Self-talk and self-awareness: On the nature of the relation.

Abstract

This article raises the question of how we acquire self-information through self-talk, i.e., of how self-talk mediates self-awareness. It is first suggested that two social mechanisms leading to self-awareness could be reproduced by self-talk: engaging in dialogues with ourselves, in which we talk to fictive persons, would permit an internalization of others' perspectives; and addressing comments to ourselves about ourselves, as others do toward us, would allow an acquisition of self-information. Secondly, it is proposed that self-observation(self-awareness) is possible only if there exists a distance between the individual and any potentially observable self-aspect; self-talk, because it conveys self-information under a different form (i.e., words), would create a redundancy -- and with it, a wedge -- within the self