Conference Agenda

Many young offenders are unable to come to terms with past traumatic experiences and therefore find it difficult to associate and verbalize their past deeds. In an incarcerated environment, the narrative becomes 'monotone', with formal responses being the norm making proactive narrative more difficult. We use music as a catalyst to promote a narrative in small groups as part of correctional clinical education in prisons with the goal of regaining a sense of self-agency.

The Musical Narrative Approach (MNA) - listening to songs with personal meaning and talking about them, participants refer to personal links and fundamental values (Matsumoto 2005, 2024). Non-verbal activities such as improvising music were used as an introduction, then the group members build a relationship of mutual trust while playing percussion. Finally, they talk about their "Personally Meaningful Music" -as it represents one's identity and life. It has been found that music, when set to the narrator's life and shared with the participants, facilitates the activity of telling, listening to, and describing life stories. This practice involves “creating a process of exploring one's life, past, present, and future. The results showed that the music facilitated self-narratives and influenced the inmates' own voices.(196words)

Dialogical Self Theory conceptualizes the self as a multiplicity of voices that require specific spatial and temporal conditions for articulation. Building on this perspective, this presentation focuses on clinical practices of protecting spaces in which vulnerable, contradictory, and politically risky voices can exist without premature shaping, sharing, or integration.

The presentation draws on longitudinal counseling records from psychological support provided to Ukrainian evacuees in Japan, documenting dialogical processes under war, forced displacement, and prolonged uncertainty. Clinical material reveals distortions of dialogical space: voices that would ordinarily articulate experience, meaning, and temporal continuity are often weakened or lost. At the same time, other voices—such as those linked to public self-representation—may become amplified within social and global discourses. Language-related voices are dynamically positioned within social and political expectations of who can speak and how, enabling some I-positions while displacing others, thereby destabilizing the internal organization of the self.

Additional tensions emerge from relational spaces fractured by evacuation, as refugees find themselves unable to speak about guilt, exhaustion, exclusion, or uncertainty to those with whom they were once most closely connected, particularly when those others remain in Ukraine. The loss of a shared horizon of experience makes certain voices unspeakable, not because they lack content, but because no dialogical space remains in which they can be safely received.

From this perspective, psychological support within psychosocial and team-based practices involves sustaining non-synchronous, non-visible, and sometimes inefficient spaces within collaborative systems, where voices can remain unfinalized and intact. Rather than amplifying or integrating voices into a unified self, effective support in forced migration contexts lies in safeguarding the conditions that prevent voices from breaking.

Whereas Harmans emphasized “polyphony within the self” in a Western context, polyphony in Japanese culture tends to reside in “between-ness” and “physical and psychological space” rather than within the individual. Masayoshi Morioka's attempt to combine the concept of “Ma” with Dialogical Self Theory (DST) is a highly original and essential perspective for unravelling the dynamism between “self” and “space” in Japanese culture.

Japanese culture has long possessed a system (Hare and Ke) that dramatically transforms the potential of a “space”. By shifting the rigid human relationships (fixed positions) of everyday life (Ke) into the “special space” of festivals and rituals (Hare), it dismantles them in one fell swoop. Whereas Western dialogue generates meaning through the direct confrontation of voices, Japanese dialogue involves discerning the other's position and subtly adjusting one's own through the silence (ma) between voices. While “reserve” and “reading between the lines” are often perceived negatively, viewed through the lens of DST and “ma”, they could even be described as “advanced spatial control techniques for maintaining polyphony”. In my presentation, I would like to consider these points from several perspectives that should be borne in mind in order to invigorate case study sessions. If Hermans' DST posits that ‘there are diverse others within the self’, then Japanese culture and can be seen as positing that ‘the true self is generated precisely in the space between the self and the other’. When considering the influence of the “ba: space” in Japanese culture on its constituent members, it is necessary not only to analyze the “individual voices”, but also to treat the subtle elements, such as the “quality of the air flowing between the voices (humidity, temperature, depth of silence)”, as an important “position”.