Transformative learning and the form that transforms: towards a psychosocial theory of recognition using auto/biographical narrative research

In this paper I interrogate the changing forms that may be fundamental to transformative learning and how these are best chronicled and understood. Drawing on auto/biographical narrative research, I challenge the continuing primacy of a kind of overly disembodied, decontextualized cognition as the basis of transformation. Notions of epistemic shifts, for instance, and their central importance, can lack sufficient or convincing grounding in the complexities of whole people and their stories. I develop, instead, a psychosocial theory of recognition, drawing, especially, on critical theory and psychoanalysis: in this perspective, the experiencing self, in relationship, constitutes, agentically, the form that transforms, while fundamental changes in mind-set are deeply intertwined with shifts in inner-outer psychosocial dynamics. I challenge, in the process, some conventional boundaries between cognition and emotion, self and other, the psychological and socio-cultural, as well as collective and individual learning.