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Volume 2 Number 1
Fall 2007
| Constructing
Organization Through Multiplicity: A Microgenetic Analysis of
Self-Organization in the Dialogical Self Carla Cunha University of Minho & ISMAI, Portugal |
pp. 287-316 |
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| ABSTRACT. The
self is in a constant process of becoming that demands the construction
of “sameness” and identity throughout the irreversibility of time and
changing experience (Valsiner, 2002b). Thus, self-organization is the
constant and necessary task of a changing self. Occasionally, this
dynamic organization may lead to recursive and inflexible patterns
implicated in a perpetuating personal problem. The “Identity Positions
Interview” (Gonçalves & Cunha, 2006) was designed to elicit
dialogical processes while discussing a personal problem. This allows
different dialogues to occur: 1) the actual dialogues from the
interaction participant-researcher; 2) the imagined dialogues of the
participant and others about the problem (e.g. “What would your mother
say about the problem?”); 3) the imagined dialogues between Present and
Future possible-selves (e.g. “What would the Future say to you?”).
These different phases were inspired in therapeutic techniques that
call upon the perspectives of social others or temporal movements as
semiotic devices used to generate diversity and novelty in the present.
Following a dialogical framework, two case-studies are presented to
illustrate the emergence of novelty and difference and its regulation
into recursive self-dynamics at a microgenetic-level. This idiographic
study has two aims: a) to highlight the dynamism of I-positions within
the Dialogical Self, and b) to depict the emergence of novelty,
self-innovation and re-organization. |
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| Keywords: dialogical self, development, microgenesis, self-regulation | ||