Cultural Psychology as Basic Science

Maria C.D.P. Lyra is a Professor of Psychology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She is interested in the process of human cultural development, the dynamic features through which human beings faces change and stability throughout their lives. She received her M. A. at Cornell University, U.S.A. and her Ph.D. at São Paulo University, Brazil. She coordinates a research laboratory - LabCCom - dedicated to the study of the process of emergence and development of the subject (self) in and through communication, concentrating on its microgenetic transformations embedded in sociocultural milieu. Culture and sign dynamics are particular relevant to explore diverse themes through reconstructive memory and imagination highlighting the process of internalization/externalization. She co- edited, "Determinism and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Science" (Lawrence Welbaum, 1997), "Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences" (Springer, 2009), "Challenges and Strategies for Studying Human Development in Cultural Contexts" (Firera & Liuzzo Publishing, 2009), and presently "Imagining the Past, Constructing the Future" with Brady Wagoner and Alicia Barreiro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018/19). Marina Assis Pinheiro is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). She coordinates the research group Psychology of Creative Processes. She is especially interested in the following subjects: creativity and imagination, art and psychology, language and subjectivity, culture and singularity.

Chapter 1. From Everyday Experiencing to Abstract Knowledge: Approaching Semiotic Dynamics.- Part I: Human Psyche.- Chapter 2. Constructive Semiosis is the Core of the Human Psyche.- Chapter 3. Beyond the Tension: From Concrete to Abstract Level in Scientific Knowledge.- Chapter 4. Between Psychology of Creative Processes and the dynamics of innovation in culture: semiotic challenges in the modeling of creativity.- Part II: Sublime as Border.- Chapter 5. Human Psyche between the mundane and the aesthetic.- Chapter 6. Performers in their sublime transitions: Interconnections between aesthetic and developmental approaches.- Chapter 7. The experience of the sublime as an aesthetic field for the Psychology from an analysis of a school essay.- Part III: Ambivalence as a Norm for Encountering the Sublime.- Chapter 8. Human Psyche as inherently ambivalent.- Chapter 9. Emergence of Umbanda in the context of the dynamic semiotic destruction-construction.- Chapter 10. Exploring the reconstructive dimension of construction-destruction semiose in the experience of adopting in Brazil.- Chapter 11. Towards an abstracting conceptual enterprise.