The Wandering Soul in Relation to Time

Abstract

The unidirectional, linear-progressive view of time for psychology may need an overhaul. In this article, I comment upon Yamada and Kato’s (2006) findings and further discuss the underlying axiom that gives time its structure: We stand in relation to things. This relationship is key to understanding the world in which we are embedded. The trajectories of time reveal the course of a particular development, be it the psyche in the historical-cultural temporal context as illustrated through Wilhelm Wundt’s Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1912), or how certain people conceive of their soul’s voyage through life and death cycles. However, the supposedly ‘observed’ developmental trajectories—of whatever nature they may be—emerge due to our situatedness towards a particular event. In the end, we must remember that time is nothing but an ‘infused’ component of the complex qualities of phenomena, whose Gestalt reveals itself once the researcher’s finite perspective has cut somewhere into the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world