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This paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.

This article discusses how the topics of social reality, culture, and subjectivity have evolved throughout a cultural-historical tradition in psychology and links these processes to the first steps taken by Soviet psychology in this direction. Despite Soviet psychology being the birthplace of cultural-historical psychology, the topics of culture and social realities were treated in a narrow way because of the ideological dogmatism of the different dominant theoretical trends that characterized its short existence. The author discusses some of the factors that prevented a closer attention to the topics of subjectivity, symbolical processes, communication and the social genesis of human consciousness in the Soviet psychology, despite the numerous antecedents that some of its more dialectical thinkers brought into light on such topics. Advancing on some of Vygotsky's latest concepts, like perezhivanie and sense, the author proposes to redefine the topic of subjectivity from a cultural-historical standpoint. In doing so, the author emphasizes the unity of symbolical and emotional processes that emerge during living experiences, centering on the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration to focus on the subjective side of any social experience. The concepts of social and individual subjectivities that support this theoretical proposal transform subjectivity into a quality of every human experience or event. Culture, in turn, would be a subjective system within which new subjectivities are continuously renewed and reinvented in an endless development that characterizes human existence.

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