Publisher's Synopsis
The present volume contains the major papers of one of psychology?s most iconoclastic scholars. In a series of controversial and groundbreaking articles and books, Kenneth Gergen has not only offered a radical challenge to psychology's traditional concept of the self, but to its foundations as a science. Traditional psychology defines the self as the private possession of individuals, operating on the basis of universal principles made manifest through inspection by scientific procedures. The psychologist as a private, rational being, thus accumulates knowledge of the personal world of 'the other'. The present collection of papers traces the development of Gergen?s thought, through its initial explorations of self preservation, its recasting of social psychology as a historical endeavour, the development of a social constructionist alternative to science and the self and the elaboration of a constructionist perspective in topic areas such as narrative psychology, relational selves, and psychotherapy. - - Over the past 25 years the most consistent and perceptive challenges to psychology have come from Kenneth Gergen. He has shown that many of the conceptual and philosophical premises on which psychology is based are open to profound doubt. The alternative perspectives put forward by Gergen and his associates emphasize the fundamentally social and historical nature of human experience as well as the importance of interpretation and search for meaning in human activities.
