Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Journal / Book Title

Journal of Constructivist Psychology

Abstract

Dialogical Self Theory has not emerged in a historical vacuum. Its fore-runners, whether the Eastern Atman, the tripartite Platonic self with itsclear hierarchical relations, the Cartesian “ghost in the machine,” theFreudian ego-id hydraulic model or the Jungian topography of ego andunconscious, represent the theoretical grounding from which the dia-logical self has emerged and self-articulated as much as have WilliamJames, George Herbert Mead and Mikel Bakhtin. Most of them, includ-ing DST, center on developmental models, and see the self as intrinsi-cally oriented toward a more integrated sense of itself that Jung called“wholeness,” although their internal politics differ. Plato is an authoritar-ian, for whom the rational dimension must rule the spirited and theappetitive; otherwise, disorder and injustice prevail. Freud’s battle cry“where id was, ego shall be” is continually compromised by his realiza-tion that “ego is not master in its own house”; and Jung’s notion ofwholeness involves a process of compensatory integration of consciousand unconscious contents of the personality that demands intensiveshadow work. DST borrows from them all in one guise or another, but,in contrast with its predecessors, places its emphasis on intersubjectiv-ity, polyphony and boundary-work, and as such is positioned for dia-logical relations, not only between the I positions within its boundaries,but with the I positions of subjects who are grounded in other social,cultural and political systems. As such, the acronym DST might alsostand for Democratic Self Theory, reflecting its historical emergence ata moment of rapidly increasing globalization of the information envi-ronment, and the resulting confrontation between disparate ideologicaltraditions and forms of life that were hitherto invisible to each other.This paper represents a preliminary meditation on the infrastructure ofDST within the context of the larger theoretical ground from which itemerges. It aims, not to seek exact correspondences or contradictionswith other theories, but to act as a “bridging theory” between psycho-dynamic, constructivist, and humanist theories, thereby exploring thefamily resemblances that ground it, and acting to deconstruct theboundaries between it and other conceptual landscapes.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2024.2431962

Published Citation

Kennedy, David (2024) Different Maps, Same Territory: Dialogical Self Theory and its Predecessors. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 1–19.

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