Experience and socio-cultural psychodynamics: Comment on Larrain and Haye’s “The discursive nature of inner speech”

Abstract

Larrain and Haye propose that inner speech is a socially constituted phenomenon. I suggest they provide new directions for understanding inner speech but do not take the reader much beyond discursive psychology. In particular, the authors partially fall into the neglect of embodied experience (i.e., phenomenologically immediate experience) that is already a pitfall of discursive approaches. This commentary attempts to extend some of the ideas already embedded in Larrain and Haye’s article. It attempts to add an account of experience that includes lived tensions. Such an extension potentially takes readers beyond the boundaries of discursive psychology by enabling an approach to inner speech that addresses dynamic lived experiences of tension.