The book includes a new theoretical synthesis of William Stern's classic personology published in the 1930s with contemporary cultural psychology of semiotic mediation developed by the author over the last two decades. It looks at the human mind as it operates in its full complexity, starting from the most complex general levels of aesthetic and political participation in society and ending with individual willful actions in everyday life contexts.

Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. And Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. He has been Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark in 2013-2018 and Professeur invitee at University of Luxembourg (2013-2019). He has published and edited around 50 books, the most pertinent of which are his monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), and Ornamented Lives (Charlotte NC: Information Age, 2019). He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017, for his interdisciplinary work on human development, as well as Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

Introduction: Psychology as general science of human being . Part 1. Phenomenology of the psyche and Semiotic foundations for human psychology Chapter 1. Constructing and Destroying One's Life: Phenomenology of the human life course Chapter 2 Signs in Minds: Semiotic basis for the New General Psychology Chapter 3 Mediating Mind: Making values Part 2. The Depth of Human Subjectivity Chapter 4. Silent screaming: Voices within the Self Chapter 5. Disquieting societies Part 3. Societal framing: Demand, direction and catalysis Chapter 6. Constructing loyalties: Dialogues between rights and duties Chapter 7. Masked morality: Theatrical reality of living Chapter 8. Monuments and memory: Imagination amplified and objectified Chapter 9. Political Sentiments: Escalation and resistance Part 4. Person in the mirror of oneself: Qualitative structures in dynamic transformations Chapter 10. Desires for Beauty: Aesthetics of human existence Chapter 11. From Wanting to Acting: Active desire for meaningful living Part V. Pathways of Cultural Personology Chapter 12. How to investigate complex personological processes? Chapter 13 Final Conclusions: General Structure of Cultural Personology