This book’s aim is to rescue from oblivion the work of a forgotten founder of developmental psychology: Austrian psychologist Heinz Werner. Based on the Orthogenetic Principle, Werner created a structuralist-systemic way of understanding organismic development as genetic processes always leading parts of a system to increasing levels of differentiation and hierarchical integration in relation to the whole system. This made him one of the pioneers of developmental sciences along with figures such as James Baldwin, Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget. Werner, however, has never enjoyed the same degree of recognition as his peers and his work started to fall into oblivion by the end of the 20th century. By rescuing Heinz Werner’s work from oblivion, authors in this volume argue that it’s possible to find a way to the future of developmental psychology by looking at a forgotten part of its past. So, this contributed volume brings together chapters that review Heinz Werner’s main theoretical contributions to developmental psychology, point to the limitations of Werner’s work and propose new theoretical and methodological approaches that build upon Werner’s work to contribute to revitalize his legacy and make his original ideas the basis of a holistic approach to developmental psychology that aims at understanding development in a systemic and contextualized way. Heinz Werner: A Forgotten Pioneer in Developmental Sciences will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students in the fields of developmental, educational and theoretical psychology.
Bento Selau, Ph.D., is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the Federal University of Pampa, Brazil, and holds a Research Productivity Scholarship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). His research focuses on the themes of educational psychology, orthogenetic principle, cultural-historical psychology, death education, learning, and development. He is the author of scientific articles and books in these fields.
Pablo Fossa is director of the Cognition & Culture Laboratory (C&C) of Instituto de Bienestar Socioemocional (IBEM) at the Faculty of Psychology, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile. He received a PhD degree in Psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His doctoral thesis dealt with the expressive dimension of inner language in human experience. He did a postdoctoral fellowship financed by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of Chile, with a research project on thought trajectories from a microgenetic orientation. His lines of research are related to Cognition, Cultural Psychology and Phenomenology. He is an active member of the Society for Historical Cultural Activity Research (ISCAR), the International Society for Dialogical Self (ISDS), and the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP). He is the editor of the books Latin American Advances in Subjectivity and Development: Through Vygotsky Route (Springer, 2021), New Perspectives on Inner Speech (Springer, 2022), Inner Speech, Culture & Education (Springer, 2022), Affectivity & Learning (Springer, 2023) and Collected Papers on Inner Speech (IAP, 2024). Currently, he is PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain.
