IJSP Number 6, 2024

26 helpful clues as to the nature of their difficulties in private and professional life and the solutions they are pursuing. It is therefore worth drawing the client's or supervisee's attention to this "inner speech". Equally obvious is the idea of actively varying the "inner speech" to find and try out new, possibly more constructive, and promising approaches and solutions. However, these ideas have an implication, namely that there is a close relationship between the structure and dynamics of "inner speech" and a person's "external relationships", perhaps even a far-reaching correspondence in certain cases. According to this assumption, how a person speaks and interacts "internally" with themselves, and their "internal others" would be related to how they speak and interact with others in “external” life and how they speak and interact with others there. In fact, many of the approaches used in psychotherapy to date to work with clients' "inner conversations" are based on such assumptions. This article aims to show and discuss that there are different possibilities and approaches to this. We assume that the Dialogic Triad also plays an essential role in this sense for clinical and psychotherapeutic supervision and will outline this in the final part. But let's lay the foundations for this first. 2. DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES We will start with the developmental psychological perspectives of Jean Piaget [ 4 ] and Lev Vygotsky [ 5 ] , because most psychotherapeutic concepts of "inner speech" ultimately go back to these two approaches. They have therefore not lost their influence over the decades. The starting point for both is the observation that young children (aged around 3–5 years) often accompany their play or other activities with vocalizations without it being apparent that these have a specific addressee or that a response is expected. Piaget introduced the term "egocentric speech" for this phenomenon in young children (speaking "for themselves") - in contrast to "social speech" (speaking for others). Vygotsky dealt with this in his own studies on thinking and speaking. Piaget and Vygotsky agree that the “egocentric speech” of the young child is characterized by three special features, which they then classify differently, however. It is 1) a "collective monologue" (or a monologue in the context of a collective, in the presence of other people); 2) it is accompanied by an "illusion of understanding" (the child assumes that the others understand it); and 3) in its external form (volume and articulation) it certainly corresponds to "social speech".