Ken Gergen - Notable Concepts

Notable Concepts

• Enlightenment effects. The moral and political effects on cultural behavior of disseminating scientific knowledge. (“Social psychology as history”)
• Generative theory: Theory that unsettles common assumptions, and opens up possibilities or new forms of action. (“Toward generative theory”)
• Deficit discourse. By constructing the world, and particularly individuals, in terms of problems, there is an objectification of deficit and a suppression of positive possibilities. (Realities and Relationships)
• Cycle of progressive infirmity: With the dissemination of information about categories of mental illness, people come to see themselves in these terms. As a result, they seek help from the mental health professions, which are in turn, expanded in numbers. With the expansion of the mental health industry, new diagnostic categories are developed and disseminated. The society becomes progressively infirmed. (Realities and Relationships)
• Multiphrenia: The condition, largely attributed to technologies that increase social contact, of being simultaneously drawn in multiple and conflicting directions. (The Saturated Self)
• Pregression. To unsettle the modernist value placed on progress, the proposal that for every change that is effected in societal life, the repercussions will unsettle multiple conditions that people define as positive. (The Saturated Self)
• Positive aging: As an alternative to the pervasive view of aging as decline (deficit discourse), it is possible to discover and construct myriad ways of crating later life as a period of unparalleled growth and enrichment.
• First and second order morality: All collaborative relationships will being about some understanding of the good. With multiple groups proclaiming their own good, the stage is set for interminable conflict. Second order morality is achieved through practices that bring otherwise embattled groups into a condition of positive collaboration. (Relational Being)
• Transformative dialogue: Forms of dialogic practice that dissolve the barriers of meaning separating otherwise conflicted parties. (Relational Being)
• Co-action. One’s actions have no meaning in themselves, but come into meaning through another’s collaborative action. At the same time, another’s potentially collaborative actions only become so as they are supplemented. All human intelligibility emerges not from individual actors but through co-action. (Relational Being)
• Multi-being. What is commonly viewed as the individual subject is the common intersection of multiple relationships. (Relational Being)