Cultural Psychology A Once and Future Discipline by Michael Cole. Harvard University Press, 1996. 400 pages.

Abstract

For the past thirty years, Michael Cole has been a prolific writer, researcher,
and creative thinker in the field of developmental psychology. In Cultural
Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, he attempts to synthesize what he
has learned and to set forth an approach to developmental psychology from an
historical and culrural perspective. Hence, a culturally sensitive science of
human development appears to be Cole's objective. He describes cultural psychology
as "the study of culture's role in the mental life of human beings." His
subtitle suggests that culrural psychology was a discipline which existed in former
times and will exist again in the future. Cole argues in favor of what is
known as a "second psychology," which moves beyond the confines of traditional
and contemporary psychological thinking about how the human mind is
understood. The former psychology, described as naturalistic, has focused on
the familiar and more classical views. Such views evolved from our analysis of
mental phenomena developed from ideas, sensations, reflexes, and experiences
with sensorimotor connections. Alternately, the latter approach, "second psychology,"
looks at the higher mental processes formed by cultures. These
include things such as languages, myths, and social practices within the individual's
social context. The author reviews the evolution of thought through
several contemporary thinkers who, in his view, have contributed the substance
of a scientific, second psychology-oriented methodology necessary for a
viable, efficacious culrural psychology. That is to say a psychology which is
sensitive to social and culrural contexts. The context includes such things as
language, riruals, and routines as they contribute to understanding people in
terms of their interdependence, cooperation, and essential humanity ...