IJSP Number 6, 2024

24 1. INTRODUCTION People spend a good part of their time talking to themselves or - inaudibly to others - in an "inner" conversation with other people . 1 Often it is not other people they are talking to, but things, beings, or processes that they deal with in conversation as if they were personalities of their own. They talk to their computers, but also to God and to their fate and to the weather and the lottery drum. Talking to ourselves is such a natural part of our lives that it is reflected in phrases such as "I said to myself", "I asked myself" and the like. In literary works, it is common practice to give us an insight into what characterizes the people in these works, what moves and motivates them, by reproducing such “inner” conversations between the protagonists and themselves or their "inner" conversations with others. The term "private speech" is often used for this phenomenon because these conversations are not heard by anyone but the people themselves. If this "inner speech" of people is such a natural part of their lives, then it is obvious to ask what function it has for them and their lives. And this raises further questions for psychotherapy and clinical supervision: Can helpful clues about the nature of people’s difficulties in their everyday and professional life and possible solutions be gained from paying attention to the way people "speak internally"? Can these "inner dialogs" themselves perhaps also be a practical starting point for constructive change? 1.1. THE FUNCTION OF “INNER SPEECH” From the point of view of Gestalt psychology, we can answer the first question about the function of "inner speech" as follows: Humans are self-regulating, or - to use a more neutral expression - auto regulating and self-steering beings, and "inner speech" is part of this autoregulation and self-steering. Life demands constant fine-tuning from people - on the one hand between the phenomenal ego and the phenomenal environment which form the microcosm of their experienced world, and on the other hand between this microcosm and the physical macrocosm in which this microcosm is 1 "Inner" and "outer" are in quotation marks due to the ambiguity of these expressions. For our topic, two meanings are to be distinguished: "inside" and "outside" as inside or outside the realm of the person within the phenomenal world of somebody, and "inside" and "outside" as inside or outside the physiological organism of somebody. For these and other differentiations of "inside" and "outside", see Bischof 1966 [ 2 ] .