Conference Agenda

Parrhesia, speaking the truth in the moments of deep societal and individual crises, is an internal dialogue, made transparent for a witnessing and emotionally involved audience. When addressing a societal issue, the parrhesiastes risks their personal existence, while establishing or maintaining their integrity. On an individual level, parrhesia demonstrates and enables the ritual separation from earlier identities and entering the unpredictable zone of liminality. Parrhesia is hazardous, however, it might be the only way to avoid freezing into an inauthentic state that paralyses human development. It requires an internal, I-I type encounter between the core self-positions and states: a courageous and fundamental expression or revision of core identity elements in a crisis when life cannot continue the way as it was before. As the values expressed by the individual are identical with those of a larger community, parrhesia is characteristic of the hero’s story, often appearing in myths, tales and works of art.

In this presentation, I compare two parrhesiastic acts performed in the former dictatorships in Hungary: Istvan Bibó’s, Minister of the State’s speech in the very last moments of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution putting an end to open terror, and Gabor Bódy’s film, the Dog’s Night Song (1983), an attempt to reflect on the destructive and powerful semantic web of lies in a soft dictatorship.

In any dictatorship, core identity elements must be suppressed or eradicated in a painful process of group- and individual-level identicide. Substitute fake elements, often, former contra-ideal selves, are linked to previous, traumatizing experiences of entrapment. Bibó could escape identicide, but suffered the grave existential consequences of his speech. Bódy’s identicide and attempted parrhesia turned into a (debated) suicide. His work is a deep reflection on the individual's dissociative responses to a traumatizing social system.

When reading narratives such as novels and manga, readers often place themselves in the position of the protagonist and experience intense emotions, including tension, anticipation, fear, anger, and joy. Moreover, fictional characters—despite their non-existence—may later function in the mind as if they were real others, offering encouragement or guidance that influences readers’ actions and judgments. This paper theoretically re-describes the experience of narrative reading by drawing on the conceptual framework of Dialogical Self Theory.

When a reader begins a narrative, a work-specific “narrative domain” is established within the self, in which character-based I-positions corresponding to the protagonist and other major characters are gradually constructed. As narrative absorption deepens, the protagonist’s I-position is foregrounded and becomes dominant within the self. In some cases, readers may temporarily shift to the I-positions of other characters, organizing emotional responses and meaning-making from those perspectives. In contrast to conventional views that conceptualize narrative engagement as a monolithic self empathizing with characters external to the self, this paper conceptualizes story characters as I-positions that temporarily constitute elements of the self.

Within narratives, characters with differing perspectives and values interact, generating multiple contradictions both within and between positions. Such contradictions are essential to narrative development and function as generative conditions for human action and meaning-making.

After the reader leaves the narrative world, the narrative domain enters a “sleep mode,” defined as a temporary inactive state that withdraws from the experiential foreground while retaining the potential for reactivation. Even in this state, some character-based I-positions remain dialogically available, continuing to engage with everyday I-positions. In this way, memorable fictional characters persist as “internalized others” within the reader’s self. From this perspective, narrative reading opens dialogical possibilities with diverse others and transforms the self into a more polyphonic and enriched configuration.

According to Hubert Hermans (2004), characters from digital games can enter the domain of the player’s self and become interlocutors in their intrapersonal communication. The present study aims to identify affective types of in-game interlocutors and their psychological functions. From a group of 244 players, 69 were selected based on their engagement in internal dialogues with game characters. The participants completed three measures: (1) the Dialogical Activity Form (DAF), (2) the Figure’s Emotional Climate Inventory (FECI), based on a list of 24 affective states derived from the Self-Confrontation Method developed by Hermans, and (3) the Functions of Dialogues–Revised Questionnaire (FUND-R). Four affective types of in-game interlocutors were identified. The first three profiles align with previously established types, whereas the fourth is characteristic of the digital game context. Affective types of in-game interlocutors were also analyzed in terms of six functions: analyzing, bonding, self-knowing, fantasizing, ruminating, and testing. The results highlight the significant contribution of affectively laden in-game interlocutors to players’ personal functioning. The findings will be discussed within the framework of Dialogical Self Theory.