A person using a symbolic resource is a person using a novel, a film, a picture, a song, or a ritual, to address an unfamiliar situation in her everyday life. This chapter sketches the historical background of the notion of symbolic resource, and highlights its potential for socio-cultural psychology. It gives a model for the analysis of uses of symbolic resources. The chapter shows how symbolic resources participate to psychological development because of their mediation of three basic psychological processes: intentionality, inscription in time, and distancing. It explains that the symbolic systems and artefacts have as major property the fact that they encapsulate human meaning and experience; people are constantly striving for meaning, especially in moments of change. However, it appears that social sciences are still unable to account for how cultural tools participate in people's personal meaning making, and emotional elaboration as part of psychic transformation.

Socio-cultural psychology is widely known as a theory and research field that stresses the determinant role of social interaction and culture in the development of the higher psychological functions. This chapter presents a view of the human subject that avoided dualism (mind-body, individual-social, physical-symbolic) and was capable of bridging the gap between the basic psychological processes and the higher processes involving consciousness and meaning. It describes the reorganization of dynamic systems as a key concept for the description and explanation of perception and movement. The main claim is that the kind of explanation including self-organization and temporal dynamics applied to the development of perception and action may be useful for the explanation of how socialization and enculturation processes develop. The chapter explores the concept of re-mediation, and the practices from it derived, which are one of the privileged arenas where basic psychological processes and socio-cultural phenomena have historically intersected.

This chapter discusses the parallels between metaphor and the sign applying to the extent that one accepts the temporal embeddedness of human meaning-making. By temporal embeddedness, it is meant that each experience humans have is made novel by its unique position within the temporal order. One situation in which the literal and imagined are allowed close company, and remain visible as they hold it, is the poem. The chapter turns to illustrate the poetic motion of the sign in more detail. Daniel describes feeling that his identity was a façade, a remainder left behind after years of draining emotional content out of experience. The 'literal' and 'imagined' can be seen as a dynamic field of analysis in socio-cultural psychology. In an ephemeral world, humans are doing something to organize experience, yet that organizer, the sign, itself bears the mark of the temporal flow, and perpetually transforming through those tensions.

This chapter focuses on the historical socio-cultural processes of producing psychological theories, and most specifically theories of a socio-cultural kind. Psychology is a consequence of situated activities and thus the knowledge it offers is subordinated to a process of continuous cultural and historical transformation. The chapter describes how human rationality gets shaped in a socio-historical spiral, focusing on how culture establishes and distributes levels of self-reflection about human action. An analysis of the emergence of psychological theories about the socio-cultural phenomenon follows. The chapter then explains how multidisciplinary heritage produced current psychological approaches to socio-cultural phenomena. The sociocultural network of contents, reasons, and meanings, which shape subjectivity and permit to make sense of human activity is examined. Finally, the chapter argues that human behavior involves an activity oriented towards establishing the meaning of experiencing.