-writings as simultaneously an externalization of a person’s experience and a reflection upon her experience, addressed to real or imaginary audiences. Based on a ideographic study of diaries, we will show both how the development of subjective identity can be traced through time, as the diarist moves through real and imaginary spaces. Such analysis, we argue, demands both a careful, theoretically informed examination of form and content of texts, and the reconstitution of the environment in which these texts have been produced. Finally, we discuss new directions for the study of identity through increasingly diverse forms self-writing, such as online diaries, emails, text messages, letters, and social media.

This chapter outlines a sociocultural approach to imagination, an approach that considers imagination at once as an individual and cultural phenomenon, grounded in our embodied experience of the world, in social interactions, and in the use of symbolic resources. We begin by reviewing the classical philosophical debates about the nature of imagination – whether it is based on images or experience and whether it is primarily personal or cultural – in order to position the sociocultural framework that builds on the seminal work of Lev Vygotsky. Following this, we review old and recent sociocultural research in this area, focusing on four main issues: imagination and perception, the phenomenology of art experience, intentionality and imagination, and the imagination as generative. We conclude the chapter with an integrative model – the imagination loop – and a discussion of how imagination plays a fundamental role not only for individual development but also the development of society through the construction of collective futures.