Hubert Hermans- Creator of the Dialogical Self Theory

Hubert J.M. Hermans

In: R.A. Neimeyer, & G.J. Neimeyer, Advances in Personal Construct Psychology: New Directions and Perspectives (pp. 3-38). Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

As a researcher in the field of personality I started, at the end of the sixties, to construct tests for the measurement of achievement motivation and fear of failure (e.g., Hermans, 1970). Dissatisfaction, however, with the objectifying and impersonal nature of these tests, with the separation between assessment and change, and with the rather limited value range of such instruments, motivated me to search for alternatives. One of the authors who inspired me during this scientific exploration was George Kelly (1955) because in his work I found at least three elements which liberated me from the straitjacket of mainstream trait psychology: the personal and idiographic nature of his work, the relational approach in which the client is considered as a colleague, and his supposition that a multiplicity of building blocks (personal constructs in his case) are organized into a system and could be assessed using a grid methodology.

Now, almost 30 years later, I am still interested in my original field, human motivation, albeit in a quite different way from the period mentioned above. In the meantime, developments in the area of the psychology of the self in the line of William James and the recent upsurge of narrative psychology have stimulated me to investigate the construction of personal meanings or, using a more dynamic term, the process of valuation, in which the person is continuously involved. Moreover, my cooperation with Els Hermans-Jansen, a psychotherapist, and our common experiences with a variety of clients have also had a major impact on the work presented in this chapter. Finally, I came to realize that the most appropriate way to characterize the way in which people give form to their own lives is to phrase it in terms of the metaphor of the motivated storyteller (Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 1995) which provides a fertile starting point for both theory and practice. Read more (PDF)