Harry Kempen
In the 1990s, Kempen and Hubert Hermans developed a new approach in cultural psychology around the concept of the dialogical self. In 1993, they published the seminal work "The dialogical self: Meaning as movement", and published several articles in "American Psychologist", "Journal of Personality" and "Theory & Psychology". Despite their success Kempen suffered from depression. In 2000, he died in Nijmegen four days before his retirement from the Radboud University. At the university he is remembered by as the "personification of cultural psychology."Articles, a selection:
Relational dialectics
In the Western world, these ideas hark back to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who held that the world was in constant flux (like fire), with creative and destructive forces on both sides of every process. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian scholar most known for his work in dialogism, applied Marxist dialectic to literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. He illustrated the tensions that exists in the deep structure of all human experience. For example, he identified that the tension that exists between unity and difference. Bakhtin conceived the human dialectic as two forces analogous to the physical forces "centripetal" (emotional forces tending towards unity) and "centrifugal" (emotional forces tending towards divergence). Like the Yin and Yang, Bakhtin's forces have no ultimate resolution.