1. Dialogical perspectives on
mutual understanding
Ivana Marková
University of Stirling
Leuven, 7th March 2013

2. Revolution?
• Two meanings:
• A) In psychotherapeutic practices, psychiatry, counselling
• B) In dialogicality, by paying attention to concepts
• Example: evolution and upward progress
• dialogical brain: ‘we can speculate how a dialogical self
might actually be housed in a dialogical brain’ (Lewis, 2002,
p.178)
• dialogue and dialogicality deny evolution as an upward
progress
• Dialectics and dialogicality
• Bakhtin: dialogical tension permits realization of author’s
intentions in heterogeneity of languages and ideas

3. Diversity of dialogical approaches
• different theoretical traditions and diverse issues
• the ancient philosophy of Platonic dialogues;
phenomenology, hermeneutics (Gadamer – interpretation;
Levinas – ethical dialogue); interaction (e.g. George Herbert
Mead); Habermas’s (1991) communicative action; Mikhail
Bakhtin
• dialogical approaches do not form a unified theory
• From broadly based ‘Rethinking Language, Mind, and the
World Dialogically’ (Linell, 2009), to more specific theories of
the dialogical self (Hermans and Kempen,1993) and to
analyses of detailed aspects of utterances in the
contemporary French dialogical linguistics (Salazar-Orvig and
Grossen, 2004).

4. Meanings of dialogue
• Dialogue as a symbolic interaction between two or several
individuals who are mutually co-present; extensions to
artefact-borne forms (e.g. written messages, pictures,
internet)
• Internal dialogue - dialogues of individuals and groups and
with absent individuals
• Dialogue among ideas rather than between people e.g. in
‘The Rules of Sociological Method’ (Durkheim, 1938, p. li); to
investigate the ways in which social representations ‘adhere
to and repel one another, how they fuse or separate from one
another’ – in other ways, how they circulate in society.
• Dialogue between different cultural traditions and historical
epochs (Bakhtin (1979/1986a, Yuri Lotman, 1990); e.g.
Mediaeval culture and Renaissance.

5. Intersubjectivity and strife for recognition
• Intersubjectivity
• the self-other as an irreducible dyad in theories of the self by
James Mark Baldwin, George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky;
• Trevarthen: intersubjectivity can provide an explanation “of
how human social and cultural knowledge is created, how
language serves a culture and how its transmission from
generation to generation is secured”
• Matusov – intersubjectivity may lead to disagreement
• Bakhtin - dialogue as a strife of divergent perspectives

6. Intersubjectivity and strife for recognition
• The strife for social recognition
• Studies in difficult communication, e.g. cerebral palsy or
learning difficulty; consistency and innovation in imposing
own meaning on the other
• No kind of resources can be a priori considered as non-
communicative or as discrete and isolated units
• Strangeness - effort of the self to understand and surmount
the unknown qualities and meanings of others
• Tension is ever present, whether participants strive for
intersubjectivity, for dominance, for overcoming strangeness
of one another, or for dialogical mutualities

7. Uniqueness of a dialogical encounter
• Uniqueness - interdependence of participant(s) with the
situation/context
• No inductive cumulating of data from questionnaires or scales
• Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study
Research - unique cases must be strategically selected
Qualitative Inquiry, 12, pp. 219- 245; ‘analytic generalization’
• when the aim of research is to bring out the greatest possible
knowledge about a given phenomenon, a random or a
representative sample, aggregation, and averaging of
gathered facts do not provide rich knowledge about the
phenomenon in question

8. Trust and dialogue
• If dialogicality is the fundamental capacity of the Self to
conceive, create, and communicate about social realities in
terms of the Alter – participants must have a basic trust that
there is a common ground between them
• The term ‘trust’ has special dialogical qualities because it is
the existential feature of both intersubjectivity and of social
recognition
• It expresses the Self’s direct relation to the other and to the
shared social world; unreflected and reflected trust; other
terms like ‘love’, ‘attachment’
• Ontological moral and ethical binding to fulfil mutual
expectations and obligations

9. Trust and dialogue
• Trust - deep religious, philosophical, ethical, linguistic roots
• in daily life it makes sense only with respect to its opposite,
(e.g. distrust, doubt, risk)
• ethical obligations, linguistic and non-linguistic features of
communication, the nature of interaction, to content of what
is communicated
• Simmel (1950) - ethical obligations in secret societies
• Dialogical features of concealing and revealing secrets
• Micro-social and macro-social forms of trust and distrust
• Unreflected and reflected forms of trust

10. Forms of trust and distrust
• Trust as a polysemic concept
• From pre-conceptual to conceptual and reflected trust
• From micro-social trust (e.g. Erikson) to macro-social trust
(e.g. Simmel)
• Erikson: ‘basic trust’ as the first mark of mental life, preceding
any feelings of autonomy and initiative. It evolves through
mutual somatic experiences and ‘unmistakable
communication’
• Simmel: the society would disintegrate without trust, feeling
that binds society together

11. Macro-social trust
A priori generalised Context-dependent
trust (G. Simmel) (context-specific) trust
Psychosocial feeling P re audits
-co st
nce tru
pt u u al
al t pt Machiavelian
rus n ce
Social cohesion
t Co strategies
In-group solidarity Co-operation
Local communities
Primary (taken-for- Reflective trust
granted) trust
Co
n ce p
tu a
st l tr
ust
l tru
ua
pt Third parties
n ce
e -co
Pr
Emotional interdependence Self doubt/confidence
Psychosocial feeling
basic trust Inner dialogicality
(ontological)
Micro-social trust

12. Confession
• Bakhtin’s (1984) analysis of dialogical trust and risk in
confessional discourse
• Confession - a self-reflective dialogical interaction between
the self and other; communication genres of Dostoyevsky’s
heroes and anti-heroes; confessors’ strategies in exposing
themselves to distrust of the other; fear of non-recognition
and rejection; confession and rejection of those who agree
with self-condemnation; dependence and orientation of the
self towards the other;
• Implication of Bakhtin’s analysis for psychotherapy

13. Dialogical perspectives on
mutual understanding
A dialogue between
Ivana Marková and Peter Rober