More than a theory: a new map of social thought

Nikos Kalampalikis (1) , Valérie Haas (1)

1 GRePS - Groupe de Recherche en Psychologie Sociale

In this article we revisit two different temporal phases related to the main publication of Serge Moscovici's book La Psychanalyse, son image et son public together with two key promissing notions of the theory, cognitive polyphasia and anchoring. The first phase, initiated by the durkheimian cercle, will give us the occasion to retrieve the traces of the fascinating intellectual debate about collective psychology that was involved in producing ¨frontier¨ propositions and renewing their perspectives in today's light, namely throught cognitive polyphasia. The second phase, more recent, inspired by classical and modern research into the social representation's field, will serve us as a basis for a new hypothesis about anchoring. We will attempt to suggest that traditional familiarization allocated to anchoring can also work in the opposite sense, transmitting and guaranteeing the non-familiar, establishing strangeness. Finally, we are arguing that social representations are more than a simple theory, just as the symbol is always more than what it symbolizes.

Mots clés: social representations; cognitive polyphasia; anchoring; familiarization; strangeness

Domaines: Psychologie

Nikos Kalampalikis, Valérie Haas. More than a theory: a new map of social thought. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2008, 38 (4), pp.449-459. ⟨halshs-00495385⟩