The subject matter of this paper concerns, on the one hand, the potentials and promises, and on the other hand, the limitations or even illusions of the narrative turn in psychology. Joining the critique of narrative reductionism (Atkinson, 1997; Crossley, 2003; Eakin, 1999; Freeman, 2003), the contextualization of the narrative turn proposed here transcends the realm of narratives themselves and includes social ontology as its indispensable referent, since narratives are one of the ontological conditions of social life. It will be argued that the internal validation of narratives (Baerger & Mc Adams, 1999) must be complemented by social validation, that is, validation in terms of social change.

As one of the latest “turns” in the history of psychology, declared in 1980s -1990s, the narrative turn emerged as a critique of previous paradigms in psychology and as a self-confident promise to overcome the previous shortcomings and to finally develop a comprehensive psychology of human experience (Bruner, 1986; Schiff, 2017). However, contemporary narrative psychologists increasingly recognize tensions within narrative approaches (Smith & Sparkes, 2006), some of which are recurrent issues in the history of psychology.

It is argued here that even in its narrative turn, psychology remains mostly blind to inherent, but not always conscious, evaluative dimensions of human experience – dimensions that its founding, but substantially misinterpreted, father Wilhelm Wundt (1883/1921) recognized as the defining features of the subject matter of psychology. Where references to the ethical aspects of narrative approach are made nowadays, they rarely reach the human socio-cultural ontology, remaining instead within narratives themselves (their consistency) or confined to methodological considerations.

It seems psychology needs yet another turn to grasp human experience and to engage more deeply with human worlds.

Learning is often treated as the acquisition of codified knowledge, the mastery of disciplinary concepts, their application to problem-solving tasks, and the demonstration of competence according to predefined criteria. Even where there is recognition that learning must encompass more than this, it is frequently described at a very general level as overcoming uncertainty and crisis and adapting to rapidly shifting institutional and economic demands. This talk challenges that framing by approaching learning from the standpoint of the subject (Holzkamp, forthcoming English translation). Rather than treating uncertainty and crisis as disruptions of learning, I argue that experienced discrepancy is a constitutive condition of learning itself—one that confronts learners with agentive predicaments and forces a reorientation of their relation to knowledge, institutions, and their own life projects.

By foregrounding subjective reasons, power relations, and lived experience, I rethink theorizing itself as a learning process, propelled by uncertainty, contradiction, and the need to make one’s own standpoint intelligible. The talk concludes by reflecting on the implications of a subject-scientific theory of learning for higher education policy and pedagogy, particularly in precarious times, where the question is less how learners adapt to crisis than how learning can become a means of reclaiming agency within it.