Anna Sieben

The popularisation of psychological knowledge and practices has so far mainly been studied in the urban middle class of the so-called West. In this talk, I will look at a series of interview projects in which we have analysed ideals of marriage, marital relationships and marital conflicts as well as parenthood and parent-child relationships in Turkey. Turkey is an interesting field of research because of its cultural position ‘in between’ (neither collectivist nor individualist, neither East nor West, etc.).

What fascinates us about our empirical material is the diversity in the extent and manner in which psychological knowledge is incorporated into the framing of intimate family relationships. This lecture will attempt to systematise this diversity on the basis of Kagitcibasi’s cultural psychological work and develop new research questions for the future.