Zittoun, Tania

2017, Zittoun, Tania, Han, Min, Cunha, Carla

Subjectivity is what makes a person a unique subject, different from other persons and her social environment, and distanced enough from her experience to be able to reflect upon it and create her own future. In this chapter, I will examine the life of married couples in a changing country. A country groups many individuals, and because of its social and political institutions, it constraints what is possible for people to live or want for themselves. A marriage is a curious alliance between two lives for an unpredictable period of time, which strongly canalizes each of the partners’ lives. However, a person is never reduced to his or her national history, or the story of his or her marriage: even in the tighter frame, a person keeps becoming a unique human being. This chapter is thus a modest attempt to account for the fact that, within a group of six couples married at the same time and living in the same societal conditions, each couple grows differently, and each person becomes absolutely unique… In order to explain the generation of uniqueness in such constraining forces, my proposition is to examine people’s imagination of alternatives, and their personal life philosophies.

2016, Zittoun, Tania, Marsico, Giuseppina, Ruggero Andrisano, Ruggeri, Salvatore, Sergio

This chapter considers reflexivity as the process by which people can learn from their experience of living, and develop personal life philosophies. Within the theoretical frame of a semiotic, cultural psychology, I characterize reflexivity as process demanding: (1) distancing from an initial lived, relational experience; (2) an explorative loop; (3) and the enrichment of the initial experience. Social others, symbolic resources and ruptures might trigger or facilitate reflexivity; yet at times, reflexivity might be constrained socially and psychologically. The case study of the life-courses of two partners, Ivana and Vaclav, over 25 years, allows identifying modalities of reflexive loops, their social and personal limitations, and their various consequences for developmental trajectories.