1st Edition

Nothingness Philosophical Insights into Psychology

By Jytte Bang Copyright 2016

    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