This volume, first published in 2001, presents research in psychological anthropology, including person-centred ethnography, activity theory, and cultural schema theory.

What does Western science know about the relationship between individual well-being and cultural trends? What can learn from other cultural traditions? What do the recent advancements in positive psychology teach us on this issue, particularly the eudaimonic framework, which emphasizes the connections between personal well-being and social welfare? People grow and live in cultures that deeply influence their values, aspirations and behaviors. However, individuals in their turn play an active role in building their own goals, growth trajectories and social roles, at the same time influencing culture trends. This process, defined psychological selection, is related to the individual pursuit of well-being People preferentially select and cultivate in their lives activities, interests, and relationships associated with optimal experience, a state of deep engagement, concentration, and enjoyment. Several cross-cultural studies confirmed the positive and rewarding features of optimal experience. Based on these evidences, this book offers a new perspective in the study of human behavior. Highlighting the interplay between individual and cultural growth trajectories, it conveys a core message: educating people to enjoy engagement and involvement in activities that can be relevant and meaningful for social welfare is a premise to foster the harmonious development of human communities, and the peaceful cohabitation of cultures.

Incorporates over a decade of new research and material on coping with the causes and consequencs that instigate culture shock, this can occur when a person is transported from a familiar to an alien culture.

We are fed at the breast of culture, not wholly but to differing degrees. The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic focuses on the formative influence of cultural objects in our lives, and the contribution such experiences make to our mental health and overall wellbeing. The book introduces “the culture-breast”, a new clinical concept, to explore the central importance played by cultural objects in the psychical lives of patients and psychoanalytic clinical practitioners inside and outside the consulting room. Bringing together clinical writings from psychoanalysis and cultural objects from the applied fields of film, art, literature and music, the book also makes an argument for the usefulness of encounters with cultural objects as “non-clinical case studies” in the training and further professional development of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Through its engagement with psychosocial studies, this text, furthermore, interrogates, challenges and offers a way through a hierarchical split that has become established in psychoanalysis between “clinical psychoanalysis” and “applied psychoanalysis”. Combining approaches used in clinical, academic and arts settings, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis is an essential resource for clinical practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counselling, psychology and psychiatry. It will also be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychosocial studies, sociology, social work, cultural studies and the creative and performing arts.

An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology – that of semiotic dynamics. Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It’s a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living. Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe′s first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.

Fourteen different cultures from five continents are represented in this volume, which asks Western psychologists to rethink the premises of their discipline and conceptualize a new universal psychology. With examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America, contributors emphasize that psychology has traditionally meant Western psychology. However, psychology practised in other parts of the world raises alternative views of human behaviour. Contributors argue that indigenous psychology requires each culture to be understood within its own frame of reference and examined in terms of its own social and ecological context. They present aspects of their own indigenous psychology, demonstrating the diversity a