ABSTRACT
A brief glance at the philosophical roots of self-disclosure provides insight into why most of us elect to have an approach-avoidance relationship with this form of communication. For example, Heidegger (1927/1962) considered self-disclosure essential to our understanding of our own existence and as an inevitable part of being human; indeed, talk is the way we disclose our primordial, primitive conditions of being-in-the-world. Laing (1962), on the other hand, viewed self-disclosure as a person’s “making patent” his or her “true self” (p. 126). He argued that the possibility of “going forward” (as opposed to “going back,” “going around in circles,” or “going nowhere”) exists only when self-disclosing, when a person “puts himself into his actions” (p. 126). More important than serving as a way to “go forward,” self-disclosure also serves as a way to create and understand our personal selves as well as our interpersonal selves: “The act I do is felt to be me, and I become ‘me’ in and through such action” (p. 126).
