Hubert Hermans- Creator of the Dialogical Self Theory

Dialogical Self Theory, as published in Hermans' and Kempen's book "The dialogical self: Meaning as movement" (1993) emerged from working with valuation theory and the self-confrontation method in theory and practice and from a historical analysis of the psychological and novelistic literature.

• Starting point: The contrasting philosophical thoughts of  Descartes and Vico
• Considers the self as multivoiced and dialogical - Is inspired by James's psychology of the self and the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who introduced the concept "polyphonic novel" after an analysis of the works of Dostoyevsky
• Acknowledges not only the role of human interchange but also the impact of power

• For a detailed exposition see the book The Dialogical Self: Meaning as Movement
• For the anchoring of the dialogical self in recent trends in psychological literature see the article Voicing the Self: From Information Processing to Dialogical Interchange
• For the relationship between the dialogical self and the process of globalization see the article Moving Cultures: The Perilous Problems of Cultural Dichotomies in a Globalizing Society
• See also Special Issues on the Dialogical Self