Reverberation Between I-Positions: How Border Tensions Function in Meaning Construction

Abstract

The Self is a hypercomplex concept that humankind has given to their essence, which has been consequently explored as a social construct or an individual concept. Nevertheless, we have only recently started to overcome the idea that the Self is simply one unity. With Hermans’ Dialogical Self Theory (2001) it became much more common to see the Self as a polysemic and dynamic concept, consisting of I-positions, that constantly remain in dialogue with one another while maintaining the relative stability of the Self as a whole. In the following contribution, this dynamic notion of the Self is enhanced by the elaboration of how this dynamic concept is guided in its process, by the implemented borders -introduced in analogy with particle borders-. Elementary for our ongoing in exploring the complexity of the Self is to learn to understand therefore the inner movement of the fragmental units that result in the experienced Self. A movement that is explored and defined as reverberating and reminds explorers of the self to be aware that the topic they tackle is always in change and strongly influenced by the positions they find themselves in -for looking into the future, past, and present.

Keywords:

• I-positions
• particle-borders
• reverberation
• self
• trajectories

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my mentors Jaan Valsiner and Pina Marsico for their support. Without you, this article may have never been able to emerge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author Contributions

Marc Antoine Campill has created the article and generated the used material.

Notes

1 Example rooting from the Organon model by Bühler (1934). The moment Goethe was looking for a sender includes the act of creating the image of a sender who might be no longer there (where it has been).

2 Past and future projections that have not existed in the moment of experiencing but exist now in the reflection from a current self, or vice versa.

3 The self in Figure 2 is not dialogical and represents only a basic symbolic representation of the entity self.

4 In the figure the I-position dotes locations are not of theoretical interest but are used in such a way that the reader experiences a clearer insight into the explained theoretical content.

5 Both internal and external I-positions are believed and introduced as (w)holistic I-positions while they are often incompletely explored resulting in misused deconstructed-I-positions. In Figure 5, we can observe how from left to right the focus shifts from internal& external, to deconstructed I-position& borders and to below the newly constructed internal-external dynamics –temporary (w)holistic-I-position frames.

6 The multilayered S includes in this occasion all the internalized and externalized I-positions while the inner borders are projected into the outside space and represent their influence towards the dynamic self-projection context.

7 The Gestalt-explosion represents a strong rupture in the meaning-making process that results in a fundamental reorganizing of certain meaning constructs and their interrelation to one another. This change is triggered by an individual experiencing something extremely untypical based on their until-then-understanding of reality causing the individual to completely question the own substance of knowledge and understandings they leaned into –until that moment. (Campill et al. 2023).

8 Concept of border crossing, based on Marsico (2013). Border crossing can be seen as a process that at the same time can also be experienced from a different perception point as border making -considering that a logical construction of materialized reality in the perspective of an individual is creating with every new vision a new hidden context, a border. Overcoming previous borders involves us in other words, into the establishment of new versions. Multiple identities embody multiple projections and their borderland context.

Additional information

Funding

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any funding support.