The Dialogical Cure: An interview with Hubert Hermans
Max Kampelman, one of the best known US diplomats, once remarked that dialogue is more than two monologues.
As therapists, we know all too well that our dialogues with clients have to be more than two monologues if they are to be of even the slightest value to the client. If we work well, we become very good at ensuring that our interactions are not of the monological kind.
But what about the internal dialogues that we engage with ourselves? Are they dialogues, or are they two monologues, one by a disenfranchised part of our self that has been relegated to a lower status by history, habit or hardship, the other a dominant, possibly bullying self that dislikes alternate views?
Hubert Hermans, softly spoken architect of the dialogical self theory (DST), is at least as much the diplomat as Max Kampelman, but not only in his gentle interpersonal style. He is also an advocate for the good internal diplomacy that he suggests is the key to better living with oneself and others. His approach espouses the multiplicity of views that can exist within an individual about how to better negotiate the challenges of life without resorting to monologues of self.
Hermans recently made a visit to Pietermaritzburg, where he addressed a New Therapist conference on DST. Dylan Evans and John Soderlund dialogued with him after the workshop on his ideas and where they fit into the broader psychotherapeutic landscape.
T: Would you give us a brief introduction to some of the original ideas of the dialogical self theory that you developed?
HH: I think I profited much from being a co-therapist as well as being a scientist. I had the opportunity of witnessing the moments, or periods, of significant change in a person’s life. This had a major influence on developing the theory, which is the dialogical self theory (DST).
Dialogical self brings together two main concepts—self and dialogue. Self is inspired by William James and American pragmatists and dialogue is strongly influenced by the Russian dialogical school with Mikhail Bakhtin as the main representative. I try to bring these two concepts—self and dialogue—together, so that they influence each other and something new emerges.
What we have been exploring over the years (the first publication was in 1992) is what we can do with is combination—dialogical self, in which the self is seen as functioning as a “mini-society.” You could say that a person is able to criticize another person, but I can also criticize myself; people can have conflict, but I can also have conflict with myself; people can make an agreement with one another, but I can also reach an agreement with myself; people can consult each other, I can also consult myself—so what happens between people can also happen within one person.
Maybe I can illustrate this by referring to the work of Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka (my wife and colleague) and myself that applies dialogical self theory on emotions. An emotion, you could say, is a temporary I-position, for example, I am angry, or I feel guilty about something. Normally this is for a period, or it lasts longer in dysfunctional cases. What we do is to invite a client to go into the emotion—not talk about the emotion as a kind of “aboutism” in the sense of Fritz Perls [who used the term to refer to an over reliance on intellectual processing of experience, rather than on the experience itself]. When you go into an important emotion (e.g., anger or guilt) and you are also aware of your posture, your body, how it reacts, you know the emotion from the inside. Next, we stimulate the movement from this emotion to another one, which can be considered a counter-emotion. This is what we call the “stage-model of emotions”.
The basic idea is that there is a process of positioning, re-positioning and counter positioning of the self. So the client goes from a negative emotion to a counter-emotion, a positive emotion, and then we invite the client to look at the original emotion, for example anxiety or guilt, from the perspective of the counter-emotion, which might be enjoyment or any other positive emotion. And then we explore what the original emotion (e.g., anxiety) can learn from the counter emotion (e.g. enjoyment). This is a kind of moving hence and forth in the landscape of the mind, which influences the emotions in dialogical ways.
So, emotion work is one of the methods, which we have developed in the International Institute for the Dialogical Self. We try to teach people—in the form of lectures, workshops, and trainings - how to apply the variety of methods we have developed on the basis of dialogical self theory. Our job is typically scientist/practitioner work. We do quite a lot of theoretical work, but always pose the question as to how we can apply it in practice, with psychotherapy being one of the main fields.
NT: Some of the theory that you have spoken about seems to explain quite well how people can be really contradictory—behave and feel in seemingly contradictory ways. Could you comment on that?
HH: Yeah, in my workshop this morning, I asked the following question: Is it possible to describe two opposing sides of your personality, where the one is a bit stronger, more developed or more dominant that the other? Most people could answer this question. Most clients can also answer this question. The example I gave this morning was of a person who says: “I have an open side, which is affiliated to my mother—my mother is as open as I am, friendly, open, and accepting— but I also have a darker side, which is my closed side—it’s opposite and its less strong, but I would like to explore that.”
Then I invited the person to answer questions about her past, present and future from the perspective of the open position and when she was ready I posed the same questions to her closed position.
When you do this, it’s striking how contradictory a person’s responses can be, something of which they are sometimes not even aware until they do this exercise. For example, from her open position she said, about the relationship with her friend, “The contact with my boyfriend: I’m always listening to him; I’m always there for him.” When we moved to the closed position, she talked again about her boyfriend and said: “My partner and I have both had a broken relationship in the past: I do not want to lose myself again in another relationship”, which is apparently contradictory to her first statement. When you bring together the self-narratives of two different or opposite positions, something special happens. The person sees that he or she is contradicting him—or herself, but can also make good use of the contradictions. When you find out what the conflicts and contradictions in yourself are, you have a fertile basis to become innovative and creative, because you can profit from it, you can take it into account, instead of just going into a direction which is in the service of one position in the self only, to the exclusion of alternative possibilities.
NT: A lot of what you talk about sounds like it could be sold as object relations theory: You might talk about split off parts of the self, which is similar to the splitting to which object-relations theorists refer, and they talk about internal object relations, which you might refer to as different internal “I” positions. Can you comment on what you see to be the overlaps between your own thoughts and object-relations thinking?
HH: In fact you already gave an excellent summary of the similarities, which are indeed there. I would also add that there are some differences. I think an important difference is in the notion of “I-position”—an I-position is not only a significant other who is internalized, but it can also be a social role. For example, “I as a scientist” working as part of a team” or “I as a professional”, or “I as a tax payer”. From a cultural point of view, it can reflect the cultural multiplicity of my identity (e.g., I as a Dutch man married to a Polish woman).
So an I-position is not only a personal position, but also a social position (social role) or a cultural position. In this way the concept of I-position is located at the interface of psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. That is the reason why we are very interested in the process of globalization and in cross-cultural and inter-cultural contacts, as we live in a multiplicity of worlds which evoke the development of a multiplicity of I-positions in the self. Many people live in two cultures. Immigrants go to a new culture and they still have their original culture embodied in themselves. How do they answer to contradictions and cultural conflicts that they experience in themselves? That is very significant for dialogical self theory. Maybe this is not so strongly emphasized in the original object relations theories.
NT: Could you comment on how dialogical self theory could be applied in understanding human mental illness, or pathology.
HH: There are several excellent chapters as part of our upcoming Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans & Gieser, 2012), published by Cambridge University Press. There are several psychotherapists from the West and the East, for example from China, Japan and also from western countries. One of the Western contributions is by Paul H. Lysaker, a clinical psychologist, and John T. Lysaker, a philosopher. They have done a very good job of setting out three dysfunctional forms of the dialogical self.
The first one is when a person is subjected to an “empty self”. Imagine that all I-positions disappear from the landscape of the mind, so that the natural movement from the one to the other position is no longer possible. There is no positioning and counter-positioning and no meaningful interchange between the different voices and positions. The self becomes a desert.
The second one is the “cacophonous self.” Suppose you have an enormous multiplicity of voices that are not well organized; they come and go in unexpected ways and they are not meaningfully related to each other. You are exposed to a total chaos in yourself. This state of fragmentation and disintegration characterizes the cacophonous-self.
The third dysfunction is called the “monological self”, in which one position becomes overly dominant over all other positions. The self as a society of mind lacks a meaningful democracy in this case .You can see that, for instance, in paranoid schizophrenia. Although the people in the client’s environment may be very different, they can be experienced as highly similar—they are threatening, intruding upon him, trying to destroy or poison him. There is one external position in the client’s extended self, which dominates all other positions, the threatening one, and only one position in his internal domain, the suspicious one. The absolute dominance of such positions silences the voices of other positions, resulting in a monological self.
So, the dialogical self can become dysfunctional in different ways. The positions disappear temporarily, or more permanently, or they become fragmented and disorganized, or they become subordinated by one powerful monological position. The healthy multiplicity of the self gets lost.
NT: What would you say that a healthy multiplicity is?
HH: A healthy multiplicity should be distinguished from dissociative identity disorder (DID). In the healthy case there is a fluent dialogue between the different positions. They are really “I-positions.” When you take the classic example of Eve Black and Eve White, then you see that Eve Black talks in an objectifying way about the other. Eve White talks about Eve Black as a “she”, and not as “I”. So the other position is seen as a stranger, as an alter, and its accessibility is strongly reduced. The fluent hence-and-forth dialogical movement is disrupted.
NT: So would you say a healthy dialogical self would be where different voices have democracy— there is not one that is completely dominant, or one which is inferior, or discarded in some way?
Yes, exactly. Probably even the healthy dialogical self is not purely democratic in the sense that all those voices have an equal “vote” in the parliament of the self. Strikingly, even the notion of dialogue is not totally democratic in the sense that the different voices are equal, or have an equal chance. Actually, some of them are stronger, more influential or more developed.
Consider the process of dialogue. When I dialogue with you, you may know more about a particular topic of discussion than I do. You may be more specialized in the field than I am and, as a consequence, you are dominant in the interchange. So, turn-taking— as a hence-and-forth moving in dialogue—always implies a certain amount of dominance and this cannot be avoided. One voice may talk longer or louder than the other or one becomes more influential by making a strategic move. Dialogue is unthinkable without some (temporary) dominance of one voice over another.
The notion of dominance brings me to a next step. There is one very important type of I-position, which we call a “promoter position”. A “promoter position” is a kind of leadership figure in the otherwise disorganized or fragmented community of I-positions. It’s like when you have a group of people: they have all their own orientations, needs, and aspirations. This changes when a leader emerges, who organizes the group and invites participants to work towards a common goal or go together into a particular direction. Well, that’s a promoter position in the mini society of the self. So, a promoter position influences, organizes, and gives direction to a range of other positions in the self.
In my case, for example, “I as a scientist” is a promoter position in my life, because the fact that I am here in South Africa and meet all kinds of interesting people is a result of that promoter position. My learnings in psychology are useful in my contact with a diversity of other people. They also opened me to give attention to the richness of phenomena around me and to develop an exploring mind. So, as a human being, I am influenced in many ways by my position of “scientist”. Also in the external domain promoter positions may emerge when an important person, for example, a political figure, like Gandhi in India, or Mandela in South Africa, becomes a model for myself. When you find an inspiring teacher, he or she gives you guidelines to organize a variety of other I-positions in a coherent way. Promoter positions have an integrative function in the dialogical self.
NT: Would you agree that the development of promoter positions is a lot of what therapy is about?
HH: Right, in my view a good psychotherapist functions as a promoter position in the external domain of the self of the client with the power to reorganize existing positions in the client’s self. When clients have a healing contact with a psychotherapist—they take the psychotherapist home. The psychotherapist re-appears in their mind, particularly at problematic moments. They think: “What would my psychotherapist say about that?” This voice, if it functions as a promoter position, stimulates the client’s imagination so that the psychotherapist speaks also when he is physically absent.
NT: So the therapist gets internalized and in some ways starts to influence, or lead the other voices that the client has.
HH: That’s precisely what a promoter position does. I think not only in psychotherapy, but also in everybody’s life it is important to find out what our important internal or external promoter positions are. An internal promoter position can be, for example, “I as accepting”, or “I as fighting against unjustice” or “I as inspiring other people”. Some people have an internal promoter position that stimulates them to realize the purposes of a significant other with whom they feel very connected (e.g., “I want to realize what my friend wanted to do, but could not, due to his early death”)
Why are promoter positions so important in our contemporary era? When we do not have them, we are increasingly subjected to distracting forces. As a result of the process of globalization, our selves are increasingly “occupied” by a multiplicity of I-positions, which easily lead to a crumbling of the self. So, promoter positions are a healthy counterforce against fragmentation of the self. We are overwhelmed by an enormous number of impressions via the media, via our contacts, via our international communication, via the fact that we meet new people all the time—people who can be very different from each other and from us. How can we organize them within ourselves? How can we keep all those things together? That’s the function of promoter positions.
NT: I wonder whether you can give an example of how, on a technical level, you would use some of these ideas in therapy.
HH: One of the techniques, developed by Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka and myself, is what we call “composition work”. Here we are on the interface between dialogical self theory, art and psychotherapy. The self can be depicted as a circle—as William James, Jung and the Buddhists have argued— but it’s an open circle. Inspired by Japanese gardens, as “mindscapes”, we provide clients with a variety of stones with different shapes, colors, and textures. We invite them to tell about their most important I-positions and to make a composition of these I-positions in the form of a pattern of stones. By using both verbal and non-verbal techniques, we appeal to both left and right hemisphere activities. It is fascinating to see how people organize their positions in groups, with some of them in the centre and others more in the periphery, some on the left side, others on the right side, or one group experienced as positive, another as negative. They shift and reorganize their stones in unexpected ways when invited to articulate their future or desirable positions. In doing this, special attention is required to be given to the ones that function as obstacles that prevent them from realizing meaningful goals.
Another method is the so-called“stage model”. It involves the identification of emotions, counter emotions and the dialogue between these different emotions (see the article “Doing and undoing self” in this issue).
A third method is the so-called Personal Position Repertoire (PPR) procedure, published in Culture and Psychology in 2001. This is a method where you select from a larger pool a number of internal positions (e.g., I as anxious, I as adventurous. I as divorced) and number of external positions (e.g., my father, my mother, my teacher, my employer). The method allows to find out the similarities between different internal positions For example, “I as anxious’” can be highly correlated to “I as angry”, which may reveal that “anger” functions as a “secondary” emotion that covers “anxiety” as the “primary” emotion in Greenberg’s sense [see New Therapist edition 71 for an extensive overview of Leslie Greenberg’s EFT model]. In the external domain, the method may reveal, for example, the subjective meaning of the therapist as a position in the client’s life (e.g., the therapist as highly correlated with “my always protective mother”).
NT: How important is it, do you think, for therapists who are working in a dialogical self model, to understand and pay attention to the transference? Is it important to the outcome of therapy in your opinion?
HH: I see it as possible rather than essential. In particular cases it can be very useful—when you investigate and discuss with the client the correlations between the external positions (e.g., between the psychotherapist and my competitive brother). It can be very relevant in some cases, but in our self-confrontation work we have found that it is possible to work with the client in a productive way when the parents are not central in the therapy. So, you can focus on I-positions which are relevant in the present situation and yet work effectively from a psychotherapeutic perspective. It’s not always required to go deeply into the past. In some cases you may focus on the present and the future. However, some people require you to go into the past, particularly when the problem is more serious. In my view, we need methods and approaches that allow us to move to past, present, and future in flexible ways, dependent on the needs of the client and the expertise and vision of the therapist.
Hubert Hermans granted New Therapist the above interview during a visit to South Africa in May 2011, during which time he conducted several workshops on the use of Dialogical Self Theory in psychotherapy.
This article was first published in New Therapist.
About the author
Hubert Hermans is the world-renowned developer of the Dialogical Self Theory and the Self Confrontation Method(SCM). Hermans is a leading figure in the narrative psychology field and has authored over 200 publications. He is author of Self-Narratives: The Construction of Meaning in Psychotherapy (with Els Hermans-Jansen), The Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy (with Giancarlo Dimaggio) and Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-Positioning in a Globalizing Society (with Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka).
About the interviewer
Dylan Evans, the interviewer, is a psychologist working in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and contributing editor to New Therapist.
References
Hermans, H.J.M., & Gieser, T. (Eds.) (2012). Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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