Creating bridges to the future: The poetic dimension through family life

Abstract

In their article, Jovchelovitch, Priego-Hernandez, and Glaveanu (2013) document how children from societies characterized by collectivist ideologies, or who experience poverty and/or marginalization, may experience an accelerated process of decentration. In these children, the public world and its complexity are foregrounded in their drawings, and they show a strengthened connection between themselves and the public world relative to normative assumptions for their age. While the target article is largely focused on the outcomes of development, this commentary will further elaborate the processes of development. Process-focused accounts centralize the concept of emergence. We here consider the notion of poetic motion as a metaphor for human development that centralizes the notion of emergence. The study of phenomena circumscribed in this field cannot avoid recognizing the uncertainty that underlies the person's developmental experience—in impoverished environments or otherwise. Novelty emerges from a meaning-making field, within which the developing person moves, negotiating heterogeneous, ambivalent demands. In an everyday context—especially one of “living with fear”—that may be associated with marginalization and poverty, both children and adults act “as-if” the world were different, creating distance from the here-and-now and constructing bridges to the future. This process entails active imagination, in the intra and interpersonal spheres. This paper analyzes a case study to understand meaning-making processes in impoverished conditions. We look at how poverty limits developmental contexts, yet how, simultaneously, there can be psychological novelty in a very positive way, constructed through semiotically mediated, imagination driven, meaning-making processes.