Dialectics of Influence: How Agency Works

Dialectical perspectives have had an ambiguous history in European thought in the past two centuries. Having become established in the late eighteenth century by J. G. Fichte and G. W. Hegel as a philosophical system, the dialectical perspective episodically entered into other sciences (psychology, sociology) while being “politically kidnapped” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1980s. The result has been uneven development of basic ideas of change and development in the conceptual repertoires of the biological, social, and human sciences. It is time to bring back this venerable tradition of thought to the center of the construction efforts of new perspectives in the social sciences of the twenty-first century. In this article, we outline the core of the dialectical ideas as these are centrally relevant for a new synthesis of developmental psychology and traditionally systemic but non-developmental theoretical domains such as psychoanalysis. We use one of the concepts from psychoanalysis that has proven to be productive in all of human psychology—the notion of ego-defense mechanisms—and re-conceptualize them as self-construction mechanisms. We thus make a basic psychoanalytic concept developmental—self-construction is a process where the Ego uses its agentive power in different dynamic and dialectical transformation of the various societal influences. It creates a synthetic set of personal-cultural tools for anticipatory actions towards future challenges when these occur. The human agency functions in pre-defending the Ego in relation to undesired influences and dialectical self-construction mechanism occupy a central place in this eternal fight for feeling oneself as a meaningfully whole person in the middle of constantly new life-course experiences.