Conference Agenda

This presentation is a reflection on how dialogue can transform today’s polarized, traumatizing discourses into contexts of healing and recovery. Contemporary, globalized societies are characterized by uneasy and increasing uncertainties, rapidly expanding crises, and a strong emphasis on technologies at the expense of social and human values, neglecting the complexities of human existence. In this sociocultural setting, liminality, traditionally understood as the in-between stage of communal and personal-level transitions, extends. Being arrested in a liminal hotspot, characterized by increased suggestibility in an ambivalent state coupled with the intensity of emotions blocks natural reconstructive processes in the turbulent phases of identity development. When keeping the person arrested in a stressful or traumatizing situation, criminalizing, or medicalizing the emerging human conditions would not solve the problem of blocked transitions.

Dialogue, a bridge between people and cultures, respects the human potential for positive change, and can convert extended or permanent liminalities into a transformative context. Its traditional, face-to-face form is grounded in the unity of mind and body. People are not only responding to each other by their empathetic words but also by gut-level responses, such as, for example, changes in heart rate patterns during a psychotherapy session. This way, your story can momentarily become my story, and your experience is construed as similar to my experience. These responses are powerful enough to establish the transient context of I-Thou relationship as an authentic and transformative experience and help the suffering person eliminate oppressive and spurious self-positions. By integrating many other important self-positions (as core me-positions, I-positions, and mine-positions), the door towards personal development opens.