A Heideggerian reading of J.H. van den Berg's writings contributes to an appreciation of phenomenological psychology as a cultural therapeutics. Both van den Berg's structural phenomenology of human existence and his Metablectic theory of historical changes lead to a notion of culture as a disclosive construction of the world. Our technological culture, in its reduction of all forms of relatedness to functionality (what van den Berg refers to as secularization), has repressed the spiritual dimension of contemporary life. The resultant derangement (...) of social existence gives rise to the individual distress brought in to psychotherapy. Attention to the spiritual unconscious is the ethical obligation of phenomenological psychology that transcends, and in so doing contextualizes considerations of professional competency. (shrink)

The present article undertakes a psychological reading of The Child's Conception of the World as a cultural artifact in which genetic psychology's naturalistic and positivistic assumptions reflect an Enlightenment model of science, and Piaget figures as an agent of technological rationality. A phenomenological analysis of the text reveals how Piaget's research engages in an active repression of specific dimensions of childhood experience. Young children's 'adualistic' conceptions of thought, self and language are deemed 'confused', and thereby discounted, by virtue of the (...) fact such children do not 'correctly' dichotomize experience in accord with the cultural norm of mechanistic rationality. Piaget's numerous associations of the child's 'primitive' views and the (childish) thought of the pre-Socratics are briefly explored. (shrink)