Conference Agenda

The Dialogical Self Theory provided psychology with a fundamental new perspective on the Self. The systemic, dialogical, and dynamic nature of the I-Me-Self represents a paradigm shift in the field of psychological science, in tune with the most recent epistemological advances. In this presentation, my aim is to offer fresh elaborations on the topic, inspired by a cultural semiotic perspective I have been developing through my academic and research activities. While elaborating on the topic of the dialogical self, grounded on Hermans’ DST, I realized that drawing on the concept of hypergeneralized affective-semiotic fields proposed by Valsiner this could provide an interesting addition to make sense of the development of the self along human trajectories, expanding DST towards investing in the power of human values in organizing or configuring the development of the Dialogical Self. My contributions are elaborated along the four following lines: (1) conceptualization of the dialogical self as a Dialogical Self System-DSS, as Hermans has particularly implied in his recent works; (2) introduction of a subjectification intermediate layer between actual significant social others and those ‘I-Positions’ which are created by how the subject sees or internalizes these social others; (3) presentation of arguments on how Hypergeneralized Affective-Semiotic Fields—such as values and prejudices—grounds the emergence of I-Positions; and (4) proposal of the existence of different degrees of an irradiating power to each I-Position (Dynamic Self Positionings), what could better explain why some positionings, as race, gender, etc, fundamentally affect all other positionings in the Dialogical Self. The concept of ‘Degree of Irradiating Power-DIP’ of an I-Position is proposed here to account for the fact that some I-Positions play a central, dominant role in the Dialogical Self System of the person, to the point that they are often referred to as identitarian indexes. This theoretical proposal, therefore, may serve as a fruitful venue for addressing the complex issue of ‘identity’ grounded in the theoretical fundamentals of Dialogical Self Theory and Cultural Psychology.