A Human Through the Prism of Jointness. The Possibility of a General Psychology

The paper raises the question of the possibility of creating a general psychological field of research. The condition for the beginning of such research is a sufficiently complete general model of psychological phenomena. The assumption is made that the work of identifying suitable psychological universals has already been done as a part of cultural-historical psychology. We summarised the investigations, starting with L.S. Vygotsky's idea of a psychological «unit». With the help of some modern theories, the assumption is substantiated that meaning is a feeling of jointness, the essence of the human in man. As an example we took the «integral unit of the human life world» construction in the F.E. Vasilyuk’s school and its transformation into a scheme of jointness. By analysing F.E. Vasilyuk's notion of «experience», the activity-dialogical model of jointness is extrapolated and filled with «meaning». This model is proposed as a suitable tool for generalising psychological knowledge. An assumption is made about resonance as a fundamental mechanism of jointness formation. In this paper we describe the properties of the prism of jointness and question its sufficiency for the beginning of general psychological research.