Toward a Process Approach in Psychology: Stepping into Heraclitus' River

By: Paul van Geert and Naomi de Ruiter

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Synopsis: Psychological science constructs much of the knowledge that we consume in our everyday lives. This book is a systematic analysis of this process, and of the nature of the knowledge it produces. The authors show how mainstream scientific activity treats psychological properties as being fundamentally stable, universal, and isolable. They then challenge this status quo by inviting readers to recognize that dynamics, context-specificity, interconnectedness, and uncertainty, are a natural and exciting part of human psychology – these are not things to be avoided and feared, but instead embraced. This requires a shift toward a process-based approach that recognizes the situated, time-dependent, and fundamentally processual nature of psychological phenomena. With complex dynamic systems as a framework, this book sketches out how we might move toward a process-based praxis that is more suitable and effective for understanding human functioning.