Dialogical Change Processes , Emotions , and the Early Emergence of Self

The present paper is grounded on the premise that emotions are an essential component of self development as they simultaneously foster a sense of connection with and differentiation from others. Emotions are viewed as holistic as they dynamically involve the whole body and emerge in dialogical contexts. Emotions involve feelings of being alive (or not) in relationships, experiences that are dynamically lived and developed over time through coregulated dialogues with others. We contend that the study of early emotions in dialogical contexts constitutes a viable avenue to study how young infants develop their sense of self. A case study of a mother-infant dyad’s co-regulated experiences is presented with the goal of illustrating the theoretical and methodological contributions of examining self and emotions as dialogically and dynamically evolving over time. This paper examines emotions as a crucial and integral component of self development. We argue that emotions are dialogical experiences lived in bodies – bodies that co-exist in relation to other bodies, bodies that engage in alive communication with others, bodies that co-regulate their movements with the movements of others. It follows then that a productive strategy to study how infants develop their sense of self is through the examination of early emotions in the dialogical contexts infants co-created with their mothers. The theoretical underpinnings of the work presented are influenced by dynamic systems theory and the works of Henri Wallon, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Bohm. We start by presenting Wallon’s efforts to integrate emotions and self development, followed by a short discussion of Bakhtin’s contributions to conceptualizing selfhood as dialogical and Bohm’s view on dialogue, self and emotions. AUTHORS’ NOTE. The authors would like to express their gratitude to their colleagues Cami Maianu and Rachelle Soles for their insightful and helpful comments. Please address correspondence regarding this article to either author: (a) Andrea Garvey, American River College, Department of Psychology, 4700 College Oak Drive, Sacramento, CA 95841, USA. Email: [email protected] (b) Alan Fogel, University of Utah, Department of Psychology, 380 South 1530 East, Room 502, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0251, USA. Email: [email protected]