REMICH-2014

Ambivalence and Inter-generational Relations: The Construction of the Value

of Responsibility in the Transition to Adulthood A Case Example
Elsa de Mattos (PhD)
FAINOR Faculdade Independente do Nordeste (Bahia, Brazil)
Recently, Zittoun and Gillespie (in their Niels Bohr Lecture, March 2014, Aalborg)
proposed a model of the relation between mind and society, and specifically the way
in which individuals develop and gain agency through society, in which they
theorized a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate
differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind, enabling
psychological movement between experiences, which in turn mediates how people
move through society.
They suggest that humans move through society, encountering a diversity of
proximal experiences, and that they bring to these experiences a range of distal
experiences that help them deal with ambivalence and uncertainty emerging in these
encounters. According to this model, this combination of proximal and distal
experiences constitutes the dialogicality of human mind (Grossen & Salazar Orvig,
2011; Markov, 2003, 2006; Zittoun & Grossen, 2012; Zittoun, 2014a). Humans
bring distal experiences, knowledge and ideas from other contexts, and
temporalities, into the immediate present context. As pointed out by the Zittoun and
Gillespie (2014), among relevant distal experiences are voices of significant others,
that can be and most of the times are family members, teachers, friends and
mentors.
Along these lines, I will explore the idea that inter-generational relations can be
understood as a crossroad where proximal and distal experiences meet. More
specifically, the way in which adolescents and young people develop and gain
agency through society is deeply embedded in their inter-generational relations.
Through these relations, adolescents and youth may integrate important meanings,
values and beliefs from past generations into their proximal experiences, facilitating
both the overcoming of uncertainty, and the emergence of new personal cultures.
Through this movement, they may integrate past and present experiences, and
project themselves into new, alternative futures (Valsiner, 2009).
In this paper, I will explore how inter-generational relations, i.e. the relations between
youth and significant others such as mentors and family members may become
powerful internalized voices and take the role of catalyzing agents in facilitating new
synthesis in young peoples personal cultures. Voices of significant others, acting as
powerful semiotic mediators of young peoples experiences, may enable a specific
direction for change in the transition to adulthood. For example, these voices may
take a critical role in young peoples construction of the notion of responsibility a
fundamental value one must develop in the transition to adulthood in Western
culture.
Responsibility is usually regarded as a personal trait or an individual competence,
however, but from a cultural psychological perspective it can be conceived as an
affective semiotic field that operates as a value orientation of human actions. The
construction of values is an intensely dynamic process, involving internalization and
externalization of meanings that become salient in inter-generational relations.
In this paper, I will depart from the perspectives of the cultural psychology and
dialogical self theory, and explore how a young woman Jane navigates into inter-
generational relations and constructs a new personal meaning of herself as a
responsible person. Exploring continuity and change in self-positioning over time, I
will show how the value of responsibility becomes progressively integrated into
Janes personal culture, as she participates in different contexts of life, specifically,
family, work and religion.
Methodology
In this study, I will present a longitudinal case study focusing on the narrative of a
young woman Jane who lives in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a large city of
the Northeast of Brazil. Data was constructed through three rounds of in-depth
interviews at ages18-19 (1
st
round), 20-21 (2
nd
round), and at 22-23 (3
rd
round).
Interviews lasted approximately two hours each. Data analysis consisted of narrative
analysis, followed by mapping of tensions between self-positions, and analysis of
how these tensions evolve.

Analysis
This case analysis illustrates three main aspects:
1) how inter-generational encounters may foster catalytic changes in young
peoples personal cultures in the transition to adulthood,
2) how the voices of significant others form other generations (and more
specifically of mentors, parents and grandparents) may act as catalytic agents
operating between the micro- and mesogenetic levels of development,
fostering the emergence of promoter self-positions in young peoples self-
system over time, helping create meaning bridges between past and future
(projected) positions, and validating these new meanings in a broader context,
giving a social framework to personal events.
3) how young people construct the value of responsibility through inter-
generational encounters and how this hypergeneralyzed affective meaning
provides an integration of different spheres of Janes life along her flux of
experience (past-present-future), contributing to the emergence of new
perspectives towards the future.