ABSTRACT
This book is generated by the theoretical marriage of two concepts, self and dialogue, representing different traditions in the history of human thought. After centuries of philosophical discussions about the human soul, William James (1890) was one of the main thinkers who proposed a conception of the self that would have an enormous impact on theory and research in American psychology of the twentieth century. In the period that American psychologists, inspired by James, Mead and other theorists, were giving shape to a ‘psychology of the self’, there emerged in Russia a dialogical school inspired by the literary scientist Mikhail Bakhtin (1973, 1981), who presented a finegrained analysis of the human capacity for communication and interchange. The ‘dialogical self’ brings these two concepts, self and dialogue, together in such a way that a fertile field of theory, research and practice is disclosed.
