Human Experience through the Lens of Culture: An invitation to psychology in a new key My workspace is in disorder. Or so it seems-for others, not for me. Books, books, and more books-everywhere. Papers-copied articles, abandoned drafts-all over the floor. Nobody but myself can detect an order in this mess. Sometimes I fail as well. The search for an article I put into a special place among that artistic chaos-to find it later for sure-turns into a drama when that search fails. Of course the paper will be found sometime later. But the tension about 'where on Earth did I put it?' has by that time been lived through. Not all books are the same for me. The volumes of Charles Darwin-in Russian first translation-are almost the only remnants from my father's library. I do not read them-but remember my childhood surrounded by well-organized bookshelves. My father was adamant about where each book of his library was. He very reluctantly lent them out, in fear that the avid readers would lose or damage them. Yet among the books on my shelf now is that one that was damaged-by my father himself, as he grabbed it in rage and threw it on the floor. I had been reading The Kon-Tiki Expedition rather than doing my homework. So the book was snatched from me and thrown-in its flight it was hurt by a table corner. The scar is still there. This was the only time my father got angry with me. I still remember that, after half-century. I learned about censorship in my reading through the books that surrounded me. After devouring half of Decameron that I found on the open shelf, it suddenly disappeared. Nobody would explain to a 12-year old boy where it had gone. Yet I found it in a locked cabinet. And read it through. Today I cherish a reproduction of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde above my bookshelf. I enjoy it in all what it stands for. Nothing is more profound than

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The dialogical self entails relations between perspectival positions (I-positions) that maintain and develop within the self as a field. A typology of such relations is outlined, and related with the process of semiotic mediation. Semiotic mediation takes the form of flexible control systems that regulate the relations between I-positions. These autoregulatory processes generate both the meaningfulness of the flow of experience, and meta-level meanings that constrain the extent of construcion and loci of application of the direct semiotic regulators to the flow of experience. The dialogical self is an autocatalytic system that orients itself towards the future by either enabling or blocking the emergence of its own new states.

Development of semiotic mediation of psychological functions entails construction and use of signs to regulate both interpersonal and intrapersonal psychological processes. The latter can be viewed as regulated through a hierarchy of semiotic mechanisms. It is demonstrated that semiotic mediation leads to the creation of psychological problems as well as to their solutions. Semiotic mediation guarantees both flexibility and inflexibility of the human psychological system, through the processes of abstracting generalization and contextualizing specification, which operate through the layers of the semiotic regulation hierarchy. Context specificity of psychological phenomena is an indication of general mechanisms that generate variability. Much has been written about the role of signs – semiotic mediators – in psychology over recent decades. Usually more or less elaborate claims in favor of the importance of signs – semiotic mediators, words, ‘voices’, meanings – in human psychological worlds have been made [Cole, 1996; Shweder, 1995; Wertsch, 1991, 1998]. That importance is here taken for granted, and the question addressed moves beyond the discourse about the social nature of the human individual psyche [Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000]. In which ways could one conceptualize the functioning of signs in the regulation of psychological processes? The present elaboration is based on previous work along similar lines [Valsiner, 1996, 1997a, 1998a, 1999]. By a focus on regulation, a systemic perspective is immediately evoked. The system that is being regulated entails psychological processes of intra- and interpsychological communication. These processes are mutually related in a hierarchical organizational order – some of them (higher psychological functions, based on the operation of signs) controlling others (lower, nonintentional psychological functions, or flow of personal experience). The hierarchy can be viewed as open to changes [including reversals, or formation of intransitive order – see Valsiner, 1997d]. The person is viewed as inclusively separated from its environment [Valsiner, 1997a, 1998c]. The intrapsychological system is cultural through the inclusion of semiotic regulators into the hierarchy of psychological processes [Valsiner, 1998a]. How that system works in its immediate relatedness with the environment is the target of the present theoretical construction.

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