Methodological and epistemological demands in advancing the study of subjectivity from a cultural-historical standpoint

Abstract

Historically, psychology has given little attention to the ontological definition of its main theoretical representations and has consequently avoided the epistemological and methodological challenges that new theoretical constructions should have implied. This fact, to some extent, has resulted from the rupture between psychology, particularly American psychology (Note: I refer to American psychology not only because it was characterized by this theoretical orientation, but also because at the beginning of the 20th century American psychology came to have a position of leadership in world psychology, due both to its level of organization as well as to its growing number of publications.), and philosophy and the other social sciences since the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, American psychology is strongly oriented toward being recognized as a natural science. In following that goal, methodology has been an object of special attention to the detriment of theory and epistemology. That “methodolatry,” has defined the trend in psychology of considering above on methodology as scientific, independent of the problems to be studied and of its requirements in terms of knowledge production. In fact, the methodology of psychology has oriented itself up until the present toward five main ontological definitions of what psyche is: behavioral, cognitivist, semiotic operational, linguistic, and discursive, with emotions being understood as epiphenomena within each of these representations.