Well-being, learning, and development must build on understandings of ‘human specificity’

A critical analysis of emotionregulating initiatives in pedagogical practice

Abstract

This article argues for Danish/German critical psychology as a foundational theory for understanding why human well-being is currently challenged.
From a historical dialectical materialist perspective human subjectivity must be interpreted both ‘internally’ and ‘externally’; understood as inextricably linked all the way from the individual biology to the social material world, and internally in the development of the critical psychological theory and in more pedagogical and political projects.
In the very basic assumption, the theory of critical psychology is founded in the human biology and body. With the ambition of insisting on a psychology which includes the intersubjective as the least analytical unit, the development of theory that incorporates and conceptualizes the human body has more or less been left at the first pages in Grundlegung (Holzkamp, 1983), pointing out the fact that the human body stood up and became societal.
The article discusses how there are tendencies – internally in the project of developing a critical psychological theory that crucially insists on the societal – to forget, disapprove or overlook concepts that may secure the inclusion of what the critical psychology conceptualizes as ‘human specificity’ in the praxis which the theory is meant to serve. Through analyses of actual tendencies in the pedagogy designed for school starters, I will argue for the importance of going back to the roots and remind ourselves, psychology, and the rest of the world that the human being is a biological creature with both body and cognition, senses and emotions, who participates inextricably in the societal world.