Abstract
Handbook of dialogical self theory, edited by Hubert Hermans and Thorsten Gieser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 503 pages. ISBN-13: 9781107006515
Theories about the self are attempts to develop answers for the questions about the processes of being and becoming which debates sway from the inner and outer nature of meanings in a human’s everyday life and the tensions within their emergence. However, the different paths for the construction of knowledge represent a risk; that of taking off the dynamic nature of the relationships, with objects, tools, persons, and contexts reducing them to mere static categories. This is precisely why this book is certainly an excellent labor of reconciliation with some constitutive processes of humanness, as well as scenery for contributions to the contemporary weakness of psychology.
The Dialogical Self Theory (DST) is a bridging theory because its own conceptual framework is still open to considering the necessity of being in relation with other similar and contradictory theories that could contribute to its further development, and because it considers that I-positions as voices of the self are to be understood as external and internal societies (Hermans & Gieser, 2011, pp. 1–5). In this order of ideas, DST is a theory of the self and a theory of the social other (Gallagher, 2011). This book promotes the awareness of our relational nature and helps us to comprehend that even if we can interact, we do not always engage in dialogue, which is something precious, dialectic, dynamic and innovative (Hermans & Gieser, 2011). Further, we humans need to improve the quality of our dialogues with the self and others and, because of this, the handbook is a guideline to accompany different applicative fields in educational, clinical and organizational contexts, by means of a flexible self-awareness among the relationship of I-positions, third positions, meta-positions, and promoter-positions.
Contributions are not just limited to pragmatic instances. This book offers and accurate documentation of innovations for basic psychology and methodology of research arenas. As well as offering innovative answers to contemporary weaknesses of psychology publications. Indeed, one aspect to highlight is that of the development of the self through space and time.
The trajectories of I-positions, having a unique temporal origin, can have a different developmental history with unique transformations and significance across time (Barresi, 2011). In order to study them, one can assume that the performance of the self through space and time involves basic and dynamic elements, developmental and cultural/historical processes of the positioning theory (Raggatt, 2011). Furthermore, the performance of human activities by means of inner/outer I-positions recovers the importance of time and historicity in developmental studies, and the crucial role of language for the dialogical self, as long as our tensional relations require semiotically chargeable objects that allow the emergence of meanings (Bertau, 2011).
In fact, “the ever-developing, ever-transitioning and ever-dynamic dialogical self” (Valsiner & Cabell, 2011, p. 82) realizes that there cannot be something like a self without a self-maker who dialogues with him/herself and others, where I-positions regulate, inhibit and promote diverse transformations of meanings (Valsiner & Cabell, 2011). Here, it is worth recognizing that dialogical processes do not always imply explicit reflection, because their transitions can be implicit (Barresi, 2011).
Another important strength is the appropriateness of topics of study that authors of the DST Handbook focus on, stressing the cultural nuances of the multivoicedness of the self. Some cultures have distinctive social dynamics for the functioning of I-positions, for example Indian communities, where the sense of relatedness (i.e. persons they share time with and their positioning within conversations) with other people defines crucial issues of identity (Chaudhary, 2011), or the case of traditional African healing, which operates through dialogical processes, being both natural and supernatural spaces considered scenarios for dialogue (Lindegger & Alberts, 2011).
On the other hand, the unavoidable awareness of globalization promotes some general dynamics that become an important matter of interest. For instance, the western contemporary construction of the relational self shares with the East the consideration of the self-in-relation, the inclusion of the other in the constitution of the self, and the self in the constitution of the other (Ho, 2011). The membranes of societies and cultures are becoming porous, which makes it necessary to hold meanings that promote acceptance and negotiation within different voices of the self in the process of identity (Bhatia, 2011). That is, contact with diverse cultural voices involves multiple identifications of the self through space and time (Van Mejil, 2011), which in some cases generates a “hybridization,” here understood as the combination of existing voices of the self on an emergent position because other active I-positions were not able to coexist at a personal, social or societal level (Surgan & Abbey, 2011). Furthermore, it is a matter of fact that the internet plays an important role in this phenomenon because, far from being considered a universal technology across cultures, it works in a trend that causes us to consider a human digital ecology in cyberspace, challenging the negotiation and integration of models from the environment from I-positions (Hevern, 2011).
It is important to sum up the crucial advances for psychotherapy this handbook places at one’s disposal. Psychotherapy is a dialogical space, or a third area between two persons, that can be understood as the Japanese concept of ma, because it is considered as the space between one moment and another, one and more things, the quality of interpersonal relationships, the distance from one voice to another in an internal dialogue, a pause, the silence, or an opposite inclusive part of a field of meaning (Morioka, 2011). In this order of ideas, understanding the DST as a self-narrative is to say that the voices of different I-positions in dialogue giving meaning to experience, as well as the emergence of novel meanings, can lead to the emergence of new I-positions and metapositions, making these innovative moments a feature of the quality of the psychotherapy process (Gonçalves & Riberio, 2011). The use of I-positions in psychotherapy has also proven its efficacy in achieving the multiplicity of the self, extending the relationships between inner/outer positions which allow other discourses often difficult to work with, as the “soul” or “God,” because they can become an I-position (Rowan, 2011). Furthermore, one can even talk of a Dialogical Action Therapy (DAT) to highlight the implications of dialogue in action, being the execution of acts as evidence of successful psychotherapy processes (Ho, 2011). For example, DST has innovative implications for psychodrama, where the actualization and reorganization of the self involves a complex dynamic of speaking, thinking, acting and feeling, and it serves here to recognize its role in the “recovering of the flow of life” by means of establishing conscious and emotional dialogues with different internal/external voices of the self, rather than with the therapist (Verhofstadlt-Denève, 2011).
Concerning psychopathology, DST is directed to an experiential dimension of life besides illness, comprehending in depth how the relational-self acts in some specific diseases (Lysaker & Lysaker, 2011). Consider schizophrenia and the difficulties that people who suffer it present in organizing ideas and establishing dialogues between I-positions, which contributes to social dislocations and threatens the self-experience (Lysaker & Lysaker, 2011). By contrast, a healthy system of personal meanings involve a creative, expressive, adaptive, and flexible repertoire of I-positions (Oleś & Puchalska-Wasyl, 2011), and, in addition, psychotherapy processes as health promoter interventions should also work on the depositioning of the self, as a fact of transcendence and awareness, that liberates the person of I-positions, being an experiential–emotional space where the person can feel without identification, whatever arises giving a sense of continuity to experience (Hermans-Konopka, 2011).
In clinical practice, dialogue and metacognition are very important for the understanding of psychopathology because of the limited position repertoire with impoverished voices, lack of voices, or lack of dialogue that are presented in different ways in specific disorders (Dimaggio, 2011). Indeed, the psychotherapy of personality disorders from the perspective of DST helps to promote self-reflection and mind-reading in order to enrich the narrative construction of the self, involving imaginary conversations of patients and the therapy relationship itself (Dimaggio, 2011). But consider also the experiential dimension of life events of crisis such as the case of grief. DST allows a person to see the pain and suffering of their loss as a challenge to the worlds of meaning of “survivors,” and to respond to this difficult situation with the help of tools given by the therapist, such as the act of writing the index for the book of their life, making sense of traumatic lived experiences, such as the death of a beloved one, giving alternative names to chapters and sections through readings (Neimeyer, 2011).
It is also necessary to give account of the principal issues of the methodological innovations described in the DST handbook in order to answer specific questions of research, which are directly related to new developments of theory. In the case of self dialogues, the Internal Dialogical Activity Scale (IDAS) is a measure that permits the study of personality traits and, for example, proves that avoidant personality traits are not just related to scarce dialogue activity with others, but also with a lower rate of inner dialogues (Oleś & Puchalska-Wasyl, 2011). Then, with the Spatial Self Representation Procedure, scholars have studied the dynamics between the I-positions of writers and I-positions of their characters, with the aim of gathering graphical descriptions of the spatial organization of different I-positions of the self ( Ż urawska- Ż yła, Chmielnicka-Kuter, & Oleś, 2011). Also seeking to gather a deep comprehension of the organization of the dialogical self in experimental research, the Discursive Mind Model suggests that the existing representational modules in our mind have a social origin where dialogue has a crucial role in the sociocultural and relational context, and to accept this could lead to great contributions of cognition and personality (Stemplewska-Żakowicz, Zalewski, Suszek, & Kobylińska, 2011).
Next, the Negotiational Self Theory (NST) exposes alternatives to solve conflict by decisionmaking, generating an integrative negotiation that takes into account the “for” and “against” poles, and the underlying interests on each consideration (Nir, 2011). Furthermore, an analysis of different methods of studying the dialogical self is also presented in the book, concluding that the self-confrontation method, the personal repertoire method, and the bi-plot method, serve as accurate studies of the voices of the self, but lack information about their interpersonal nature, while this is a strength of other methods such as the Interpersonal Perception Method (IPM) which can be adapted to the DST, while recognizing the limitations of self-reports (Jasper, Moore, Whittaker, & Gillespie, 2011).
Therefore, even if the DST handbook has an implicit emphasis on psychotherapy, it also has implications on marketing and educational arenas, opening paths for present and future followers of DST to innovate on. In the case of marketing, it shows how the choice of consumption objects involves the resolution of conflict between I-positions, considering that even those products that have a positive evaluation evoke negative emotions in some positions, as well as a divergence of meanings (Bahl, 2011). In the case of learning and cognition, the latter is to be understood by means of interaction in specific contexts, with tools and people, and in the perspective of DST, the self is constantly moving between the tensions of I-positions that seek for a balance, and promoting change and innovation; that is, as a matter of learning (Ligorio, 2011). In fact, this is shown in career learning, because careers are developed over a lifetime and not just in one particular moment, and so on. Dialogues with real-life problems are crucial for professional performance, and they should be prominent in the reflective conversations between teachers and/or mentors and students. These conversations can be teacher dominant, student directed or dialogical (Winters, Meijers, Lengelle, & Baert, 2011).
Altogether, the dynamic nature of the dialogical self is a dance between the membranes of the quality and trajectory of experience. This handbook certainly returns human studies to a conception of unitax multiplex, calling us to work on the borders of the self which remind us that the relational self has a dialogical potential, and that we need to learn how to dance in the monologue–dialogue continuum with steps of centering and decentering, in order to listen to experience from different points of view with the motivation of uncovering misunderstandings in order to change and correct them. DST by analogy recalls us to understand human freedom as a non-exclusive field in contrast to determinism (Hermans & Gieser, 2011).