Identity Negotiations of Colombian International Students

Research has pointed to challenges and positive aspects of the international student experience, but it has been mainly outcome-oriented and has not addressed the ongoing identity negotiations of these students as they navigate a new cultural setting. The aim of this study was to illustrate the application of a sociocultural/dialogical framework to the analysis of identity processing by international students. Based on interviews with 14 Colombian university students in the United States, the analysis identified meanings (positionings) relative to the experience, tensions between meanings and, for some students, abstractions that served to resolve the tensions. We suggest that this dialogical framework promotes needed attention to the dynamic, ongoing nature of identity meaning creation.     

Negotiating Multiplicity: Adaptive Asymmetries within Second-Generation Turks’ “Society of Mind”

If identities are socially produced, what happens when individuals grow up participating in divergent or conflicting social contexts? This article reports on research with second-generation Turkish adolescents in London. Using the concept of the dialogical self, the research examines the dialogical structure of these young Turks’ selves. The analysis is Bakhtinian and seeks to identify the different discourses through which these young Turks talk about themselves. Three distinct discourses, or I-positions, are identified. These are then related to the sociocultural context within which these youth live, and specific attention is given to the constraints on these youth in expressing aspects of their identity. We demonstrate that the asymmetries and tensions within these adolescents’ dialogical selves are adaptive to the fractured and asymmetrical social contexts in which they are embedded.     

Semiotic Regulation through Inhibitor Signs: Creating a Cycle of Rigid Meanings

This study aims to analyze the process of semiotic regulation in youth transition to adulthood from the perspectives of cultural developmental psychology and dialogical self theory. The focus is on the transformations that occur in youth’s self-system configurations during a critical developmental period. In this paper, we will advance the idea that semiotic regulation may lead to the construction of strong signs (i.e. those signs that bring rigidity to personal meaning systems)—and more specifically, of strong inhibitor signs—that block the emergence of alternative meanings, leading to rigidity in the self-system. We present a longitudinal case study of a young man who participated in a social project in Salvador, Bahia to illustrate the process. Data was collected through two rounds of in-depth interviews at ages 18 (1st round) and 21 (2nd round) years. Analysis followed a mapping of positions and counter-positions, as well as emerging tensions and their resolution over time and in different spheres of life (i.e. work, school, and family life). The idea is to show how negotiations of self-positions evolve and activate a mechanism of inhibition of hierarchical integration and construction of alternative future meanings, in which rigid meanings are created and do not allow for emergence of alternative life trajectories.     

Critical Encounters with Rabbinic Doctrines of Creation: The Teacher as Source of Authority or as Partner in Dialogue

This is a case study based upon my experience of teaching an introduction to rabbinic thought to a group of Orthodox Jewish students. The study of one particular midrashic pericope allowed for major tensions between academic and religious approaches to the text to surface. The tension revolved around the apparent contradiction between the rabbinic mythical perception of creation as proceeding from primary negative matter and later philosophical belief in creatio ex nihilo. This contradiction touches upon issues of authority and of interpretation. The article explores various strategies dealing with issues of authority in general and of the meaning of the individual text in particular. Following a presentation of these strategies I offer my reflections upon my role as a teacher in this context. Dialogue emerges as an important element in the teaching process, creating a common ground between teachers and students and making them partners in a common quest for the truth of the text. Traditional dialogical modes of Jewish learning serve as the basis for the introduction of the academic agenda. This agenda is introduced as an extension of classical religious concerns rather than as an alternative to them.     

The Self Between Cacophony and Monologue: A Conceptualization and Empirical Examination of Dialogical Complexity

Theory of dialogical self distinguishes between cacophonous, monological, and dialogical structure of the self. So far these structures have not been examined within systematic quantitative studies. Focusing on this issue, we conceptualized the three structures as degrees on a dimension of dialogical complexity. To assess dialogical complexity, we proposed a numerical index derived from the personal position repertoire and examined it empirically. We compared the index of dialogical complexity with indices of cognitive complexity (derived from the repertory grid technique), integrative complexity, and presence of dialogical relationships in narratives (both derived from the thematic apperception test). In our sample of a total of 60 nonclinical respondents, the index of dialogical complexity was not correlated with cognitive complexity. It was weakly negatively but significantly correlated with integrative complexity. Respondents who yielded a higher score of dialogical relationships in narratives formed the dialogical structure of the self according to the dialogical complexity index. Respondents who yielded less dialogical relationships in narratives obtained a wider range of dialogical complexity scores that indicated more cacophonous or monological structures. We conclude that the relationships with integrative complexity and with presence of dialogical relationships in narratives support the original conceptualization of dialogical complexity. However, due to limitations of the study, the results are not decisive, and further examination of dialogical complexity including clinical samples is needed.     

Psychoanalysis,religion, philosophy and the possibility for dialogue: Freud,Binswanger and Pfister

Abstract

This article considers the longstanding disciplinary tensions between psychoanalysis, religion, and philosophy. It argues for a cross-disciplinary understanding of human experience by examining the relationship of Sigmund Freud to his two Swiss colleagues, Ludwig Binswanger and Oskar Pfister. In contrast to Freud's avowed atheism and pronounced ambivalence on philosophy, Binswanger and Pfister both professed a strong religious sensibility and philosophical outlook. The article juxtaposes their theoretical divergences on religion and philosophy with personal interactions and correspondence. The relationship of Freud to Binswanger and Pfister is instructive for understanding the historical and contemporary interaction of psychoanalytic theory and practice with other disciplines and diverse viewpoints. The dialogical spirit that connects the three protagonists constitutes a critical engagement with learning and is essential to psychoanalysis today.     

In defence of loose ends: Psychotherapy process research in the real world

Understanding what transpires in therapeutic conversations is as complex as the humans who are engaged in them. Inspired by the natural sciences, mainstream research in psychotherapy has taken up a positivist epistemology and strives for quantification and verification to produce evidence of the effectiveness of an approach. This paper explores an alternative foundation for therapeutic practices which has implications for how we do research. First, we present some ideas from process philosophy and dialogical perspectives.. In particular we return to the ideas of Henri Bergson who understood change as consisting of interpenetrated continuous and shifting states. In a next step we briefly look into how such ideas have influenced what is referred to as dialogical practices. Such dialogical practices operate through facilitating polyphonic, diverse perspectives that may mediate change in and through an intersubjective process of becoming. Based on this we take another step and make some suggestions for how we may develop research that enables ways of exploring therapeutic conversations as a multi-voiced, interactional and unfinalized process. We offer by way of example a method by which we attempt to integrate a linguistic theory (Systemic functional linguistics) with the dialogical framework and the ideas of Bergson. This paper considers how process philosophy may offer an alternative to the seeking of certainty that occurs in both psychotherapy research and practice, and ideas for making space for the ‘loose ends’ of the inconsistent and the unknown.     

Ambiguity and the dialogical self: In search for a dialogical psychology

Abstract

It is intuitively felt that ambiguity plays a crucial role in human beings' everyday life and in psychologists' theoretical and applied work. However, ambiguity remains essentially non-problematised in psychological science since its foundation. This article analyses positivist and social constructionist perspectives on ambiguity in the context of their epistemological and ontological fundamental assumptions. The relational thesis of social constructionism is further analysed and it is argued that it constitutes a “weak thesis” concerning the relational constitution of human beings. In the second part, a dialogical alternative is elaborated. In this perspective, ambiguity is placed in the context of relationship and both are brought to an ontological ground. Therefore, it is argued, ambiguity is a fundamental property of human experience and plays a fundamental role in the constitution of (inter)subjective processes. The impact of this thesis on dialogical perspective on self is elaborated.     

Traveling Without a Destination? A Dialogical Analysis of Professional Identity Construction Among Australian Double Degree Psychology Students

This paper presents findings from a study of Australian double degree psychology students’ construction of professional identity. Dialogical self theory was used as a framework to conceptualize professional identity construction and to identify the I-positions, the voices of others, and the relationships between these voices within the self. Results revealed that conflicting voices were heard within the self, creating tensions in students’ professional identification. Moreover, it seems that when trying to navigate their study journeys, students rely on several, sometimes unintentional, value orientations to assist them in moving forward from these struggles. Findings are considered in the context of further developing dialogical self theory and the enhancement of curricula that focus on multiprofessional and interdisciplinary learning and teaching.     

An Invitation to Travel in an Interethnic Arena: Listening Carefully to Amerindian Leaders’ Speeches

In this article, we identify usual difficulties faced by Brazilian psychologists when dealing with Amerindian Peoples, concerning the systematic violence experienced by those Peoples, who have been suffering and fighting against a process of genocide and ethnocide. To identify those difficulties, we analysed speeches of Amerindian leaders of the State of São Paulo - Guarani Mbya, Pankararu, Xavante, Baniwa, Tupi - Guarani, Terena, Kaingang and Krenak - which were addressed to psychologists. Those speeches were delivered in events promoted by CRP-SP in 2010 and in the 2nd and 3rd Forums “The Amerindian presence in São Paulo” at the Institute of Psychology (USP), in 2014. From the analysis, we make a distinction between the notions of meeting and dialogical encounter, considering that: 1. not every meeting is an encounter, in the dialogical sense, because the meeting can happen in a way that one of the interlocutors is objectified by the other and 2. being together and building an affective ground is an a priori for the dialogical encounter to happen. Based on the leaderships` speeches and in the notions of Amerindian perspectivism and the phenomenology of alterity in Cultural Psychology, we propose alternative paths to understand constitutive aspects of a dialogical meeting in such interethnic situation. These reflections are proposed as a theoretic-empirical work, as it departs from the comprehension that the theoretical problems are not separated from the concrete situation that enables them to emerge.     

Culture and dialogue: Positioning,mediation or style?

Dialogicality has become a key notion in current cultural psychology. Strikingly, whereas mediational and semiotic thinkers have developed the dialogical view by emphasizing the role of psychological distancing in semiotic and dialogical processes, dialogical self-theorists following the work of Hermans remain caught up in a perspective that naively privileges non-mediated interaction. In this article I argue that both accounts lack an adequate ontological understanding of dialogicality. In looking for an alternative, I will first discuss how Bakhtin offers a spatial account of dialogicality that is quite different from the positional account proposed by DST. For an ontological explication of the deep dialogicality underlying all signification, I will then turn to Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh and show how it allows us to see our embodied presence as always already part of a field of divergences, a carnal intersubjectivity, by which we participate in a particular style of being. I argue that the work of Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty allows us to recognize a primordial dialogicality in the stylized, poetic and deeply equivocal nature of human expression. This primordial dialogicality defies the logic of positioning and distancing and reveals a deeper entwinement of self and other, with different psychological and developmental implications than those of DST.     

Jungian dialogism and the problem of depth

Notions of dialogical inquiry and of the dialogical self have become increasingly influential in contemporary psychology in response to the limitations of the traditional view of monologically encapsulated and radically disengaged consciousness. Conceptions of self and inquiry as intrinsically embedded in and constituted by our shared life with others seem to do better justice to the richly interconnected character of contemporary life. At the same time, our highly interconnected global world has also tended to foster a flattening of cultural and inter‐cultural horizons that undermines dialogical engagement in any deeply meaningful sense. What is needed is to enrich current conceptions of dialogue with an understanding of experiential and cultural depth. This paper seeks an understanding of the depth dimensions of dialogue through an engagement of dialogical self theory with Jungian dialogical thought. Critical to this engagement is to appreciate the expressive potential of Jungian dialogism beyond Jung's theoretical claims about dialogue.     

Reorganization of personal identity in the context of motivational dynamics and internal dialogical activity

Identity is constantly constructed and reconstructed. It may be assumed that there are six fundamental motivational goals according to which it is organized: self‐esteem, self‐efficacy, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging, and meaning (Vignoles, 2011 ). Moreover, identity is shaped by its dialogical nature (Hermans, 2003 ; van Halen & Janssen, 2004 ). The longitudinal study was conducted to examine both the motivational and the dialogical basis of identity structure dynamics. The results showed that the more the identity element was connected with a sense of continuity and the more dialogical it was, the greater the perceived centrality of this element was after two months. Furthermore, the more the identity element satisfied the self‐esteem and belonging motives, the more positive was the affect ascribed to it. In the behavioral domain of identity, participants more strongly manifested those identity aspects that were earlier rated as more dialogical and satisfying the motive of belonging. The results showed that the motivational underpinnings of identity along with its dialogical nature explain changes in identity structure.     

Interaction Analysis and Psychology: A Dialogical Perspective

Interaction analysis is not a prerogative of any discipline in social sciences. It has its own history within each disciplinary field and is related to specific research objects. From the standpoint of psychology, this article first draws upon a distinction between factorial and dialogical conceptions of interaction. It then briefly presents the basis of a dialogical approach in psychology and focuses upon four basic assumptions. Each of them is examined on a theoretical and on a methodological level with a leading question: to what extent is it possible to develop analytical tools that are fully coherent with dialogical assumptions? The conclusion stresses the difficulty of developing methodological tools that are fully consistent with dialogical assumptions and argues that there is an unavoidable tension between accounting for the complexity of an interaction and using methodological tools which necessarily “monologise” this complexity.     

On Interaction Analysis and Dialogical Perspective: Emergent Patterns of Order and Relational Agency

This essay proposes to contribute with a continuing discussion on Grossen’s paper (2010) establishing a link between the analysis of interactions and dialogical perspective using what I call simplication-for-approaching-complexity (SFAC). This approach conceives of dialogical dynamics as a dynamic system of relationship that construct patterns. Moreover, these emergent patterns allow inferring the features of dialogical partners as relational agencies. The specific characteristics of the relational agency at any moment in dialogue can be inferred from the analysis of the specific pattern of order achieved by the historical development of dialogue. This proposal is illustrated by the analysis of mother-infant interactions.     

Perceptual projects:A theory of veridicality and distortion in perception

Abstract.— The split between objective and subjective information, characterizing dualistic theories of perception, is argued to have caused contradictions around the problems of veridicality of perception and the attention-attracting power of stimulus properties. The theory of threshold-regulation in categorical perception is criticized and an alternative model is suggested, where the main distinctions are between the "knowing how" and the "knowing that" of perception, between exteriorization and interiorization, and between the perceptual project and the perceptual foundation. It is demonstrated that concepts used in the analysis of dialogical communication are useful in the theory of perception to explain phenomena such as curiosity, boredom, and pathological perception.     

The nature of science. A dialogue

In this dialogue the view of Paul Hoyningen-Huene as defended in Systematicity. The Nature of Science is presented and criticized. The approach is developed dialectically by the two interlocutors, a series of critical points are debated and an alternative view is introduced. The dialogical form is intended to honor the general philosophical approach of the author summarized in the last sentence of the book, where he states that he sees philosophy as an ongoing, open-ended dialogue.

     

First-Order Dialogical Games and Tableaux

We present a new proof of soundness/completeness of tableaux with respect to dialogical games in Classical First-Order Logic. As far as we know it is the first thorough result for dialogical games where finiteness of plays is guaranteed by means of what we call repetition ranks.     

The inheritance of Unitatis Redintegratio: critical questions for Anglicans

Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogues have failed to gain practical traction over the past 50 years, and relations between the two groups may well have gone backwards, despite the important opening provided by Unitatis Redintegratio. This article offers an overview of some of the demographic and political reasons for the failure of dialogical ‘reception’, as well as offering some alternative paths forward, based on elements within the decree itself, especially as underlined by Pope John Paul II.