Psychosemantic Aspects of Family Microculture

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 considered 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 psychological similarity. Family microculture transmits an assimilated and concentrated in texts experience 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 microsocial 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, especially 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 relationships 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.

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