Research · Concept
A self made of many voices in conversation
Most of us talk about ‘the self’ as if it were one thing. The dialogical self theory, developed by Hubert Hermans, proposes something stranger and more useful: the self is more like a small society. It is made of relatively autonomous I-positions — ‘me as a student’, ‘me as a daughter’, ‘the critic’, ‘the dreamer’ — that can take turns, disagree, and hold conversations with one another.
On this view, thinking is often less like calculating and more like negotiating: an internal dialogue between positions, each with its own voice. The self is not a single narrator but a shifting arrangement of speakers.
My DIVP work treats the personified inner voice as exactly this — a spontaneously personified I-position. It is one of the voices in the society of self, except it has a name, a temperament, and a continuity that make it feel less like a part of me and more like someone I can talk to.