| Summary: | Abstract This study fills an urgent need for qualitative analyses of relationships resulting in human change. It is a result of sixteen years of independent study by the author. It combines postgraduate study of nonlinear methodology, applied research of children’s pretend play, experience in educational psychology and Gestalt-counselling, as well as the practical training of graduate students at the Karelian State Pedagogical University (Petrozavodsk, Russia), and the Kajaani Department of Teacher Education (Kajaani, Finland). In this thesis, an attempt is made to reveal the fundamental reality of relationships between human beings. Using theories of helping relationships and data from developmental psychology, a qualitative nonlinear dynamical model of human relationships is elaborated. The scientific findings of Kurt Lewin and the Gestalt-therapy theory are widely used. To illustrate the explanatory potential of the proposed relationship model and the possibility of qualitative analyses, children’s pretend play is analyzed. In the first chapter, the basic connectedness between humans is studied. The author is focused on theories of relationships and their application to the organizing of relationships’ flow. The second chapter is devoted to detailed analyses of dynamic features of these theories and Kurt Lewin’s conception of tension system. The ontological philosophy of relationships is briefly reviewed. This helps to formulate the main problem of the research — how is a nonlinear phenomenological model of human relationships possible? In the third chapter, a new nonlinear dynamic model of human relationships is elaborated. Several conceptions from Lewin’s dynamic psychology and Gestalt-therapy are further developed in the model. A number of examples are analyzed. Video-data on children’s pretend play is analyzed in the fourth chapter. In the subsequent discussions some advantages and shortcomings of the suggested dynamic nonlinear model are examined. Tiivistelmä Tämä tutkimus pyrkii vastaamaan kysymykseen ...
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