Enacting Inner Speech on the Academic Stage. A Dialogical Review on Fossa, P. (Ed.). (2022). New Perspectives on Inner Speech. Springer

Abstract

The recently published Springer Brief in cultural psychology presents theoretical and empirical advances on inner speech. The editor Pablo Fossa suggests viewing inner speech as a private area to remember, play and dream, rather than a mere psychological function connected to problem solving. Along the lines of this suggestion, I adopt a playful approach in order to review the volume. Rather than delivering results of an analysis, I invite us to use the academic journal platform to take part in a dialogical encounter. In the first part of this essay, I offer a transparent step-by-step process of researcher's positioning, based on remembering and playing. In the second part, I dream of research methodologies, which would allow us to explore inner speech as dynamic movements experienced by whole and dialogical beings. This experiment, in which I enact my inner speech on the academic stage, eventually lets three key-moments of Fossa's book come forward as gamechangers for future inquiries: 1. The importance of hearing one's voice in audio-diary based research, 2. the shift of attention towards experiential contexts of inner speech (such as bodily sensations or felt knowledge), and 3. the notion of thirdness as a meta-position, pointing at the mutual permeability of reflective and pre-reflective realms of inner speech. This performing review is inspired by a theatre-based practice called Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partners and represents an original contribution to researcher's self-reflexive positioning practices, as well as to inner speech qualitative research methodologies.