The Psychological Subject and Harré's Social Psychology: An Analysis of a Constructionist Case

Abstract

Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory.

Towards the Spoken World Theory: The contribution of Rom Harré to advancing social theory

“…And just before his death, he also commented upon the contributions collected in Christensen (2019). More overviews of social theory aspects of Harré’s work can be found in Scott and Stam (1996) and (Van Langenhove, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2019). But none of these publications has yet presented a comprehensive synthesis of Harré’s social theory.…”

Gripping Stuff: A Response to Kevin Durrheim

“…We will not go into it here, but Harre finally affords the body only the role of a , material seat of personhood, rather than asking how it actively participatesin the discursive or conversational process. For this and other reasons some scholars have challenged his "dual ontology" from realist as well as constructionist perspectives (Bhaskar, 1990;Scott & Starn, 1996). John Shetter, who is also mentioned by Durrheim, comes closer to what we mean with ideas of pre-reflexiveor preconscious aspects of experience and social form.…”