Reonstruction of Inner Dialogue in the Psychotherapeutic Process (A Case Analysis)

Abstract

The subject of the present article is inner dialogue and how it unfolds in the process of "psychotherapy with a significant Other" [1-4]. The decision to study the process of psychotherapy was dictated by our desire to go beyond the traditional detached, cross-sectional dimensions recording the purported effectiveness of psychotherapy (before, during, and after the completion of psychotherapy) to an exploration of therapy's inner logic as it proceeds. We have drawn on the ideas of Vygotsky [5] and Bakhtin [6] concerning, respectively, the social genesis of consciousness and dialogue, which is the form of "the personality's very being." The mind here is understood to be a structure that is fundamentally a dialogue structure implicitly containing diverse forms of external social dialogues. These ideas have served as the foundation of this particular study. Foreign psychology, particularly in the various concepts collectively called the "theory of object relations" [9-12], also contains ideas very similar in content to reflections of Russian and Soviet psychologists [5, 6] on dialogue and on the dialogue structure of consciousness. Developed forms of consciousness1 typically contain various forms of social or external dialogues in compact form.