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Many patients with cancer face existential challenges struggling to find mental respite from their illness and a space for processing and transforming difficult thoughts and concerns. Research has shown that providing a room for cancer patients’ own creative expression can foster healing processes and mental well-being. Using theories of Donald W. Winnicott and liminality as a theoretical lens, we aim to show how a group of 40 cancer patients participating in a rehabilitation program have experiences of transition through art therapy. 33 women and seven men (within the age span of 31–76 years), across all disease stages and types of cancer, participated in a five-day rehabilitative program, addressing different existential themes (e.g., death, hope, love). On the last day of the course, we performed focus group interviews to explore the participants’ perceived significance of the art therapy among other course elements. The analysis led to three main processes of transition: a) engaging in a new creative realization or refusing to do so, b) therapeutic change, and c) reintegration: contemplation and peace. We show how the participants’ experiences can be understood as a space of reflection on new patterns of life. The use of art therapy as an extended part of a rehabilitation care contributes to positive processes of “corrective emotional experiences” and to transformation of crisis by fostering patient expression, especially in combination with encounter groups.

In this paper I will take advantage of the opportunity for an unapologetic work of theoretical psychology. In recent years I have been concerned with the concept of liminality. A liminal experience, in a nutshell, involves a temporary suspension of limits that permits a transition to a new set of limits. For this reason, liminality concerns the emergence of novelty just at the moment in which ‘something’ is in process of becoming. Here, more specifically, I want to help theorise the notion of cultural experience by bringing more clearly to light the distinctively liminal sources of cultural experience.

This contribution offers a psychosocial theorisation of the notion of cultural experience / experiencing. Building upon interdisciplinary scholarship on liminality, and developing some insights from Donald Winnicott, an argument is developed which brings to light the distinctively liminal sources of cultural experience. A liminal experience, in a nutshell, involves a temporary suspension of limits that permits a transition to a new set of limits. For this reason, liminality concerns the emergence of novelty just at the moment in which ‘something’ is in process of becoming. Schütz’s phenomenological notion of a ‘world of everyday life’ permits two related contrasts: first a contrast between the relative stability of a workaday canonical ‘world’ of experience and action, and a number of artfully enacted ‘worlds within worlds’ such as art, play and sport; and second a contrast between both of these and circumstances of transition in which people find themselves in a phase of becoming that is ‘between worlds’. It is proposed that cultural experiencing be grasped as liminal experience of a world within a world that happens between worlds: a world-within-and-between-worlds. This idea that cultural experience or cultural experiencing has its source in liminal transition is illustrated through a number of examples.

We introduce memory and imagination as conceived by cultural psychology as related processes of meaning construction. Memory is a reconstructive process that brings the past into the present for the purposes of action. Imagination is the quintessence of meaning creation in that it enables us to distance ourselves from the here and now and reconfigure our thoughts and feelings in relation to the world. This chapter draws parallels between these processes by highlighting: (a) their relation to a holistic, developmental, and felt experience; (b) meaning as it develops through dialogical movement that encompasses time (past-present-future) and space (inside-subjective and outside-intersubjective); and (c) the challenge of apprehending the subjective meaning dimension.

This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies in diverse cultural settings andconcerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Jaan Valsiner’s contributions to developmental science and cultural psychology. In this brief analysis, I shall argue that Jaan Valsiner’s life and work fits nicely with a tradition of Bildung, which originates with the ancient Greeks and leads up to German philosophers of Bildung. Herder defined Bildung as “rising up to humanity through culture,” and culture in a normative sense would thus be those semiotic and material resources that enable such rising up, leading to the kind of free thinking that Jaan Valsiner’s work exemplifies.