Reinekke Lengelle’s work with Hubert Hermans’ Dialogical Self Theory
Reinekke’s area of study is “Writing the Self” – an approach that uses creative, expressive and reflective writing for identity development and is akin to writing for wellbeing. Her engagement with dialogical work began as a playwright in 1996 and she was drawn to the idea of a diversity of voices within the self through writing, voice dialogue, family-systems work, and psychosynthesis which she learned about alongside her academic studies.
She encountered Dialogical Self Theory (DST) in 2010 when she was introduced to the work and first met Hubert Hermans. In 2015 she earned her PhD, using DST to conceptualize identity as she researched how creative, expressive and reflective writing could help people develop identity in career contexts. She developed the “Career Writing” method with her partner Frans Meijers, a Dutch professor and career researcher, who died in 2018.
In 2019 Reinekke interviewed Hubert Hermans and wrote the (open access) journal article Portrait of a Scientist: in Conversation with Hubert Hermans, Founder of Dialogical Self Theory. As an extension of that work, her ISDS keynote in Tallinn, Estonia in 2024 focused on the importance of vulnerability in research.
Reinekke has been teaching “Writing the Self” for 30 years and developed the graduate courses: Writing the Self and Narrative Possibilities. She redesigned a course called Mourning and Trauma that invites students to write their own life stories using the autoethnographic method. She encourages her students to explore Dialogical Self Theory, in particular as a way to understand that when we say, “I am…” we can also explore, “…and I am also…” What she’s seen over the years is that knowledge of DST decreases shame and allows new narratives of identity to develop.
She and her partner Dr. Bob Fecho are writing a play that makes use of Dialogical Self Theory. They hope to perform it in a Readers Theatre version at the next conference!
