Culture & Psychology

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Review Essay: Rethinking Bruner's Ideas from a Rational Point of View: Metaphors Creating Theoretical Labyrinths Alejandro Iborra Culture Psychology 2007 13: 385 DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07080506 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cap.sagepub.com/content/13/3/385

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Review Essay

Alejandro Iborra University of Alcalá, Spain

Rethinking Bruner’s Ideas from a Rational Point of View: Metaphors Creating Theoretical Labyrinths Domingo Curto, J.M., La Cultura en el laberinto de la mente: Aproximación filosófica a la ‘Psicología Cultural’ de Jerome Bruner. [Culture in the labyrinth of mind: A philosophical approach to the ‘Cultural Psychology’ of Jerome Bruner.] Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2005. 448 pp. ISBN 84–96571–02–5 (pbk). This book, which deals with the work of Jerome Bruner and his sociocultural, constructivist, pragmatic and hermeneutical perspective, is an interesting and valuable contribution to the Spanish scientific literature about the social sciences. Spanish academia in the social sciences in general and psychology in particular is still quite dominated by a postpositivist paradigm which follows a quantitative approach. In that sense I think it is an interesting book to read because it will provide an alternative and fresh perspective for many readers. The core of the book presents a cognitive analysis of culture or a cultural analysis of the mind. This recursive relationship between culture and mind is one of Bruner’s ideas which is highlighted from the beginning: ‘The formation of the mind is above all a sociocultural construction. And vice versa, the formation of the cultures depends on the social transformation projects we can design and thanks to that its mental component is unavoidable’ (p. 40). Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://cap.sagepub.com Vol. 13(3): 385–391 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07080506]


Culture & Psychology 13(3)

If we take into account the objectives expressed by the author (pp. 43–44), we can appreciate his ambitious purpose, which is in my opinion quite well acomplished: (1) to reconstruct Bruner’s work from the perspective of his cognitive and cultural psychology; (2) to search for the philosophical foundations of Bruner’s work; (3) to establish in the clearest way his cognitive concept of culture; (4) to reconstruct, historically speaking, some of his main theoretical sources (psychological, philosophical, linguistic or anthropological); (5) to situate his research programme within contemporary culture analysis; (6) to analyse and criticize the limits of Bruner’s folk psychology; and (7) to introduce some new analytical dimensions to his psycho-cultural research programme. The book is divided into five interrelated parts. The first three parts deal with the philosophical sources of Jerome Bruner, namely: (a) the pragmatics related to language, action, emotion and culture (Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, Peirce, Grice, etc.); (b) the cultural constructivism of Nelson Goodman related to perception and cognition; and (c) the cultural hermeneutic of Clifford Geertz and the importance of the narrative metaphor. The author then introduces the key influence of Vygotsky about the cultural and historical construction of the mind ‘from the outside to the inside’ related to two different phenomena: what we can learn about transcultural studies in terms of how different cultures shape different minds; and the cultural construction of self-consciousness. The last part concerns the folk psychology of Bruner, focusing on how his interpretive analysis can provide interesting tools to understand our current societies, taking into account the relationship between power, mind and culture. There are five critical issues taken into consideration: ‘the power relationships’ which conform any culture; the classist dimension of any multicultural society; the ecological relationship between nature and culture; and the social critic function of cultural psychology. In the opinion of the author all these issues are avoided by Bruner and should be taken into account if we really want to create cultural projects in order to promote the cognitive capacities of the human mind. All this could be summarized in the question expressed by Bruner in the prologue: how can we facilitate the access to culture for a newborn child? All the notions briefly mentioned above constitute Bruner’s folk psychology programme, which, according to the author, is the best way of understanding and improving this complex task, despite its limitations. One interesting aspect of this book is its reflection on Bruner’s vast work instead of focusing just on one of his main themes. As any reader 386


Iborra Rethinking Bruner’s Ideas

of Bruner knows, his work is impressively extensive, and that makes the author’s purpose more difficult. If only for summarizing Bruner’s ideas, this book is interesting. Besides, you can situate his work in the most important theoretical tendencies in social sciences. As a sign of the times we are living in, this book proposes one of the qualities of a current postmodern social science: its interdisciplinarity. In terms of studying the complexity of our cultures, societies and minds, we probably need the conceptual tools of some sciences. That’s why this book could be of interest for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, linguisticians and any researcher interested in sociocultural studies. This interdisciplinarity could be a limitation in terms of a specialized approach to science research, but in my opinion it is one of the most interesting characteristics of the book. A reader who wanted to read this book in order to find a concrete description of how culture conforms an individual mind and how an individual mind could influence culture would do better looking elsewhere. In this way there are not many facts in this book. But following Richard Rorty’s idea that ‘a fact is a dead metaphor’, this is a good quality of the book. The reader of this review will understand that to reflect on the extensive work of Jerome Bruner is not an easy task. The book is quite dense when presenting the development of Bruner’s ideas, but as I mentioned above, the use of metaphors and refreshing ideas provides a source of novelty in our field. This reminds me of the distinction between ‘thick descriptions’ and ‘light descriptions’ proposed by Geertz (1973, pp. 20–24, cited by White, 1997). Light descriptions of the actions of a group of people are those which exclude the interpretations of the actors who take part in such actions. Thick descriptions are made of the interpretations of those who participate in the actions which are described, focusing on interpretation systems which help to create the negotiation of shared meaning concerning those actions. In this way I think that this book provides an attempt to go beyond a ‘light description’ of the work of Bruner, engaging in a coherent conversation and negotiation between several authors and theoretical disciplines. Again this use of ‘thick descriptions’ helps to open up new possibilities to old problems, and promote what the same Bruner signals in the prologue: ‘to think again about these issues’ (p. 22). Among all the issues treated in the book I would like to focus on two of them which drew my attention through my reading: the cultural construction of self-consciousness and the use of metaphors in order to understand new phenomena. 387



For Bruner, as explained by Domingo, the self is like a narrator who tells the unconcluded and open story about oneself. Moreover, the self is transactional; the story needs to be situated in a social reality, negotiated and distributed between others. Both the mind and the self are part of the social world. In this way, according to the author, ‘the self not only loses its preliminary virginity and splits itself in a plurality of narrative selves, but it becomes something dynamic and changeable, a conflictive product between self-reflective and metacognitive processes and cultural and sociohistorical processes’ (p.359). At the end the self becomes a ‘cultural self’, a mirror of the values and ideologies of its culture. It is important to focus on the idea of self as a narration because it is one of the ways to achieve the interconnection between mind and culture and the interrelationship between three different levels of analysis: the intrapersonal, interpersonal and suprapersonal. Any conflict between a self and its culture generates the emergence of ‘disrupted narratives’ between the self-biographical texts expressed by the self and the cultural texts provided by the culture. This conflict can be overcome in two different ways: reinventing a new self as an alternative in that culture (cultural transgression) or creating a new version of the self more adapted to the identity resources already legitimized. From a developmental psychology point of view my attention was drawn to the fact that there wasn’t any mention of the work of Erik Erikson on identity or of any of the neo-Eriksonian literature either. Erikson (1968) regarded identity formation as the central psychosocial task of adolescence. He identified four aspects of optimal identity: (a) becoming and feeling most like oneself and experiencing a subjective sense of comfort with the self; (b) having a sense of direction in life; (c) perceiving sameness and continuity of the self from the past, in the present, and to the anticipated future; and (d) expressing an identity that is affirmed by a community of important others. As we can see, the last point highlights the psychosocial nature of the identity according to Erikson, which is not so different from that defended by Bruner. The task of creating a coherent sense of self through the telling of a coherent narrative is not so different from the task given by Erikson to the Ego-self: the ‘central and partially unconscious organizing agency [which] must at any given stage of life deal with a changing self which demands to be synthesized with anticipated and abandoned selves’, and self-identity ‘emerges from experiences in which temporarily confused selves are succesfully reintegrated in an ensemble of roles which also secure social recognition’ (p. 211). Both quotations emphasize the social connection of identity with its social 388



context and also focus on one of the most recent processes researched from an Eriksonian perspective: the differentiation–integration processes (van Hoof & Raaijmakers 2003) and the development of commitments (Kunnen & Bosma, 2003). None of these authors uses a narrative approach or a narrative metaphor of self. They study identity development through the processes that take place as a complement of the content of this identity. From a sociocultural perspective like that described in the book, a content perspective based in the narratives created by an individual or provided by a given culture is emphasized. In contrast, from a neo-Eriksonian perspective there is a growing tendency to highlight a process-oriented perspective based in idiographic studies (Vleioras, 2005). This last issue takes us to the second consideration I wanted to highlight: the use of metaphors in order to understand new phenomena. If there is a key metaphor employed in the book, this is the narrative metaphor, which considers people and their behaviours as texts that can be read or interpreted: ‘Whoever wants to have access to the experience of other people will only be able to do it through the interpretation of the interpretations of the protagonists’ (p. 404). These interpretations from a narrative point of view include their intentions, beliefs, desires, norms, commitments, attitudes, and so on. As is suggested in the book (p. 394), the narrative metaphor (or text analogy) could be one of the options for analysing the problem of culture. There could be two more: the analogy of game and the analogy of drama. In my opinion the limitation of all of them is the use of a metaphor in order to understand a complex phenomenon. For instance, Gergen (1988) has criticized the limitations of this narrative metaphor: it is not possible to infer a generally valid intention or purpose conected to an external behaviour and it is not possible to avoid the influence of the previous understanding structures of a reader in the process of reading a ‘text’. According to him, the metaphor of a person as a text entails that the valid communication, a correct interpretation and a genuine intimacy are beyond human capacity. In contrast he proposes as an alternative the metaphor of dance or game to substitute for the narrative metaphor of text. This leads to a focus on the relational dimension of any human experience; any interpretation would imply a collaboration between those participants involved. It is curious to me that this seems to be the metaphor used by Domingo in order to criticize the limitations of the Bruner’s folk psychology project. As was stated above, Bruner avoided including five critical issues: the power relationships that conform any culture; 389



the classist dimension of any multicultural society; the ecological relationship between nature and culture; and the social critic function of cultural psychology. All these five issues in my opinion imply taking into account a relational perspective: between different social groups; different cultures; the relationship between culture and nature and the relationship between stability and change. This change in the metaphor being used is related to the crisis described by Denzin and Lincoln (2000) in their history of qualitative research: the crisis of praxis (related to the crisis of representation and legitimation). This crisis asks: ‘is it possible to effect change in the world if society is only and always a text?’(p. 17). The answer to this question seems to be no. Maybe that’s the reason for the subtle change of metaphor employed by the author, which anyway is too derivative of the influence of Vygotsky and Bakhtin in the work of Bruner. The positive side of using these metaphors is that they help to create an understanding of a complex and unknown phenomenon. As Jaynes (1976/2000) put it, ‘[U]nderstanding a thing is to arrive to a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding’ (p. 52)’. If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding anything in our immediate experience. That’s probably one limitation in the use of metaphors to understand any cultural or psychosocial phenomenon. They impose some of their structure and limitations on the phenomenon they want to understand, as we saw with the limitations of the metaphor of the person as a narrative, or a text, or a relationship, or a drama, and so on. The limitation itself is the use of metaphor. We understand the phenomenon better but pay the price of imposing the limitations of the metaphor on the phenomenon. And sometimes we develop the metaphor instead of the experience itself. But if we want to go beyond operating in the world in order to change it, develop it, optimize it, equilibrate it, or whatever we want to do with it, then we should pay closer attention to the processes involved and less to the metaphorical contents being used. Maybe that’s one of the critiques of the work of Bruner that the author describes in the final chapter of the book when defending that a critical folk psychology should: inform against the pycho-symbolic mechanisms used by the power in order to deprive its subjects of the freedom of their own mind. Folk psychology can only be critical (a critic of the culture) when it can transit—dialectically— from the ‘power of the mind’ to the ‘mind of the power’. (p. 419)

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In order to rethink these interesting issues I highly recommend the reading of this book. References Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Introduction. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 1–17). London: Sage. Erikson, E. (1968). Identity, youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Towards an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures (pp. 3–30). New York: Basic Books. Gergen, K.J. (1988). If persons are texts. In S.B. Messer, L.A. Sass, & R.L. Woolfolk (Eds.), Hermeneutics and psychological theory: Interpretive perspectives on personality, psychotherapy, and psychopathology (pp. 28–51). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jaynes, J. (2000). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicamental mind. New York: Mariner Books. (Original work published 1976.) Kunnen, E.S., & Bosma, H.A. (2003). Fischer’s skill theory applied to identity development: A response to Kroger. Identity, 3, 247–270. van Hoof, A., & Raaijmakers Q.A. (2003). The search for the structure of identity formation. Identity, 3, 271–289. Vleioras, G. (2005). Identity and emotions: An overlooked link. Groningen: Stichting Kinderstudies. White, M. (1997). Narratives of therapist’s lives. Dulwich: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Biography ALEJANDRO IBORRA is Assistant Professor in the faculty of Psychopedagogy at the University of Alcalá, Spain. His research to date has been concerned with several topics, such as identity formation processes, developmental transitions, collaborative learning and programs to improve social skills in adolescents and adults. He has made several research visits to West Virginia University (USA, 2000), Exeter University (UK, 2004) and Groningen University (the Netherlands, 2006). His current research is related to the integration of qualitative and quantitative research through the use of dynamic systems models and the development of intervention programs to optimize transitions concerning identity changes. ADDRESS: Alejandro Iborra, Aulario María de Guzmán, C/S.Cirilo s/n, Alcalá de Henares, 28801, Madrid, Spain. [email: [email protected]]

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