‘If there is no tension, there is no reason to talk’

Ivana, you have just published your latest book, The Making of a Dialogical Theory: Social Representations and Communication. It presents a dynamic social theory situated within historical, political, and cultural challenges. What can social psychologists learn from the concept of dialogicality in relation to the study of contemporary political issues?

When people speak about dialogue, they often have in mind that dialogue will make our interaction much easier, smoother… that we shall resolve problems. Intersubjectivity is important. Although some researchers also speak about the question of subjectivity, 'I express myself as an agent, and I also take into consideration you as my co-participant and we construct dialogue together'.

However, it seems to me that what is much more important to acknowledge is that dialogues are about strife. There are different ideas which come together, and it doesn't mean that we are going to resolve the problem. We can make problems even bigger. The question of subjectivity and intersubjectivity creates questions – about tension, strife in dialogue and coping with strife. In fact, this feature of tension is absolutely essential in interaction… if there is no tension, there is no reason to talk.

Are there any significant events in your own story which have inspired your lifelong work on dialogicality?

It's always difficult to look at your past with hindsight… you tend to find things which perhaps were not like that, when you actually lived them.

I could give you at least two examples.

The first one influenced me tremendously and somehow persecutes me even now. I was 12-years-old, in 1950. There were political trials or artificial trials in Czechoslovakia, in which people were submitted to torture and death. There was a politician, a deeply democratic person who spent her life during Nazism in a concentration camp, but who also worked very hard for resistance. 

I could understand what Nazism meant. But what I couldn't understand was why in 1950, she was imprisoned and condemned to death, because she was disagreeing with the communist regime, which came to power only two years earlier. This woman had a daughter, who was four or five years older than I was. I experienced this so strongly that somehow it persecutes me, even now. I feel offended. I felt offended.

I wrote everything I could. This was the most drastic case where Albert Einstein wrote a letter, the French president Auriol, Madame Roosevelt… but no, she was hanged for crimes which she didn't commit. That was the regime in which I lived.

The other case was in 1953, three years later. Communism was well established in Czechoslovakia, and the regime decided to make a financial reform. A lot of people lost their money, whatever they had. There was a demonstration where I lived. I was 15, it was my last year in the secondary school and my father, my brother and I, went out together with the crowd. People were throwing out the photos of all these political leaders, Stalin. My brother, who was four years younger, he was just shouting, 'Oh, it's funny, Father, isn't it'. Nothing much happened. But the next day, I was interrogated by a teacher, whom I desperately loved. She asked me with her very nice voice, 'Did you go to the march, Ivana?'. What could I say? I was 15, I wouldn't be allowed to go to gymnasium and to university. So, I just lied.

But it was such a big problem for me because I had colleagues, friends who didn't lie. I met one after 40 years and she told me: 'I couldn't lie. I told the truth I was there. I was interrogated with my mother, and she was kicking me, not to speak, but I just couldn't. So I was not allowed to go to school to study at all. My only satisfaction came later, after many years, when my children were good in sports, and became internationally renowned as sports people'.

There were many occasions of this kind, which must have had influence on what I did later. The question of loyalty: how do you split your responsibilities between your conscience and others?

Do you remember how you made sense of that at the time?

I knew that there are things I can say at home, and different things which are for the public. People asked me, 'why did you emigrate to Britain? My answer, for many years, was that I didn't want my children to be brought up in this conflict. One for you, and one for the public.

A few years back you were a guest editor on a special issue of the journal Culture and Psychology, and you also contributed a piece on 'chronotopes'. Tell us about that. 

The notion of chronotope, that time and space are very important for the way you interpret an event or interaction, is extremely useful. When I go back to that event in 1953, we could say the main chronotope was the event of the financial reform – a particular time in a particular period of communism. But then we had different sub-chronotopes inbetween, for example, mother kicking her daughter under the table. or my brother, shouting, 'isn't it fun'.

So, within one chronotope you can have different events and each of them would have different ethics, meanings, style.

Of course in politics, from day to day, you have a totally changed world. But when we look at time, space and politics even more broadly, we see how inconsistent these relations could be. I have in mind the years from 1917 to 1970, in Russia, in the Soviet Union, with respect to work of Albert Einstein. There would be stages where Einstein's work would be accepted, then rejected, and these ups and downs continue. Even more drastic, I would say, were cases of musicians constantly persecuted by the Soviet Union. 

When you do something, then your family is responsible, everybody's responsible, so everybody's finished. This is what happened in my family as well – my father was imprisoned for political reasons, I was thrown out from school, my brother wasn't allowed to study, my mother was thrown out from her work, other relatives would just try to avoid us.

What does it mean to be political in the public sphere, from the perspective of dialogicality?

To be political, I would say, means to be engaged in the problem or in whatever you are concerned with. What does it mean to be engaged? It means to take responsibility for something or not; to be committed, or not; to consider something as ethical, or not. To be engaged in ways which the issue necessitates. But these interdependencies need a balance between thinking and passions. That is a basic problem. Political events are historical events, cultural events, economic events… they require very complex thought.

If you want to be political about something which happened in the past, you must be able to appreciate that past, on its own merits, and not try to interpret it from your point of view, because of your passions. You can appreciate it only if you try to understand it on its merits, and not on your own merits. 

This is very important for young people to try and understand this. Why do people today judge Aristotle, Plato, Churchill, without even trying to understand the time in which they lived and what may lead them to certain kinds of ideas, which today are appreciated as a wrong idea. 

In addition, the media are responsible for many, many things and we must be very careful about this. It becomes common sense because everybody believes in it. When I came to Britain, I wanted to be more political. I joined Amnesty International. I joined it just for one day because what I experienced there was going marching and shouting, and that was that. You see, we need actions which are based on historical knowledge, proper knowledge, appreciating things as they happened at the time and not just implanting our own ideas into that.

You make the point in your 2022 article 'Willing and Action' in Culture and Psychology that social psychology is political. How would you define political psychology?

The study of interdependence between individuals and communities, because that interdependence is never neutral, it is always evaluative. We always judge, evaluate, want to understand and justify actions of our own and others. Social psychology was created after the Second World War, and for those people, it was a political science. 

I adopted this perspective, because although I didn't remember much of the war, of course I remember something. I certainly lived in a totalitarian regime, which gave me the same idea. Social psychology is about loyalties, lack of loyalties, responsibilities, ethics, lack of ethics, commitment. For me, that is political psychology.

I would say that in Britain, it is important that the British Psychological Society's Social Psychology Section was created, because perhaps more than elsewhere, psychology, or social psychology, was not political. It was a very narrow experimental science… until only recently we still feel that it is the experiment, and now neuroscience, which is somehow the most important. So, the Section can play a big role, but it is also a big responsibility to do it properly.

You were Chair of the Section: can you give an example from that time?

Yes – it was 1985 to 1988, apartheid in South Africa. How should the social section behave at that time? Should we abandon South Africa? Should we abandon academic contacts, or should we not? There was a psychologist called Don Foster, I think he still functions in America, who came to Britain, and he argued for abandoning any social contacts. 

Some people were very much for, I would say it was the majority. I was one of those who were against it, didn't feel that was a proper way. Not abandoning these contacts would support the apartheid regime, but it's only half of the story. It would also damage those who live in South Africa, these colleagues who would be just left.

Of course, that is not the only event… in 1968, there was supposed to be a congress of European social psychology, in Czechoslovakia in Prague. It was immediately after the invasion of Russia. So again, there was a problem between psychologists who thought we should go and those who didn't. We have the same problem now with Ukraine, with Russia.

So, if we want to work as social psychologists, we have to be very careful about what we say, how we say it, and what we do, and to not just be passionate about a ready-made solution. I think it's very important that young people become part of this movement of political psychology, but that they study very carefully the reasons, thinking and be aware of these passions.

Any last thoughts on the development of political psychology?

I would be arguing for thinking, thinking and thinking! We cannot think without passions – of course, we have passions. But we must be able to judge and evaluate.

Dr Nicola Magnusson is a Social Psychologist and Associate Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Counselling at the Open University. Her main area of inquiry is the human rights of refugees and asylum migration, with a particular focus on the psychological and dialogical processes associated with navigating the legal and rights systems pertaining to forced migration.

Professor Ivana Marková is a Czech-born social psychologist, Emeritus Professor at the University of Stirling, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and Research Associate in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences. at the London School of Economics.