Dialogical Self

Model a person's self as a changing repertoire of socially formed I-positions whose distinct voices can address, oppose, silence, or reorganize one another, making identity an ongoing dialogical organization rather than a single context-free center.

Version

v2 · 2026-09-19 · History

Domain-specific #

1662

Domain group

Social Sciences

Origin domain

Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

Subdomains

Personality Psychology, Dialogical Self Theory → Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

Aliases

Dialogical self theory model of self, Society of I-positions

Core Idea

A dialogical self is the model of personal identity at the center of Dialogical Self Theory (DST): the self is organized as a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I-positions, each able to voice a perspective from a particular social, temporal, embodied, or relational location, and those positions can address, answer, support, oppose, dominate, or silence one another. Identity is therefore neither one unchanging inner substance nor an unrelated collection of personalities. It is the changing organization of positions and relations through which a person experiences and narrates a life.

How would you explain it like I'm…

The Many Sides of Me

You can think about yourself in different ways — you as a big sister, you as a soccer player, you as a new kid at school — and each of those 'yous' can have its own opinion. They can talk to each other inside your head, agree, argue, or one can get too bossy. The dialogical self is the idea that who you are is made of all those voices and how they get along. It doesn't mean there are really several different people living inside you.

A Self Made of Many Voices

The dialogical self is an idea from psychology about how a person's identity is organized. It says your self is made of many 'I-positions' — like 'me as a student,' 'me as a friend,' or 'me when I'm nervous' — and each one can speak from its own point of view. You can even carry voices of other people inside, like 'what my coach would say.' These positions can talk to each other: they might agree, argue, cheer each other on, or one might drown the others out. So you're not one fixed thing, and not a bunch of separate people either, but a changing conversation. It's a way of understanding identity, not a sign that something is wrong.

Self as Dialogue of I-Positions

The dialogical self is the model of identity in Dialogical Self Theory, introduced by Hermans, Kempen and van Loon in 1992. It combines William James's distinction between the knowing "I" and the known "Me" with Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogue among many voices. The self is seen as a changing collection of relatively independent "I-positions" — "I as parent," "I as critic," "I as newcomer" — each speaking from a particular social, relational, bodily or time-bound place. These positions can address, answer, support, oppose, dominate or silence one another. The self also includes external positions, like "my teacher" or "my community as I hear it." So identity is neither one unchanging core nor a set of unrelated personalities, and "dialogical" doesn't mean the positions always get along. It's a theory of how selfhood is organized, not a diagnosis or a claim that separate conscious beings live in one person.

 

In Dialogical Self Theory, formulated by Hermans, Kempen and van Loon in 1992, the self is a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I-positions, each capable of voicing a perspective from a particular social, temporal, embodied or relational location. The theory joins William James's distinction between the knowing I and the empirical Me with Bakhtin's account of dialogic, polyphonic voices: a movable I occupies positions such as 'I as parent' or 'I as newcomer' and lends each a voice. Because social others and collective voices can be appropriated, the repertoire also includes external positions such as 'my teacher' or 'my imagined audience'. Positions can address, answer, support, oppose, dominate or silence one another, so identity is neither a single unchanging inner substance nor an unrelated collection of personalities but a changing organization of positions and relations through which a person experiences and narrates a life. 'Dialogical' does not imply harmony: exchange can produce new orientations, but one position may also monopolize the field. The concept names a theoretical organization of selfhood and associated research and reflective practices, not a diagnosis, a neurological decomposition, or evidence of literally separate conscious agents.

Scope of Application

DST is used in personality, cultural, developmental, counseling, educational, organizational, and identity research. It is especially useful when a person's continuity coexists with strong contextual shifts: migration, bicultural life, professional formation, family transition, conflict, or change across time. The same person may speak differently as a child of a family, a member of a profession, an outsider, and an imagined future self without those shifts becoming pathological.

Clarity

The abstraction replaces ambiguous statements such as “part of me wants this” with a more inspectable map. The analyst identifies the speaking position, the position addressed, the relation between them, the social voices each carries, and the situation that changes their relative power. “I am indecisive” can then be unpacked into an ambitious professional position demanding advancement, a caregiving position protecting family time, and an internalized supervisor dismissing hesitation.

Manages Complexity

Human identity spans remembered pasts, anticipated futures, relationships, institutions, cultures, and immediate demands. A unitary trait description compresses that field too aggressively, while an unstructured life narrative can become too large to compare or intervene upon. DST offers a middle-scale representation: a finite working repertoire of positions plus a map of their relations.

Abstract Reasoning

Dialogical-self reasoning licenses several disciplined moves:

• Position: restate a global self-judgment as a perspective located in a relationship, institution, place, or time.
• Voice: ask what story, value, emotion, and anticipated listener become available from that position.
• Relate: distinguish mutual address from alternation, domination, coalition, avoidance, or silencing.
• Contextualize: trace which actual or imagined others and collective discourses give the position authority.
• Reposition: examine how a shift in situation changes which I-position speaks and which response becomes possible.
• Meta-position: construct a sufficiently distanced view of several positions and their pattern without mistaking that view for a permanent sovereign self.
• Mediate: test whether a third position can preserve important commitments of conflicting positions while changing their relation.
• Audit evidence: separate a useful interpretive reconstruction from an empirically supported causal, developmental, or therapeutic claim.

Knowledge Transfer

The same model can be recognized across adjacent psychological practices when the position-and-dialogue machinery remains literal: a migrant negotiating home and host-cultural voices, a student teacher relating novice and professional positions, or a client differentiating a self-critical position from a protective one. The source domain changes, but the object is still a socially situated human self organized through voiced I-positions.

Relationships to Other Abstractions

Current abstraction Dialogical Self Domain-specific

Parents (1) — outgoing typed relations

• Dialogical Self is a kind of Dialogism Domain-specific

  Dialogical Self most directly instantiates Dialogism.

Hierarchy paths (2) — routes to 2 parentless roots

• Dialogical Self → is a kind of Dialogism → is a kind of Interpretation → presupposes Representation → presupposes Abstraction

Show alternative path (1)

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Dialogical Self sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (89^th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.

Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (2769 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

• Kiss-Up–Kick-Down — 0.83
• Linear Drumming — 0.81
• Reputation Management — 0.79
• Dialogism — 0.79
• Diglossia — 0.79

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-25