Collected Papers II on Trajectory Equifinality Approach内容紹介

Collected Papers II on Trajectory Equifinality Approach

Tatsuya Sato（サトウタツヤ）著

発行日: 2026年3月15日

形式: 電子書籍のみ

ISBN: 978-4-908736-98-8

定価: 3600円＋税

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内容紹介

文化心理学の方法論として広く用いられているTEA（複線径路等至性アプローチ）に関する英語論文集の第2集。第1集以降の既発表論文のほか、未発表論文を新たに収載。文化心理学におけるTEA、日本におけるヴァルシナー氏の貢献、文化の捉え方と文化への心理学的アプローチ、不確実性を扱う方法、小遣いの国際比較研究に見る文化的な差異と共通点、心理学史におけるナラティブなど、人間のライフコースを描くTEAの新たな軌跡。

Contents（目次）

Chapter 1. Introduction of the Trajectory Equifinality Approach to Cultural Psychology

Chapter 2. Jaan Valsiner in Japan: :The Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA)

Chapter 3. Three Modes of Viewing Culture in the Psyche: How Can We Conceive of Culture in Psychology as an Integrated Theory?

Chapter 4. Trajectory Equifinality Modeling (TEM) and Mountain Range Self for Transcending Uncertainty

Chapter 5. Psychological Approaches to Culture

Chapter 6. Cultural Differences and Shared Developmental Structures in Children’s Use of Money: A Comparative Study of Four East Asian Societies

Chapter 7. From Qualitative Traditions to TEA: Japan’s Path to Trajectory-Oriented Approaches

Chapter 8. The Role of Narrative in the History of Psychology

Author（著者）

Tatsuya Sato（サトウタツヤ）

Tatsuya Sato is Vice President of the Ritsumeikan Trust and a professor in the College of Comprehensive Psychology at Ritsumeikan University. His work spans cultural psychology, the history of psychology, and law and psychology, and he has published widely in both Japanese and English. Grounded in semiotic cultural psychology and qualitative, trajectory-oriented inquiry, he is known for developing the Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA) and related modeling tools for reconstructing human life courses without reducing them to variables. One of his major works is Making of the Future: The Trajectory Equifinality Approach in Cultural Psychology (Information Age Publishing, 2016), co-authored with Professor Jaan Valsiner.

Foreword（序文）

Cultivating TEA: Re-focusing Psychology on Phenomena That Really Matter

TEA has by now existed for two decades (Valsiner & Sato, 2006), and keeps growing. There is a very good reason for this — the Trajectory Equifinality Approach captures the reality of human psyche by uniting the real with the imaginary. Previous leading idea carriers of the 20th century — behavioral and cognitive sciences — had notoriously failed in recognizing the unity of the real and the ideal. TEA as the invention of our 21st century restores the importance of the human subjective worlds in the middle of societal action demands. It is a paradox of history of psychology that many decades have been wasted in futile pursuits of trying in psychology to become a “science” through emulating other sciences by analogy rather by substantive considerations (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). Psychology has been abandoning the very phenomena that make psychology distinctive — the psyche.
The centrality of the psyche — or soul (Seele in German) as it was known in the 19th century — was historically clear. Yet as it is materially ephemeral — our personal worlds are all “filled with” the psyche, but it has no material counterpart. Our 21st century new perspective of cultural psychology solves that problem of the ephemeral nature of the psyche by way of locating it in the process of relating with our environments and creating signs to organize that relating. The TEA is the way to approach that allows us to study it empirically in all of its concreteness. Every moment of our living forward towards the future we consult the real and imaginary trajectories of the past and project them onto the yet-to-be known range of possibilities of the future. TEA is the only approach in our contemporary psychology that allows such integration.
TEA is based on the relevance of a single instant experience of moving from the personal past to the new personal future. It is the root for new basic epistemology of nanopsychology (Valsiner, 2018) — each single instant in our psyche is structured by universal principles that make these instants work for us.
Nanopsychology involves making generalized conclusions from the minimal data — is an open-systemic approach. It celebrates the uniqueness of human life events, and the structural approach to unique phenomena. It is only through making sense of the structure of an ongoing instance of subjective experience (e.g., “what a nice flower”) in terms of instant affective escalation guided by the act of meaning-making (“this here is flower”) that the general processes of psychology work. This need to generalize from the structure of concrete instances — the basis of nanopsychology — is shared by research tasks and applied psychology practices. TEA is at the forefront of psychological science in finding a general epistemological frame of reference that would preserve the subjective unity of the human being with the ever-changing objective circumstances of our environment.

Jaan Valsiner

Prologue（プロローグ）

The Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA) did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed within a particular historical moment in Japanese psychology, was shaped through sustained international dialogue, and has been continually refined in an effort to capture the richness of human lives without reducing them to mere variables.
This volume, Collected Papers II on Trajectory Equifinality Approach, follows the first collection published in 2017 (Collected Papers on Trajectory Equifinality Approach). Whereas the first volume documented the initial emergence of TEA and the methodological consolidation of the Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM) — with particular attention to time, sampling, and well-being — this second volume reflects the further maturation and expansion of TEA within the broader landscape of cultural-semiotic psychology.
In compiling this collection, I have brought together papers of diverse origins that fall into three groups:

1. Previously published contributions. Chapters originally written for international edited volumes. These works represent TEA’s ongoing dialogue with the global scholarly community.
2. Developing manuscripts. Drafts and reflections produced during the growth of TEA but unpublished until now. These pieces offer glimpses into the thinking-in-progress that has sustained the approach.
3. Recontextualized historical and theoretical accounts. Works first written in Japanese — particularly those addressing the history of qualitative inquiry and the role of narrative — newly translated and adapted for an international readership.

Because these chapters were produced for different purposes and audiences, readers will notice some overlap, especially in the personal narratives surrounding TEA’s emergence and the foundational influence of Jaan Valsiner. I have intentionally preserved such overlap. These recurring reference points are not merely repetitions; they mark the conceptual and experiential coordinates to which my work repeatedly returns across different writing contexts.
If the first volume emphasized the methodological structure of the model, this second volume foregrounds the meanings of trajectories as they unfold in irreversible time. By bringing together historical reflections on qualitative psychology in Japan, theoretical considerations of narrative, and empirical studies of children’s agency, this collection underscores a central premise of TEA: human development is multifaceted, irreversible, and deeply meaningful.
This volume is organized into eight chapters that reflect the multiple trajectories of TEA’s development. The opening chapters introduce the conceptual foundations of the approach and its dialogue with Jaan Valsiner. Subsequent chapters explore theoretical perspectives on culture, uncertainty, and narrative, followed by empirical and historical studies that situate TEA within broader traditions of qualitative inquiry. Together, these chapters offer a multifaceted view of TEA as both a methodological framework and a cultural-psychological perspective.
I hope that Collected Papers II on TEA provides readers not only with methodological resources but also with an invitation to view human lives as unfolding stories — moving, in diverse ways, toward shared horizons of meaning within irreversible time.

Tatsuya Sato

Kyoto, Japan