Learning, Experience and the Societal Unconscious: Combining a Materialistic Theory and a Dialectic Methodology

This chapter reserves the term Transformation for substantial societal changes that involve subjective engagement and social learning. It presents a psycho-societal approach that theorizes individual and collective learning as a potential dimension of societal life. It is a materialist approach based in critical social theory and psychodynamics, which sees learning and other subjective processes as embodied in the social practice of concrete living people. Epistemologically it is committed to a dialectical methodology for empirical studies of learning in everyday life, inside and outside educational settings, recognizing historical reality, and tracing endogenous social and psychic dynamics that may emerge through individual and collective learning. Examples are studies of work life learning and potential transformations of the societal ecology of work life, with an outlook to wider society.