Disquieting experiences and conversation

Abstract

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Theory & Psychology, my aim in this article is to widen the discussion about one of the issues I consider foundational in the approach of I–other–world relations in subjectivation processes, that is to say, that of the disquieting experience, which we have been developing in the ambit of semiotic–cultural constructivism in psychology. First, I will make an exposition of the main aspects that characterise the notion of disquieting experience. I shall then seek to deepen some of the relations between disquieting experience, hermeneutic inquiry, and conversation. In order to do so, I will make use of articles published in Theory & Psychology that are fundamental to this deepening, due to leading us to the role of the third party in subjectivation processes.

Keywords

disquieting experiences hermeneutic conversation I–other–world relationships semiotic–cultural constructivism third party

In his inaugural editorial for Theory & Psychology, Henderikus Stam (1991) announced and predicted that it was time to reinstate the theoretical reflection in psychology that was lost due to the prevalence of empiricist and positivist dogma during the greater part of the 20th century.

Theory & Psychology thus signalled a moment when “certain foundational questions need[ed] to be and [we]re being brought again into the clear light of day” (Stam, 1991, p. 5).

Ever since then, Theory & Psychology has been a permanent invitation for us to widen, rebuild, and discuss our reflections with our peers, whether they are authors, reviewers, or the colleagues and students who are interested in them as readers.

It is in this sense that, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Theory & Psychology, I would like to widen the discussion about one of the issues I consider foundational in the approach of the I–other–world relations in subjectivation processes, that is to say, that of the disquieting experience, which we have been developing in the ambit of semiotic–cultural constructivism in psychology.¹

Briefly, semiotic–cultural constructivism in psychology is a systemic, theoretical–methodological, and ethical perspective that has been developing especially by the selective articulation of psycho-philosophical propositions.²

This selective articulation has, in turn, been possible thanks to a metatheoretical and ethical perspective, which underlies the semiotic–cultural constructivism itself, and originates from dialogue between the hermeneutical and phenomenological philosophies.

As I have argued (Simão, 2016), this interpelling dialogue is valuable because it allows the emergence of new ontological issues as a bordered field between philosophy and psychology. Ontological issues make interpellations at the level of the differential predication of the psychological subject, that is, they ask for the nature of the subject–other–world relationships that allow the subject’s constitution and transformation; they call for the predication of the being, which unfolds in meaningful aspects that distinguish a psychological subject from all other instances that are not it in different psychologies.

Psychology is then introduced to new issues regarding subject–world relationships, and benefits from different ways of conceiving of and performing psychological science and professional practice, in the theoretical–methodological and ethical dimensions of knowledge construction.

It is in this way that we seek to advance the understanding of intersubjective processes in the construction of human subjectivity, in which the roles of alterity, temporality, and disquieting experience are central.

As highlighted by Davey (2010), the issue of alterity is one of the central points for understanding the processes of subjectivation, inasmuch as:

Reflexive subjectivity is established in dialogical relation to alterity. Subjectivity comes to itself when it realizes that it is grounded in something both more and other to itself, in an alterity or difference that subjective consciousness is able to enter a dialogical relationship with and thus refines its specific sense about the distinctiveness of its own perspective. (pp. 25–26)

However, given the different phenomenological worlds of I and of other, there must be an effort from I and from other in the quest for intersubjectivity.

As Rommetveit (1985) discusses, the privilege of speech comes in tandem with the responsibility of making oneself clear, and with the burden of, possibly, perceiving oneself as misunderstood by the listener. Rommetveit (1990) calls this epistemic responsibility, the responsibility to construct and provide sense to a state of affairs, bringing it to the conversation through language, and being responsible for the perspectives intersubjectively assumed in that respect.

Such commitment is characterised by the asymmetry of positions in the dialogue, generating tensions and misunderstandings (Linell, 1995; Marková, 2003), as well as the necessity that each one bets on the possibility of understanding and being understood by the other (Rommetveit, 1979). Due to this, relating with someone else in their alterity is, mostly, disquieting oneself.

Thus, in the present article, I opted for focusing on the notion of disquieting experience (Simão, 2004, 2016) as an intrinsic part of this process of subjectivation in dialogue.

In what follows, I will first make an exposition of the main aspects that characterise the notion of disquieting experience. I will then seek to deepen some of the relations between disquieting experience, hermeneutic inquiring, and conversation. In order to do so, I will make use of articles published in Theory & Psychology by Barresi (2002) and Shotter (1995), as well as Martin and Sugarman (2001), which are fundamental to this deepening by leading us to the role of the third party in subjectivation processes.

Disquieting experience

In the perspective explained above, the notion of disquieting experience emerged in the context of our research into interpellations we have been making into semiotic–cultural psychology about alterity and temporality, from phenomenological and hermeneutical–dialogical philosophies.

The theoretical–methodological and ethical ambit regarding the notion of disquieting experience concerns processes of knowledge construction as subjectivation processes, which occur by means of symbolic action in the human cultural experience. In these processes, the principal event in knowledge construction is the continuous formation and transformation of the self as symbolic actor (Boesch, 1991; Valsiner, 2007, 2014).³

In this context, such perspectives oppose the focus on knowledge as being exclusively the successful result of the actions of human beings in their environment, in view of their goals of predicting and controlling events in a reality external to themselves.

The knowledge constructed, including scientific and artistic knowledge among others, is thus understood as the expression rising from the tensions and questions placed by people on themselves and on other people, regarding the I–other–world relation. For this reason, knowledge does not entail knowledge about “the things perceived by the person as outside them,” but concerns—and perhaps mainly—the knowledge about oneself in relation with one’s world, which implies the quest for others’ knowledge.

Hence the relevance that this perspective attributes to the construction of knowledge, in the nature of the questions people ask themselves and others, in the tensions that may then emerge, and in the methods to surpass them in the dynamics of the I–other–world relations.

This way, the ontological perspective that the notion of disquieting experience is an integral part of a human being who constructs knowledge about themselves and their world as a consequence of the unfolding of their personal and contextualised actions and who is possible in a momentary given field of cultural action (Boesch, 1991), in the face of challenges that their relation with the world places them in.

In the 21st century, continuing to approach the disquieting experience seems relevant to me, considering what it may bring to the comprehension of problems that are not new, but contemporarily covered by new implications to human life, such as the processes of knowledge construction—in the sense explained above—about the places where the self and the other situate themselves in the migratory flows, in the position of power, in the formation practices (Bildung), in the media, and in virtual spaces, to mention only some of the scope that this question regards, be it in the quotidian of our lives, or when it is suddenly ruptured.

I called “disquieting experience” the experience that hurts expectations, that instigates, affectively and cognitively, either the actor who experiences it, or another person who experiences the actor’s disquieting through dialogue, either verbal or not, with her, and that, in this manner, is also instigated by her experience with that other (Simão, 2004). Therefore, the disquieting experience may happen both in the intra-personal or interpersonal ambit, and, usually, occurs concomitantly in both.

At the heart of the notion of disquieting experience is the gap, the disengagement, that the person experiences between their system of aimed values (“should values”) and the values that they attribute to their present experience (“is-value”; Boesch, 1991) in a given ambit of their I–other–world relation.

According to Boesch (1991), people are constantly seeking to adjust both systems of values between each other in a search for consistency in their relations with themselves, and with others. The possible degree and extension of these regulations, which occur between the systems of desired and experienced values, are determined both by each person’s personal potentialities, and by the opportunities and limits imposed by the field of cultural action. Boesch calls them “limits of tolerance,” or “zones or ranges of tolerance” (cf. 1991, p. 60).

Highlighting that “a culture might provide special niches for deviant behaviour,” Boesch (1991) emphasises the importance of tolerance zones, as, “without them, no innovation or invention could take place” (p. 36). Besides, there is the fact that “ranges of tolerance are not static entities, but may be shifted in the course of the action” (p. 67). That is, the limits of the tolerance zones are temporary, varying contextually, be it within personal development, or in cultural diversity.

In the interplay between what is expected or desired by the person, with what is experienced by them as a “real” event, that is, in the ambit of the limits of tolerance, it forms, at each moment of the personal experience, what Boesch (1991) calls “action potential.”

Action potential “might be defined as the extent to which one feels confident in meeting one’s personal standards in any kind of situation” (Boesch, 1991, p. 108). It is a “functional action potential that bears the powers of action I attribute myself” (Boesch, 1980, p. 24, author’s translation).⁴ This way, the action potential is defined as the

capacity that a person attributes themselves of acting with positive valence, avoiding actions with negative valence, where the term “valence” refers to what is attractive, to beliefs and hopes according to which we try to guide our action. The action potential, although based on the experiences had, will then be mainly anticipatory, prospective. (Boesch, 1980, p. 24, author’s translation)⁵

The Boeschian notion of action potential points to the fact that when someone claims to be satisfied or unsatisfied with the course of their actions in a given circumstance, what is in question is the assessment of the approaching experience between those two systems of values, both subjectively constructed and reconstructed, as well as validated, or not, in a given moment of a given cultural field of action. This assessment, therefore subjective, looks—in what measure it is possible, in that contextual moment—to approach the most of both systems; or, in other words, to reduce the distance, the gap between “should-value” and “is-value.” In this process, there are personal and group limits of tolerance for the gap between what is sensed as reached and what was expected; and both experienced success and failure will regulate the action flux, decreasing or increasing the subjective potential for future actions.

This process, which regards the continuous personal formation (Bildung) in the cultural field, requires articulation between the system of values aimed at and the values experienced by the person in a given situation. Requiring different articulations accordingly to the subjective and cultural circumstances in a given moment, it is a tension-generating process, due exactly to the relation between consistence and inconsistence implied in it.

However, this process is not experienced by the self in isolation, as inconsistency and consistency are linked to the existential condition of the subject who experiences them in their relationship to one another. In the sense of Bakhtin (1986) and Holquist (1990), experiential consistency and inconsistency are mutually defined, in a dialogical relationship of complementary polarity: the experience of consistency allows the self the expectation of being understood by the other, while the experience of inconsistency allows it to be confronted with otherness. Both experiences are necessary for the process of self-transformation. Moreover,

disquieting experiences are inherent to human living, as they arise from the human potential condition of permanently looking and striving for coherence and stability, on one hand, while unceasingly realising instability and difference, on the other. This means that what we realise in our I–world relationships we do in terms of pairs of opposites, according to a symbolic imbalanced combinatory movement between and among opposites, (for instance, desired and non-desired; or desired, non-desired, allowed, not allowed, funny and not funny); some of these combinations are more plausible to the person at some moments and circumstances, some at others; thus the contextual character of disquieting experiences. (Simão, 2016, p. 21)

When the “gap” between the aimed and present systems of values surpasses the limit of tolerance, breaking the dialogic relationship between consistency and inconsistency, the disquieting experience emerges. This is because the rupture of the dialogic relation between consistency and inconsistency generates an undifferentiation in what was so far a field of relational sense between the should-value and is-value systems. Instead of a field of meaning marked by the dialogic relation between the different, the nonsense that characterises the disquieting experience emerges.

Therefore, the disquieting experience emerges as a subjective event in a process in which the differentiation, essential for the formation of a unit of sense (Herbst, 1995), does not even happen, or falls apart, in the I-other-world relation. According to Herbst’s cogenetic logic (1995), making distinctions generates a triadic unit, formed by three elements that come to existence jointly and inseparably: the inside, the outside, and the margin—this last one representing the distinction strictly speaking.

In the case of the disquieting experience, we can say that its emergence is due to the fact that, from the point of view of the subject in their relation with themselves or with someone else, what they experience, what they sought or expected to experience, and the relation between these two experiences cannot form a triadic unit because a differentiation between them does not even form, or it is broken, as a margin of sense that distinguishes them, at the same time as it relates them.⁶

Instead of a margin that relates both experiential instances differentially, what happened is experienced as an amorphous nonsense zone (Boesch, 1997), that does not relate it differentially with the expected, due to it being perceived and felt as disquieting.

Although the relation between the expected and the experienced is never one of identity, being, for this reason, always an experience of detachment in itself, in the case of the disquieting experience, detachment does not operate as a differentiation that, at the same time, relates as nonidentical, the expected and the lived. In the disquieting experience, detachment provokes a gap, a nonsense, an amorphous zone of sense that breaks the triadic unit, of which a distinction is usually an integral part.

At the same time as emerging from a symbolic process in which the distinctions cannot momentarily work as relational, the disquieting experiences themselves also give rise to amorphous zones of meaning and ambiguous situations for the self. As such, they create instability and tension, perturbing or even hurting the person’s expectancies about their “understandability” of themselves and of their I–other–world relationships.

However, the relevance of disquieting experience in the construction of knowledge as a process of subjectivation is based on the fact that the disquieting experience provokes a tension that may boost the person toward new symbolic actions in order to reach some relational reorganisation of their experience in a new triadic unit of meaning, allowing them to pacify the discomfort or anguish, or even to profit the amazing, aroused from the unwanted or amazing experience: a symbolic creation emerges from the integrative personal effort (Simão, 2003).

According to the meaning of knowledge construction adopted here, by not managing to establish a meaningful distinction between what was expected and what happened, the person who has a disquieting experience will seek a new relational unity between the expected and what happened not only with respect to a knowledge about the world outside of them, but principally regarding their own potentiality to understand themselves in relation to it.

In the quest to overcome this nonsense situation, the person usually (but not necessarily) gets

cognitively as well as affectively to feel, think and act in different directions from those they were doing until then; in such a way, the person may arrive to integrate the feelings aroused by them into her personal cognitive-affective base, which, in turn, will also change. (Simão, 2016, p. 20)

Due to being experienced in the ambit of subjectivity, the disquieting experiences are feelings regarding subjective experiences that touch the person affectively and prereflexively. As such, they are lived in the first person.

Disquieting experience, hermeneutic inquiring, and the third party in conversation

People, throughout life, and as a demand of life itself, construct and reconstruct their I–other–world relations, betting on the possibility of sharing them with someone else (Rommetveit, 1979). On the one hand,

we always speak to those who are not in the same phenomenological place as us, or else we would not have any reason to speak to them; but we bet on the possibility that we come to share meanings, otherwise we would have no reason at all to speak to them. (Simão, 2010, p. 99, author’s translation)

For this reason, in this constructive process there occur, among other experiences, those I am calling disquieting, which are lived in the first person.

Once experienced in the first person, I and other, in order to know that one of them, or both, are living a disquieting experience, depend on our respective affective–cognitive possibilities to communicate our experiences, either verbally, corporally, or both; regardless of their possibilities to express them in some way, silence occasionally occurs. On the other hand, almost paradoxically, even if we do not have the possibility, nor the desire, to communicate our lived experience as disquieting, as perhaps we have not even perceived it in a more conscious way, I and other may “pre-reflexively, unwillingly—give hints about it to others” (Simão, 2016, p. 21).

Usually, in interactive situations, if someone organises according to some triadic unit with meaning (Herbst, 1995) about a given event or situation, but realises that the other, in their turn, is not doing so in a similar manner in what they judge to be “the same situation,” this someone will have a disquieting experience in relation to the other. This way, the disquieting experience denounces the impact of the experience of alterity brought by a “third party,” the limits of my comprehension and resemblance with someone else, and from them to me.

The relevance of the “third party” in the dialogue to subjectivation processes is shown, for instance, in articles that, in Theory & Psychology, approached this theme from diverse perspectives (for instance, Barresi, 2002; Bertau, 2014; Ellis & Stam, 2010; Falmagne, 2009; Falmagne et al., 2013; Plant, 2018; Ragatt, 2010; Roth, 2007; Shotter, 1995).

Next, I will make use of aspects raised in a seminal article by John Shotter, published in Theory & Psychology in 1995, and in an article by Barresi, also published in Theory & Psychology, in 2002, whose perspectives may broaden the understanding of disquieting experience in conversation.

Barresi (2002), leaning on Bakhtin, distinguishes in dialogue two orders of information that come to the self: first-person information, and third-person information. This information refers to both the self and others. First-person information is formed by the experiences and points of view that a person has of themselves in a given activity. Third-person information is formed by the experience the other has of that person in a given activity. The comprehension of a given activity depends on the integration of the first- and third-person perspectives, both by the self and by the other (cf. p. 243).

The question is that this integration never happens in a complete way, neither by the self, nor by the other, once the “epistemological positions of the actor and the observer can never be merged, yet there is a constant need to do so” (Barresi, 2002, p. 243). Hence the “importance of the dialogical relation between self and other in the quest for further knowledge of self and other” (p. 243).

This difference of perspectives between self and other in relation to a given event may be, itself, a disquieting experience for the self and/or the other, insofar as the respective perceptions bear in their core different affective–cognitive relations with people, ideas, and objects, based on which self and other relate with memories, make decisions in the present, and construct their future hopes. For example, as Barresi (2002) points out, the “future appears open-ended with respect to one’s self, but not in our perception of other, whose behaviour appears to be determined by the environment” (p. 244).

But, given the disquieting experience brought by this difference of perspectives, self and other can experientially assume the quest to articulate them, so as to overcome the discomfort thus generated, as each one ends up affecting themselves in the face of the incongruity between what the other expresses about themselves (self) and their world, and what one (self) perceives in relation to themselves and their world. In this direction, Barresi (2002) affirms that

we try to perceive ourselves from a third-person perspective, and we try to understand the other from a first-person perspective. In engaging in each of these activities we “transgress” the boundary between self and other. (p. 244)

This “transgression,” due to the displacement of self and other from their initial positions, each one towards the other’s apprehension as alterity, and due to never achieving this apprehension in its totality, makes self and other alterities to each other.

Shotter (1995), leaning on Bakhtin (1986), and on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), approaches another aspect that regards the “third party” as alterity, making dialogue a sui-generis phenomenon. It is, according to Shotter (1995), the fact that, as we shape what we do and say, we take into account not only the immediate other with whom we are relating, but we also aim at an other that is beyond these others. We address ourselves as a “special, invisibly present, third-person Other or Otherness, an imagined super-addressee” (Shotter, 1995, p. 50), who works as a referee in the conversation:

It is as if at each moment, a third, invisible agent, another voice, created by the dialogue or conversation itself, emerges from within the background between the dialogue partners, to decree the options open to them or the limitations upon them, that is, as if to set momentary rules between them. (p. 50)

Shotter (1995) points out the fact that this is what is strange in the conversation, as “it seems to create a super-reality beyond any immediately present entities” (p. 50).

Shotter (1995) then starts to question how this phenomenon occurs and how we can understand its meaning, aiming to answer this question from two sides, that of personal intentionality, as a mental phenomenon directed to something or someone other than ourselves; and that of the sociocultural intentionality, as regulation of our daily activities by the social background.

This conversational background, which is the third party, decrees what is natural and ordinary in our world having, however, a relatively undifferentiated character. This undifferentiation means one is open to being determined, this or that way, in the proper conversation. It also means “the impossibility of any one person saying ahead of time what its character must be” (Shotter, 1995, p. 52).

It opens up, then, an ethical question, due to the fact that this third party that regulates how things can and must be, either making, or not, our world peculiar to us, and making us feel at home in it or not, is created by the interlocutors themselves, from their previous affective–cognitive biases, with which we always and inevitably come to a conversation. At the same time, we have to respond to it in its momentary alterity, once, as stresses Shotter (1995), it is it that decrees what is valid, or not, in our I–other–world relations, having, due to this, “a formative influence upon what we do as anything within ourselves” (p. 53).

From Shotter’s (1995) perspective, an I–other–third-party triad is outlined, as in Herbst’s (1995) triadic unit, which I previously described, and is necessary to consider in order to understand the conversation phenomenon.

In synthesis, the possible and limited is created only in dialogue, and one can obey it, nod, transgress, or transform, but solely in the dialogue itself. Hence one of the inextricably ethical aspects of dialogue.

One of these ethical aspects entails the manner in which the human being has managed to deal with the disquieting experience of alterity, in its character of incommensurability with the I: since the constructions of knowledge that seek to harken and signify these zones of unintelligibility, proposing dialogued margins of sense to that “gap,”—as, for instance, in the diverse psychotherapies and sociocultural practices of Bildung—to the constructions that consider that “gap” undesirable and spurious, present in the various forms of prejudice and exclusion of what is not intelligible by explaining schemes that are considered as already stated.

The importance of understanding the disquieting experience as integral (instead of unusual or inopportune) to the human experience, so that we turn to the challenge of the reconstruction of sense before it, can be described by Martin and Sugarman’s (2001) statement that, in a certain way, is a warning: “human psychological beings are human kinds capable of affecting the very classifications that enable and identify them” (p. 194).

Zabala (2015) points out the importance of the sense of hermeneutic dialogue, or conversation. To him, the most adequate translation to English of the German term (Gespräch), used by Gadamer, would be “conversation.” The sense of conversation, elucidated by Zabala (2015) is important to us here:

When Gadamer refers to the Gespräch, he is not alluding to something programmed in advance under the direction of a subject matter where the interlocutors leave aside their particular points of view. Quite contrary, a genuine Gespräch is never the one we wanted to conduct but the one we fall into and become involved in as it develops because we are led by it instead of being the leaders of it. (p. 273)

Thus, the conversation or hermeneutic dialogue is characterised by the structure of question and answer. When someone wants to understand something, they need to ask what this something has been answering ever since their present desire to understand it. It implies, in this sense, the decentring of the person who seeks to understand, by demanding from them a retrospective movement of understanding that thing as being the answer to questions asked before they asked theirs, to then seek to include them in this interplay.⁷

This way, the sense of a phrase is relative to the question to which it is the answer, and this means it necessarily goes further than what was said in it. (Gadamer, 1996, p. 448, author’s translation)

On the other hand, the questions previously asked, as well as the one someone asks now, in relation to a given situation, were, and will be, questions that seek to create, even if momentarily, a new unit of sense (Herbst, 1995), broken by a disquieting experience.

Therefore, it is in the hermeneutic character of the conversation where the challenges and tensions in the construction of new triadic units of meaning in the face of the disquieting experience are situated. This is so because, if on the one hand, the relation of hermeneutic comprehension demands that one let oneself be interpellated by someone else, by opening oneself in this interpellation, the task of hermeneutic comprehension there imposed will never be completely finished, because someone else is never completely reducible to ourselves.

The hermeneutic questioning is not only a question, in its most usual character of seeking access to some information that is useful for immediate purposes, because it already bears, in the act of questioning, a presupposition that what is sought will only be found as part of a meaning that does not belong exclusively to the one who asks the question, nor to the one who answers it. As Martin and Sugarman (2001) point out:

Hermeneutic inquiry depends on our ability to recognise that our “truths” are made possible by a shared background of life into which we are initiated, and to which we contribute through our dialogues and interactions with others (texts, cultures, interlocutors). (p. 197)

Therefore, there is, in hermeneutic questioning, not only the will and desire to know something that is beyond the present, that is, the component of futurity, but also the acquiescence that the new meaning required by the disquieting experience will only be able to be outlined or reached in dialogue with someone else. From the perspective we have been indicating so far, this other is exactly the one who brought us the disquieting experience, be they some of our selves in dialogue (Hermans et al., 1992), or another outside of ourselves.

The dialogue in which we can (or cannot) embark upon through the hermeneutic questioning provoked by the disquieting experience embraces what Grodin (1994) refers to as the process of “understanding as questioning and therefore application” (p. 115).

If we consider that the hermeneutic concepts do not exclusively concern the comprehension of texts, but also the understanding of the interlocutors’ speech, once what is at stake is the interpellation by someone else, then we can intuit that, in this interplay, the quest for a margin that differentially relates the parts in new meanings stands in dialogue. For this reason, the dialogue or conversation between I and the other embodies one of the ways of seeking understanding, and, therefore, of application, mentioned by Grodin (1994). Or, put in a more radical way, engaging in dialogue with someone else, in view of the disquieting experience, is the instance of the application involved in the hermeneutic comprehension of the meaning of the content of a given conversation.

The interpretative practice required in the dialogue with diversity, which places us before our difficulty and vulnerability to understand what is different from ourselves, disquiets us and demands from us abilities that can only be developed in dialoguing itself, the instance of hermeneutic application by excellence.

As Davey (2006) discusses, the character of the subjective apprehension present in hermeneutic comprehension is implicit in the treatment that the application is given as an assimilative function that allows understanding in concrete terms of a universal proposition; and this assimilative function—the application—is concomitant, and not subsequent, to understanding (cf. p. 111).

As the questions previously asked, and the ones now asked in a given conversation, are multiple, it then forms a “horizon of questioning” (cf. Gadamer, 1996, pp. 447–448), that is propelled by the multiple disquieting of myself and of another.

In this regard, as Martin and Sugarman (2001) emphasise, with respect to the horizon of questioning and its unfolding, in what Gadamer (1996) conceptualised as a “fusion of horizons,” the critical aspect is in that

reaching an understanding with another is a matter not of emphatically reconstructing the other’s mental process and private experiences, but of being open to, and integrating, another’s horizon in such a way that one’s own perspective is altered in the process. Inevitably, such a process also involves some greater degree of critical penetration of one’s own background of pre-understanding and prejudice . . . . In this ongoing play, this open-ended dialogue, both the phenomenon into which we are inquiring, and our own understanding are transformed. (p. 197, author’s translation)

Hence, the importance of the understanding of what is at the root of the disquieting experience, in terms of the values targeted and the real values (actual; Boesch, 1991) present and persistent in a given situation. This understanding can make possible the construction of new knowledge that is, finally, a new differential margin that leaves room for a new triadic unit (Herbst, 1995) of meaning to arise.

Footnotes

Author’s note

The article is academically linked to University of São Paulo, Brazil / FAPESP – São Paulo Research Foundation (Proc. 2018/13145-0).

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Lívia Mathias Simão, PhD, is associate and senior professor at the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she co-ordinates the Laboratory of Verbal Interaction and Knowledge Construction. Her main research interests concern issues embracing the ontological construction of human subjectivity in I–Other–World relationships from the perspective of semiotic–cultural constructivism in psychology. This approach emphasises issues regarding the psycho-philosophical notions of alterity, temporality, and disquieting experiences. Among her more representative works are “Bildung, Culture and Self: A Possible Dialogue with Gadamer, Boesch and Valsiner?,” in Theory & Psychology (2005) and (with J. Valsiner; Eds.), Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self (Information Age, 2007). She is also associate editor of Human Arenas, and member of the editorial boards of Theory & Psychology, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, and Latin American Voices, among others.

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