On a Train from Morgantown: A Film Script

This paper consists of an imagined fictive historical dialogue between German-born developmental psychologist, Klaus Riegel
and American-born social psychologist, Kenneth Gergen. In the story, Riegel and Gergen have just both presented papers at
a conference in West Virginia and are boarding a train to return to their respective Universities—Riegel to the Midwest and
Gergen to the East Coast. We meet them as they are travelling from Morgantown, West Virginia to Pittsburgh to change trains.
We join then at crucial moments for both–in their thinking and in their personal journeys. Their conversation of the train
ignites ideas that would propel Gergen into abandoning meta theories and lighting the spark that began the concept of social
constructionism. At a turning point in his development of a metatheory of the dialectic, Riegel, however, would be dead within
just a few years. This retrospective imagining, supported by narrative biographical theory is extended, in this case, to the
illusory biographies of others and constructed within a sense of other as created by an imaginative projection of self onto
their worlds.