Jörg Fertsch-Röver demonstrates through the transition to fatherhood that accessing one's own positionality within a new context of experience plays a central role in coping with crises and educational processes, as well as in the associated appropriation of new experiences. Against the backdrop of a sketched structural model of family and findings from theory-of-mind research, the author develops the thesis that the subject primarily acquires this access to their own positionality within the family’s structural dynamics. The reconstruction of experiential processes presented here thus offers a theoretical alternative to the three most influential paradigms of experience and learning – behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism – which, due to their dualistic foundational concepts, struggle to explain the emergence and appropriation of the new.