We live in a complex world of signs. Traffic lights,
interface icons, mathematical symbols, maps, words, and so on, are examples of
the variety that the semiotic universe holds. Signs seem to be fundamental
mediators of human action. All the afore mentioned kinds of signs belong to the
surrounding world. They are external mediators of our internal activity. There,
their physical constituents seem to be neuro-chemical processes in neural
networks. This is the material form of internal signs.
Psychological analysis requires that we know a bit more. The
peculiarity of neural networks is their ability to contain referential links.
The basic idea in the concept of sign is its ability to refer to something
else. Traffic signs direct our driving. They help anticipate yet unseen events
and road properties. Often their iconic symbols are straightforward, sometimes not,
and we must learn their meaning.
Language is perhaps our most important system of signs.
Words have no natural referents. Their meaning is established in social
practices and, hence, learning to know their meaning is a life-long labour.
The word “sign” also has a meaning. What should it involve
to make it applicable for psychological analysis? The challenge here is that as
both external and internal activities are mediated by signs, the understanding the
common constituents of their meaning must be spelled out.
In the last century, Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Mead represented the two classic attempts to work
out the meaning of psychological signs. Their formulations were, first, marginalised by behaviourism
and, later, by the arrival of cognitive psychology that discarded the idea of
symbolic mediation in favour of the Aristotelian view of in-formation.
The third contemporary conception in the 1930s was Mikhail Bakhtin's
dialogic understanding of signs. Together with Valentin Voloshinov he generated
and extremely interesting view of words as 2 sided acts. Bakhtin’s writings
became fashionable in Finland in the late 70’s after a translation of some of his
essays into Finnish. Somewhat later, Holqvist and Emerson’s work made his texts
available in English. Voloshinov’s “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” had
been translated in 1971. I came across the book in 1986, when the extended
revision was published in English.
Having been familiar with Vygotsky’s sign concept and Leontiev’s unsuccessful attempt to incorporate it into his activity theory, the idea of dialogic signs felt like a fresh breeze. It formed the starting point for my explorations of the meaning of psychological signs.
I also had a laboratory, my psychotherapy practice, that seemed appropriate to the task of studying the relationships between Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov in their manner of understanding signs.
The task was much harder than I ever imagined.
