Psychological and Social Borders: Regulating Relationships

Psychological phenomena take place at the border between person and environment. Indeed, psychology as a whole may be seen as a science of human liminal constructions, a science concerned with the dynamic relationships that exist between people and what surrounds them and with the constant border crossing that defines the arena within which all human development takes place. From this perspective, the central question becomes: how do humans deal with such transitions throughout the course of their lives? Cultural psychology offers a way of addressing, theoretically and empirically, the epistemological and social dimensions of this question. In addition, we argue that mereotopology—the theory of the relations of part to whole and of part to part within a whole—provides a conceptual framework of enormous potential for appreciating its unexplored ontological underpinnings, thus contributing to the foundations of psychology as a developmental science of the inherent uncertainty that accompanies all individual and social becoming. Psychological phenomena take place at the border between person and environment. Indeed, psychology as a whole may be seen as a science of human liminal constructions, a science concerned with the dynamic relationships that exist between people and what surrounds them. The person-context relationship is, therefore, a central topic in a number of different domains of psychological research, taking on special importance when applied to the study of human development (Kindermann & Valsiner, 1995). Lev Vygotsky’s early attempt to deal with “the problem of the environment” in child development offers a good illustration of the double-barrelled nature of this perspective. According to Vygotsky (1994), the child’s development entails, on the one hand, a progressive widening of the environment, from the circumscribed space related to his or her existence immediately after birth to the wider portions that gradually open up as the child starts walking: the house, the street, the neighbourhood, etc. And even further: his environment changes according to the different kinds of environment each stage of his education provides: during his nursery school age, the nursery school; during