Dialogical Self Theory has not emerged in a historical vacuum. Its forerunners, whether the Eastern Atman, the tripartite Platonic self with its clear hierarchical relations, the Cartesian “ghost in the machine,” the Freudian ego-id hydraulic model or the Jungian topography of ego and unconscious, represent the theoretical grounding from which the dialogical self has emerged and self-articulated as much as have William James, George Herbert Mead and Mikel Bakhtin. Most of them, including DST, center on developmental models, and see the self as intrinsically oriented toward a more integrated sense of itself that Jung called “wholeness,” although their internal politics differ. Plato is an authoritarian, for whom the rational dimension must rule the spirited and the appetitive; otherwise, disorder and injustice prevail. Freud’s battle cry “where id was, ego shall be” is continually compromised by his realization that “ego is not master in its own house”; and Jung’s notion of wholeness involves a process of compensatory integration of conscious and unconscious contents of the personality that demands intensive shadow work. DST borrows from them all in one guise or another, but, in contrast with its predecessors, places its emphasis on intersubjectivity, polyphony and boundary-work, and as such is positioned for dialogical 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 also stand for Democratic Self Theory, reflecting its historical emergence at a moment of rapidly increasing globalization of the information environment, and the resulting confrontation between disparate ideological traditions and forms of life that were hitherto invisible to each other. This paper represents a preliminary meditation on the infrastructure of DST within the context of the larger theoretical ground from which it emerges. It aims, not to seek exact correspondences or contradictions with other theories, but to act as a “bridging theory” between psychodynamic, constructivist, and humanist theories, thereby exploring the family resemblances that ground it, and acting to deconstruct the boundaries between it and other conceptual landscapes.
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