Psychosemantic Aspects of Family Microculture

Abstract

In the framework of the existential-narrative approach developed by the authors, the ideas about the family as a special microcultural system are defined. Family microculture is con-sidered as a psychosemantic reality built up during the family formation, reproducing itself in history and generating a figurative and cognitive model of self-perception, behavior and lifespan for each of the family members. This is a form of family subjectivity, which appears as a result of the particular psychological way of life that has developed over the course of cooperative existence of several family generations and provides for intrafamily psychologi-cal similarity. Family microculture transmits an assimilated and concentrated in texts experi-ence to a growing subject. This experience is generally suitable for a number of situations that the family considers significant and that can potentially occur on a person’s life path. The subject interiorizes this experience not so much as a role model and reproduction, but as a general modus, as the logic of behavior, hidden in everyday life and approved by the micro-social environment. The presented analysis of the content of family microculture allows us to understand it as a special precedential psychosemantic reality. Intra-family psychosemantics often appears in the consciousness of a developing person as a “pre-life-experienced” sample, which subsequently determines the choice and perception of other images, units, texts, espe-cially when a person has no individual experience with the realities which they describe. The authors propose a structure and content model of family microculture, in which four clusters are distinguished: “Family rituals and traditions” (contributes to the establishment of basic patterns and models of human interaction with the surrounding reality and corresponds to the behavioral part of the developing “Self-concept”), “Family and genealogical connections” (determines the formation of figurative and cognitive self-representations in the context of other family members existence and the family as a whole, experiences of intrafamily affinity and psychological similarity), “Spatial and material milieu of a family” (identifies relation-ships between family members through artefacts and the organization of home space, builds semantic-symbolic connections of a man and his family genealogy, influencing his emotional sphere and value orientations) and “Family Narratives” (concentrated on the value-semantic and motivational components of the “Self-concept”, facilitating individuation and promoting the subject’s adaptation to reality). Each of the clusters is presented in four dimensions: 1) its specific function in the family microculture; 2) its psychosemantic content; 3) action and/or material “carriers” of this content; 4) “points of application” - socializing potentials that fix certain semantics in the personal autobiographical memory.