From Bakhtinian theory to a dialogical psychology

Abstract

The analysis of the different articles in this special issue gives a rather promising but complex image of a dialogical approach to psychology. Mikael Leiman proposed utterances as the object of study for psychotherapy research, semiotic mediation as the explanatory principle, and semiotic position as the unit of analysis. Frank Richardson cautioned us about how dialogical proposals can become entrapped by the extreme decentering tendency of social constructionism. James Cresswell, in his turn, claimed that Bakhtin's work is precisely a way of avoiding the unbalanced account of personal vacuity and freedom found in many constructionist accounts: it is precisely because we are bound to social ties that we become ethically involved with others and, indeed, with ourselves. Michèle Grossen and Anne Salazar Orvig claimed that otherness and the institutional, transpersonal dimensions are also present in every dialogical act, something that tends to be overlooked. Moore et al., following this suggestion, pointed to the multiplicity of institutional social frames, adding to the potential tension between the different available ways of interpreting self and context. Following these various contributions, the authors argue that a dialogical conception implies a relational self in constant dialogical and ethical involvement with society. They further argue that to respect the complexity of the whole in each lived situation, we need different, and more conversational, research strategies. In a final synthesis, centrifugal and centripetal movements of the self are conceived as mutually dependent in a fundamentally temporal conception of psychological becoming.