Chapter 11: The Diary as a Dialogical Space

The relation between mind and society can be considered as the Holy Grail Quest of researchers in social psychology and, more generally, in social sciences. Indeed, this quest does not simply consist in acknowledging that society “influences” individual development, “moulds the mind” or (to use another common metaphor) that the “individual is immersed in the social,” but in accounting for the articulation between the individual and the social in a way that avoids the pitfall of reductionism: individual reductionism conceiving the social as a factor (or as a set of interdependent factors that could be controlled); social reductionism presenting the individual as a derivative of specific social conditions without personal agency; and last, but not least, interactional reductionism that considers social interactions as a source of development but loses track of personal singularity.