This book addresses nothingness as not only the intangible presence of an emotional, cultural, social, or even political void that is felt on an existential level, but has some solid foundations in reality. The death of a loved one, the social isolation of an individual, or the culture shock one may experience in another country are examples of situations in which an external sense of absence mirrors an internal psychological and philosophical sense of nothingness.
Not much has been explicitly written on nothingness in the history of psychology. On the other hand, nothingness seems to be implicitly embedded in many scholars' work. This duality of explicitly and implicitly expressed ideas about nothingness reveals how psychology finds inspiration in philosophy, and vice versa. The book aims to illustrate how the concept of the presence of absence—nothingness—fills a void in contemporary psychological theorizing.
Contents
Series Editor's Foreword, Jaan Valsiner
1 Nothingness—Philosophical Insights into Psychology
Jytte Bang and Ditte Winther-Lindqvist
2 Is Future Perception Possible?
Tetsuya Kono
3 The Color of Nothingness
Simo Koppe
4 The Nothingness of Developmental Situations
Jytte Bang
5 Nothingness as the Dark Side of Social Representations
Alicia Barreiro and Jose Antonio Castorina
6 The Gift of a Rock: A Case Study in the Emergence and Dissolution of Meaning
Alex Gillespie and Tania Zittoun
7 The Nothing That Is: Making Meaning Out of Nothing at All
Seth Surgan and Emily Abbey
8 Nothingness and the Forgotten: A Post-human Thought Experiment
Tine Jensen
9 Time Together—Time Apart: Nothingness and Hope in Teenager
Ditte Winther-Lindqvist
10 Nothingness: Imprisoned in Existence—Excluded From Society
Charlotte Mathiassen
11 When Links Are Missing: Children and Post Divorce Family Life
Anja Marschall
12 Silent Nothings: Undisciplined Language
Lisa A. Mazzei
13 Is There No Sense in Nonsense? Co-transforming the Apparently Nonsensical
Niklas A. Chimirri
14 Numbers: User-Driven Standards and Manageable Nothingness
Morten Nissen and Katrine Barington
Contributors
Index
Biography
Jytte Bang