Ethics in Practice: A Critical Appreciation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of “Outsideness” in Relation to Responsibility and the Creation of Meaning in Psychotherapy

Introduction

Two interrelated philosophical questions of crucial importance in psychotherapy are how intersubjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood are understood in theory and what the implications of these understandings are for ethics in practice. Whilst codes of ethics necessarily provide general principles that apply to all therapists and their work with all clients, ethics in practice refers to the particular: the continual evaluation and reevaluation of our activities as psychotherapy practitioners in both interactions with patients and with other professionals. Bakhtin scholar, Tim Beasley-Murray, has aptly termed this conception of localised and situation specific ethics as the “ethics of a non-categorical imperative” (2007, p. 84). In this article I will discuss how Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of human intersubjectivity could contribute to thinking about ethics in the practice of psychotherapy. I will try to show how Bakhtin’s ideas could be used to think about some of the ethical issues involved in the use of theory as a way of giving form to human subjectivity. Bakhtin describes an ethics of intersubjectivity and interdependency, of which psychotherapy could be considered to be just one form, not a privileged relationship set apart from other human relationships. This needs to be born in mind when considering the relevance of his ethical philosophy for the practice of psychotherapy.

Scientist Practitioners and Relationship Practitioners

As psychotherapy practitioners,¹ our attitude towards ethics in practice depends on how we position ourselves in relation to an imaginary fault line that divides those who prioritise the relationship in psychotherapy from those who are primarily guided by theory. The latter group is sometimes referred to as the “scientist practitioner” paradigm, where practice is primarily theory driven and in which human beings are the “objects” of study. The former, whose starting point is the human relationship and human subjective experience, could be loosely referred to as the “relationship practitioner model.” Whilst the “scientific practitioner” bases therapy on a theoretical understanding of the symptoms and causes of psychological distress and how to ameliorate them, the relationship practitioner sees symptoms as the signifiers of meaning that is unique to each individual and that emerges or is created in the context of the human relationship.

The “scientist practitioner” is guided by faith in the power of reason and knowledge based on rational enquiry. There is often an unquestioning assumption that human psycho-social functioning can be studied and conclusions reached in the same manner as in the natural sciences. The assumption of equivalence between the social and natural sciences has been criticised by Chomsky (1976) and Hacking (1999) in terms that echo Bakhtin’s critique of “theoreticism” in the realm of human subjectivity. Chomsky observes that what often passes for scientific research in the social sciences is merely common sense observation and that description translated into technical jargon often masquerades as expert knowledge (1976). Hacking points out that human beings, unlike other animals and inanimate objects, react to how they are diagnosed and categorised in ways that undermine attempts to standardize and predict outcomes (1999).

R. D. Laing (1967) articulated an even more penetrating critique of scientific psychology, pointing out that the only evidence of the nature and process of subjectivity is experience, and the experience of the other is invisible to us and can only be inferred from his or her behaviour. In other words, we can study and describe our own experience of other people (as they can of us) but we cannot observe or know their experience directly. The relationship between behaviour and experience is one on which natural science cannot comment. For Laing, experience is the self: I am my experience. It follows from this: I am not a static entity but an evolving process and the perceptions and opinions that others may have about my experience, however accurate, will never be able to keep up with my experience of myself.

Writing in the 1920s, the young Bakhtin anticipated these critiques of scientific psychology. His potential contribution to psychotherapy lies in his non-theoretical, phenomenological approach to human subjectivity and intersubjectivity, an approach that is predicated on ethics rather than theory. As our attempts to understand, analyse, manage, structure and give form to our own subjective psychological experiences and those of others, theories, can also distract us from attending to the other. Once we have a theory in mind, it is almost inevitable that we will listen more carefully for the evidence or symptoms that confirm our theoretical hypothesis and discount that which does not.

By contrast, the “relationship practitioner” is guided by experience, intuition and attentiveness to the here and now. Whilst theory is not discounted, the practitioner’s attitude towards it is very different; theories are understood as speculative, provisional, metaphorical and value laden rather than as having any objective status as scientific fact. The other’s account of experiences takes priority over the theoretical formulation of it. One of the drawbacks with this conception of psychotherapy is that it undermines assumptions about the professional status of psychotherapy and its claims to expertise. It also calls into question the nature and value of training and the hierarchies among and within different schools of therapy. It also complicates the question of regulation either by professional associations or by the state. It is much easier to regulate a practice based on a clearly defined knowledge base and techniques than on a relationship in which the very fact of it being a relationship is, for some practitioners, an end in itself. A high level of trust would be needed for anyone to put him or her self in the hands of a psychotherapist who regards the relationship between them as the sole vehicle of therapeutic change and the patient’s ability to relate appropriately to the therapist as the yardstick of his or her psychological functioning. The maintenance of appropriate boundaries is clearer when the practitioner is guided by prescribed techniques, which are determined independently of their own subjective response to their patient. By contrast, the “relationship practitioner,” whose interventions are entirely undetermined, has to exercise a constant vigilance with regard to the boundaries between the welfare of the client and his own needs and desires, with all the attendant risks of self-gratification and self-deception.

Ethics and Psychotherapy: Science Or Art?

The fault line between the “scientist practitioner” and “relationship practitioner” cuts across the different modalities so that any practice that gives priority to theory and the techniques derived from it would fall into the scientist practitioner camp²; it could even divide practitioners whose practice is of the same school. The positioning of one’s practice in relation to the fault line maybe less a matter of training and orientation and more one of experience and personal values and beliefs. It is also likely that regardless of our consciously held theoretical orientations, values, and beliefs, many practitioners oscillate along the spectrum between these two positions. These positions reflect a broader struggle in philosophy between ethics as science and ethics as art, between ethics as a set of fixed codes or rules, or between ethics as exploration, improvisation, trial and error, which Richard Holloway (1999) refers to as “ethical jazz.” Whether we refer to fixed codes or try to play “ethical jazz” would depend on the nature of the real and imagined communities in which we live. If we live and work in a relatively closed society or moral community that is governed by commonly agreed and obeyed laws, then ethical decisions are largely predetermined. If we live in more heterogeneous societies, characterised by competing systems of ethics and values, then moral decisions are partly contingent upon our perceptions of the particularities of each person and his or her situation; this necessarily involves tolerating uncertainty and conflict. The therapy world, like most relatively open societies, is characterised by different and competing moral communities with different values associated with different conceptions of subjectivity. The rivalry among different models in psychotherapy is far more than disagreements about theory but also a struggle for values, which mirror conflicts in society at large. As Holloway (1999) suggests, ethical concerns can easily become entangled with the seductiveness of power and control, inhibiting our ability and that of others to ask questions and struggle with truth, so that the powerful determine the prevailing values.

For most psychotherapy practitioners, training involves academic study of theory and the application of that theory in supervised practice, alongside their ongoing experience of personal therapy. The ethics of practice are often taught as marginal concerns, and are only rarely debated or considered as central and defining aspects of psychotherapy. As the activities of counselling and psychotherapy in many countries are being increasingly controlled and regulated by the state, the concept of ethical practice risks being further reduced to crude generalisations, applicable across a range of quasi-medical practices. Similarly, practice is increasingly driven by techniques derived from questionable research³ designed to achieve predetermined goals or targets⁴ of questionable therapeutic value. However, alongside these centralising tendencies towards standardisation and control of psychotherapy, powerful centrefugal⁵ forces exist, tending towards diversity and plurality of theory and practice. The evolution of psychotherapy could be understood as a dialogical phenomenon: i.e. theories develop in response to other theories, borrowing some aspects, whilst rejecting or modifying others, with each new idea having the potential to provoke further new ideas. No theory arises in a vacuum and all are mutually interdependent (Pollard, 2009). The diversity of thought and practice in psychotherapy; the differing emphasis on either theoretically driven technical interventions or the here and now of an evolving relationship; the degree to which therapists are subjected to external regulation and control alongside the culturally diverse settings in which psychotherapy is practiced; these all contribute to the complexities involved in considering the relationships between subjectivity, theory and ethics and whether or not it is possible or desirable to posit a principle of ethics in practice that takes precedence over theory.

Mikhail Bakhtin and the “Dialogical” Self

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and literary theorist who lived and worked in relative obscurity during his own lifetime⁶ but whose work has since become immensely influential across the humanities and social sciences, extending its influence into the realms of psychology and psychotherapy. Bakhtin, however, was neither a psychologist nor a psychotherapist and had only a passing acquaintance with psychoanalysis. His concern was with the phenomenology of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. He did not seek to pathologise or categorise but instead emphasised the unique and irreducible in each human being.

Bakhtin is best known in psychotherapy for his dialogical conception of consciousness, inspired by his seminal study of Dostoevsky,⁷ which later became known as the “Dialogical Self” (Hermans, 2004). Dialogism is primarily concerned with meaning and could be defined as the intersubjective creation of meaning at the intersection of different and often contradictory points of view (Pollard, 2009). It differs from structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of language because it allows a greater role for human intentionality to interact with the predetermined meanings of words and utterances to create new meanings. For Bakhtin, language is the condition of subjectivity and also of possibility; language is both a constraint on our subjectivity and a potential source of liberation. The relationship between language and the subject is both reciprocal and interactive. A dialogical account of language subverts attempts to systematise language or define subjectivity. The more complex and varied the societies we live in, the greater the dialogical complexity of the languages⁸ that constitute and shape our subjectivity. That is to say, the words and utterances we voice are already endowed with multiple permutations of meaning that interact with and subvert our own intentions; that these may be conscious or unconscious adds yet another dimension of complexity. Meaning is always uncertain and indeterminable. Therefore, the dialogical self, rather than being an individual psychological phenomenon, is a social entity, which can be thought of as different “voices” or “I” positions in conversation with one another, each speaking to other from different points of view (Stiles, 1997). Ambiguity is at the core of a dialogical account of language and therefore, of a dialogical conception of the self. It stands in a dialectical relation to the alienated Lacanian subject that is subordinated to the signifier.⁹ From a Bakhtinian perspective, psychotherapy could be seen as a process in which the culturally imposed signifiers of self-hood are exposed and discarded. The dialogical self is a complex self, a reflection of the culturally and historically diverse nature of the societies in which we live. It is also an unstable, decentred, dynamic and permeable self in which consciousness is not the property of the individual, but a shared social phenomenon:

However, the increasing popularity of the “dialogical self,” an entirely social self, formed by linguistically mediated relationships, could be partly explained by its apparent versatility, allowing a spurious identification with transitory postmodern phenomena; it could be dismissed as a superficial self without any specific meanings, content, sexuality, gender or desire. It is also a universalising account of the self, but only because it is pitched at a level of abstraction that renders it uncontroversial. By their exclusive focus on the dialogical in Bakhtin, theorists of the dialogical self have failed to take full account of the wider context of Bakhtin’s thought in which dialogical consciousness is embedded (Pollard, 2008). Isolated from its context, the dialogical self could belong to everyone and no one. In order to acquire depth and meaning, it needs literally to be fleshed out.

Embodied Dialogical Subjectivity

The human body was a central and recurring theme throughout Bakhtin’s work and the cornerstone of his ethical philosophy, an ethics of interpersonal relations that is grounded in the principle of incarnation. Whilst the dialogical self is an abstract construct, the individual embodied self is material, specific, and unique. Its uniqueness is defined by its materiality, i.e. the body, the gaze and the voice and therefore its otherness to every other human individual. For Bakhtin it is our bodies, rather than some inner essence, that are the defining aspect of our selves. It is the birth of the body and its death that delineate our own existence from that of anyone else. Bakhtin thought that there are profound ethical implications consequent upon the uniqueness of each individual; as each person’s experience and point of view is unique to them and as each act, like each word, is unique and unrepeatable, these cannot be governed or justified by appealing to norms, rules or theories. Formal knowledge is merely one aspect of our relationship with the world as embodied subjects, which has become elevated above other forms of knowing and experiencing the world in modern technocratic societies (Eagleton, 2009). However, as the second generation cognitive scientists Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have so vividly demonstrated, we cannot escape the inevitability of metaphors derived from bodily experiences in representing even the most abstract of ideas or spiritual concepts. Human thought cannot escape the fact of our humanity and find an external position unconstrained by the reality of being a body in the world. Handley (1993) reminds us that all social relationships are negotiated between subjects whose speech and consciousness is embodied and positioned and that positioning in the world is a somatic phenomenon as well as being a psycho-linguistic phenomenon.

Bakhtin’s thinking in this respect is very likely¹⁰ to have been profoundly influenced by his Russian Orthodox faith. In Orthodox thinking there are no divisions between the earthly and the sacred or between body and spirit. Everything is material and all matter is sacred. As Timothy Ware describes it

The Orthodox view of God is characterised by apophatic or negative theology. God is beyond human conception and therefore unknowable; as human beings are made in the image of God, it follows that there is something irreducible about the person that is not amenable to systemisation or theory (Coates, 1998). Moreover, in a very concrete sense, each person is distinct and separated from every other person by the unique position he or she occupies according to the dimensions of space and time. The narrative structure of every human life is different: only I can stand in this particular place at this particular intersection of space and time; this position is also defined by my location in relation to other people in their own particular space and time locations, as well as to other moveable and immoveable objects in the world. Hence, Bakhtin (1990, 1993) is concerned with the particular rather than the general. It is an ethics in which our individual perceptions, judgements, and responses take priority over abstract or impersonal ideals, such as justice and truth, according to the particularities of our own situation and each encounter with another. Bakhtin termed this “participatory thinking” (as opposed to abstract thinking). It is an ethics in which the transcendental, be it God, law, or theory, is subordinated to each subject’s personal responsibility for her own desires, perceptions, words and deeds (Handley, 1997). For Bakhtin, passivity is not an option. To be conscious is to be active. Every living moment involves a choice of response, and we are continually responsible for our choices. To act according to external authority without reference to the unique aspects of the situation we are in is, in Bakhtin’s terms, an “alibi for being,” an abdication of our unique responsibility¹¹ (Bakhtin, 1993).

“OUTSIDENESS” AND THE “SURPLUS OF SEEING”

An important aspect of the dialogical self is its many positions of “outsideness” in relation to other selves. Outsideness is the term Bakhtin used to denote the different perceptions that are allowed from the different vantage points in the world and which are guaranteed by embodiment and permit others to see or understand things we cannot see or understand for ourselves. The concept of outsideness has its origins in Bakhtin’s early philosophy, and it was a theme to which he returned towards the end of his life. Although Bakhtin’s concern was to understand the nature of creative activity in art, he did not hold with the division that is sometimes drawn between art and life. For Bakhtin, aesthetics and ethics interact and are interdependent and the key question is:

Outsideness is Bakhtin’s phenomenological account of how we perceive and relate to each other as people in a social world. It is an attempt to understand how we experience our own bodies as objects in the world and the asymmetry between our inner experience of our selves and other peoples’ experience of us and vice versa. This asymmetry is captured in these lines from R.D. Laing”s “The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise,”

Bakhtin both seems to anticipate and explain Laing’s observation by locating the experiencing subject in a body. What we can see and how we perceive, understand, and evaluate what we see is dependant on where we, as embodied subjects, are positioned in relation to other people and objects in the world. Bakhtin did not see the difference between your experience and my experience as an unbreachable gap, isolating us from each other, so much as offering us an opportunity for mutually enhancing creative activity. According to Bakhtin, each person has a “surplus” or excess of seeing in relation to an other, insofar as s/he can see what the other cannot see and vice versa. Whilst Bakhtin would have agreed with Laing that we can never see or know the experience of anyone else anymore than they can see or know our experience, Bakhtin did not believe that interiority or introspection, on its own, is a very useful way of getting to know our selves. Our subjectivity or experience is unique to us and simultaneously dependant on our relationships with other people. We need other people to endow our experience with meaning.

My “surplus of seeing” in relation to you is defined by my lack of seeing in relation to myself. My “surplus” is your lack and your “surplus” is my lack so that we need each other in order to overcome our mutual incompleteness (Holquist, 1993). We are all unique and unknowable to the other but we are also incomplete without the other. The isolated individual cannot be fully conscious to himself. We need other people to come to know ourselves. Outsideness, therefore, implies interdependency. In order to experience ourselves as a coherent individual self or psyche, we are dependant on the perceptions of others from outside ourselves (Brandist, 2002). Only other people can see our body as a whole object in the world; we can never see ourselves surrounded by the space in which we are situated (Bakhtin, 1993). Only others can hear our voice and see our facial expressions; we know ourselves from the inside but not in the way others know us from “outside.”

As discussed above, each person’s position in the world is unique; we all have one life that is distinct from and different from the lives of everybody else. We do not have to strive to be original because originality is granted to us by our unique “outside” position in relation to everyone else; this allows us to have a unique and unrepeatable perspective. However, as Holquist (2009) observes, the originality or uniqueness of our position also confers an “ontologically imposed” responsibility for the judgement or evaluation of what we perceive. For Bakhtin, perception is always accompanied by an evaluation or a judgement and each person’s evaluation or judgement will be different because of their unique situation in the dimensions of time and space.

For Bakhtin, we need to able to see things from outside both spatially and temporally so that we can evaluate them. He observes that the ancient Greeks did not know that they were the Ancient Greeks and this applies as much to the individual life as it does to historical events. Layers of meanings accumulate over time, meanings change and evolve; the same event may have a totally different meaning at different times in life. As therapists, part of our task is to invite our clients to find an outside perspective in relation to the events in their own lives, both past events and imagined, feared, or hoped for future events.

Ethics and “Outsideness”

One way of understanding outsideness is Bakhtin’s ethical description of responsible intersubjective relationships. As Hirschkop (1999) observes, it is interdependency, our need of the other, rather than intersubjectivity that implies a moral obligation towards others. Outsideness and the surplus of seeing that goes with it, is also a capacity to which we all have equal access. It is a horizontal rather than a vertical phenomenon. In Bakhtin’s taxonomy, there is no superior transcendental position that allows anyone to see or know more than anyone else. Bakhtin assumes that the outsideness of others will be employed in ways that are beneficial for us, if not always benevolent (Emerson, 1997), and that we will use our “surplus” with responsibility. Here is how Bakhtin describes it as used by Dostoevsky:

The surplus or excess of seeing should be used with love in a way that equates to

Here Bakhtin seems to be saying that any observations or perceptions we can offer to someone else from our outside perspective need to acknowledge what we do not and cannot know about him and that our outsideness or surplus of vision in relation to him is matched by his in relation to us; the only position from which we can help someone else is a horizontal one based on equality.

Some Reservations About the Therapeutic Usefulness of “Outsideness”

In some respects, Bakhtin appears to have a near absolute faith in the human potential for goodness through the healing power of dialogue (Pollard, 2008). He has been accused of failing to acknowledge the content of the feelings expressed in the dialogical freedom that he regards Dostoevsky as allowing the characters in his novels to express (Reed, 1999) and, therefore, as failing to acknowledge the human capacity for violence and cruelty as well the potentially destructive feelings that occur between people, such as jealousy, envy, resentment, contempt, fear and distrust. As psychotherapists we have to understand and confront these potentially destructive feelings in ourselves and in our patients on a daily basis. Bakhtin’s model for intersubjectivity is a mutually creative ideal relationship between equals, based on one between the loving author and his “hero,” which is rarely found in real life (Bernstein, 1989). If, as psychotherapists, our position of “outsideness” is to be an ethically useful concept in psychotherapy, it needs to be qualified.

Given that Bakhtin often thought in binary oppositions,¹² it is notable that he did not define outsideness in relation to or against anything else. This could be because, from an ethical perspective, Bakhtin disavowed the existence of any other position we could occupy if we are to be useful to another person. He apparently distrusted the idea of empathy or the idea of common humanity (Jacobs, 2001). Bakhtin (1990) argues against the renunciation of our own unique position and perspective in favour of solidarity with others or participation in a unitary consciousness. What we can know about someone else can only come from an outside perspective based on difference. Bakhtin did not allow for the possibility that we can know and understand things about another person because of our similarity to them. For example in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Bakhtin approves of Lise’s reproach of Alyosha for daring to predict how someone else might respond, but he doesn’t mention Alyosha’s reply to her

Bakhtin apparently never managed to resolve the contradiction between empathy¹³ or coinciding with another and maintaining one’s own unique position (Holquist, 1993). From a psychotherapeutic perspective, he does not account for the unconscious processes that operate in all inter-subjective relationships and that can subvert our conscious intentions towards and perceptions of the other.

According to Brandist (2002), we can fail to maintain a position of outsideness in two ways: he names the first way idiopathic, that is substituting our own experience for that of the other so that instead of doing therapy with the patient we do therapy with ourselves, which in Bakhtin’s terms would be equivalent to writing our own autobiography rather than a novel with an independent autonomous “hero.” The second is heteropathic, in that we over identify with the patient’s experience and lose sight of our own, risking a narcissistic merging in which we lose touch with our own outside evaluative perspective.

From a psychotherapy perspective, there is an even more significant qualification to the therapist’s position of outsideness. Despite Bakhtin’s distaste for the application of theory to human subjectivity, any knowledge or insight gained from theory, as well as any other form of knowledge and experience that differentiates us from our client, is a consequence of our outside position and part of our surplus of vision in relation to our patient. The key ethical question is whether we can use our theoretical understanding to formulate or give form to our patient’s experience, as well as to our own experience of them and their experience of us, whilst respecting the irreducibility of their own subjective experience.

The Tension Between Experience and Form in Psychotherapy Practice

During the 20th and 21st centuries, it can seem as though subjective experience has become more complex, dynamic, confusing, uncertain, and ambivalent about form; we can both crave the structure and containment of a totalising discourse, belief, or system that gives meaning to our life, whilst simultaneously strenuously trying to resist it. We want to be told who or what we are, whilst insisting on our right to autonomy and self-definition. In psychoanalytic terms, this equates with the conflicts between security and freedom or between attachment and independence. A related phenomenon is the increasing gulf between culture, in its widest sense, and individual subjective experience. In contemporary industrial societies, the culture that gives form to most individual experience is not a local phenomenon emanating from individual and community activity and creativity, but an impersonal conglomeration of systems relating to language, law, economics and production, education, science, the arts, mass media and so forth, which is both the condition of contemporary life as well as the source of our alienation from it. Bakhtin was addressing a historically specific crisis of subjectivity and, in doing so he anticipated the predominant understanding of the subject in the 20th century as being fundamentally divided.

Bakhtin (1993) conceptualised the tension between form and experience as an opposition between culture and life and between the “given” and the “posited.” The “given” refers to anything that is complete and unchanging whereas the “posited” refers to anything that is in process, open ended and incomplete. He noted that we tend to see other people as “given” or unchanging, hence the ease with which we stereotype other people and give labels to them, whilst experiencing ourselves as incomplete and in process.¹⁴ Culture systematises and objectifies experience, whether through a psychiatric assessment, artistic representation, or a high school exam, whilst experience or life is heterogeneous and dynamic.¹⁵

Tim Beasley-Murray (2007) explores the tension between experience and form in Bakhtin from a philosophical and political perspective that is equally relevant to a consideration of ethics in therapeutic practice. The starting point of Bakhtin’s earliest work, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, is a situation in which there is a rupture between individual subjective experience and the culture that gives form to that experience:

However, despite his apparent wariness of culture, Bakhtin believed it was essential as it is only through culture that experience becomes meaningful; the problem, as Bakhtin saw it, was that there is always a dislocation between experience and the culturally imposed meaning or form that is mapped onto it, which can lead to alienation. Whilst Bakhtin prized the particular, heterogeneous, and open ended over anything that was universal static, and homogenous, he also thought that a synthesis of both was needed for responsible human activity. However, as Beasley-Murray (2007) points out, Bakhtin’s own attitude towards form, i.e. anything that structures experience such as routine, repetition, habit, tradition, theories and beliefs, changed. In his earlier work, Bakhtin16 (1990) reflects approvingly on how the form-giving author finalises or consummates his “hero,” moving to a position in his later work where the author merely orchestrates the dialogic freedom and dynamism of his characters without attempting to halt or define the process of their subjective and intersubjective experience. Consummation is replaced by unfinalizability. Hirschkop (1986) attributes this apparent shift in Bakhtin’s thinking to the political significance of opposing a plurality of relativising discourses against discourses that present themselves as timeless and self-evident. In the 1960s, Bakhtin was writing in the context of Soviet communism, an obvious example of a totalizing discourse, intolerant of dissent.¹⁷ According to Coates (1998), whose research focused on Christian motifs in Bakhtin’s works, even Bakhtin’s faith in language as the highest medium of artistic expression was by now considerably shaken; Bakhtin (1981) writes that the prose writer can only describe and measure his own experience in an alien language. In some respects, in a “post modern” era of multiple, sometimes contradictory and often ephemeral and fragmentary social worlds, the forms given to us by culture are optional and more easily contested. However, as Beasley-Murray (2007) points out, the contemporary discourses most prevalent in the West, such as the universal desirability of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, are no less hegemonic or resistant to critique despite, perhaps because of, their apparent accommodation of difference and cultural diversity. The relative ease with which we can contest the forms given to us or imposed upon us varies according to the societies and communities in which we live. Many dialogical interactions are asymmetrical because people do not always have equal access to language; linguistic capital, the ability to influence others and control the self by the use of words, is unequally distributed (Pollard, 2006).

Bakhtin’s shift towards the dialogic, or what Hirschkop (2001) has referred to as his “linguistic turn,” represents a more nuanced and discriminating attitude towards form. Our being in the world as actively perceiving subjects means that we cannot avoid taking up an evaluative, i.e. form-giving, attitude towards our own subjective experience, including our experience of other people. As stated previously, Bakhtin emphasised that passivity is not an option. Any claims we might make that are justified either by our own passivity or by reference to transcendental, universal imperatives are abdications of personal responsibility or, in Bakhtin’s terms, “alibis for being.” Ethics in practice involves an acceptance of responsibility for our evaluations or judgements, alongside a full recognition of the other’s irreducibility and an active participation in life as thinking, speaking and corporeal subjects.

Theory, Form and Experience in the Therapeutic Relationship

One way of thinking about the therapeutic relationship is as a complex interweaving of experience and form. Whether as “scientist practitioners” or “relationship practitioners giving form to our patient’s experience is unavoidable, the difference being that the formulation of the “scientist practitioner” is more overt and therefore, more available to scrutiny. However, for all therapists and their patients, there is a tension, or even struggle, between raw, unfiltered experience and the demand (and/or the need) of both parties for this to be formulated, theorised, and shaped into something that is meaningful. One of the difficulties of formulating the experience of someone else is that her or his experience is invisible to us. We can only infer her or his experience indirectly. This maybe why some traditions in psychotherapy emphasise the importance of not knowing, or what the poet John Keats (1817) called “negative capability,” referring to the ability to tolerate a state of uncertainty, mystery and doubt¹⁸ without searching for facts and reason to allay our own insecurities. Too comprehensive and too early formulation risks leaving the patient feeling disrespected, unheard, misunderstood, oppressed or even manipulated: Regardless of the therapist’s intentions, this is a misuse of the surplus of vision granted by the therapist’s outside position in relation to their patient: Too little formulation too late also risks the patient feeling unheard and could be construed as a failure of the therapist’s attention. How and when to formulate depends on the individual and the unique aspects of each patient and their experience but also, from a theoretical perspective, varies across different schools of therapy and with each individual therapist, according to their own subjective experience, training, values and theoretical orientation.

How the therapist uses theory in practice is an important ethical consideration, particularly because, as therapists, our relationship to theory is often far from detached and objective. Psychotherapy theories do not deal in observable phenomena but are, in general, inferences that become articles of faith or belief. The effort, emotional stress, and sacrifice that training to be a psychotherapist can entail may mean that we cannot afford to doubt the value or even superiority of our own training and theoretical orientation when compared with others; it becomes central to our professional and sometimes personal identity, and to have it challenged can be deeply unsettling (Pollard, 2009). We could also ask whether any of the ever-expanding number of theories and models that abound in psychotherapy are uncontaminated by the particular experiences and personal ambitions of their founders; any such contamination could obscure rather than illuminate the experience of others. Deciding how and when to formulate is therefore a complex ethical issue, subject to a number of variable influences.

Insideness and Outsideness

The discussion so far has focused on the apparent paradox of human interdependency; the divided nature of subjectivity or the subject’s selfalienation and the distinctiveness that each person possesses in relation every other person, make us both unknowable to but also dependent on other people. As a consequence, despite his ambivalence about form, Bakhtin believed that the only position from which we could offer anything of ethical value to the other was from a position of outsideness: That is, utilising the knowledge and perceptions that are based on our differences from the other person in terms of our bodies and where we are situated, our spatial and temporal situation in the world, our different life histories and experiences, differences in age, gender, ethnic background, culture and religion, differences in class, culture, education, sexuality, family relations, tastes, attitudes, values and beliefs. All the varying aspects of each individual makes him different from every other individual and also give us a surplus of vision in relation to anyone else and, of course, everyone else in relation to us.

Bakhtin thought that a position of outsideness based on difference was ethically paramount in intersubjective relationships because he was deeply suspicious of blanket generalisations or transcendental systems. For Bakhtin, it was ethically presumptuous to claim to know or understand anything about anyone else because of our claims to hierarchical authority over them or because of our similarity to them. He considered that dialogue between equals who are different from each other is the only basis for intersubjectivity and the creation of meaning. Not everyone would agree, however, that dialogue necessarily leads to better relationships between people or groups of people or that it enhances the life of the individual.¹⁹ A Bakhtinian dialogue presupposes a willingness to listen as well as speak, an openness to different, opposing and contradictory points of view, a willingness to be persuaded as well as to persuade and an attitude of humility alongside an acceptance of personal responsibility; these qualities might be considered exceptional rather than routine.

In his insistence on difference, Bakhtin obviates the more banal ethical significance of human similarity and the potential knowledge, understanding and compassion that comes from the ways in which we are the same as other people. Although in his early work Bakhtin stresses the way the body serves to individualise and differentiate us as individuals from every other individual, in his later work on “Carnival” (1984b) he talks about the universal, “grotesque” body that is amenable to caricature and humour, which we understand and laugh at because it refers to aspects of common experience. He (1984b) also draws attention to the permeability of the body and therefore, how it is in a constant process of interaction and exchange with the environment and other bodies. But Bakhtin does not seem to use his insights into the universal aspects of bodily experience to modify his concept of outsideness. Not only do we have bodies that function in ways that are similar to other peoples and give rise to a similar range of sensations, we also have similar minds that think in similar ways and are capable of experiencing a similar range of feelings and emotions. Our differences from other people are not absolute but arise out of a field of sameness. If difference were absolute, there would be no such thing as medicine or psychology, there could be no human sciences, no languages nor human culture; there would be no such category of human beings and no human social life or collective and/or communal experiences. This form of knowledge, which is based on our similarity to others, could be referred to as “insideness” (Pollard, 2008).

It is our commonality of experience with other people that enables us to empathize with another person’s experience, to feel with them as well as offer a different perspective. This is not to deny the importance of differences, as over identification can be as dangerous as lack of empathy, but rather to say that both are important. One way of thinking about the relationship between similarity and difference is to liken it to the relationship between the hub and spokes of a bicycle wheel. We all have a basic common humanity, which is the hub, and the numerous ways in which people are different from each other are the spokes. It is the hub that holds the spokes together and both are essential for the wheel to function as a whole (Pollard 2006). If we forget what we have in common with other people, by hiding behind official roles or retreating into behaviour governed by rules or ideology, then we abandon our ordinary humanity and we could also be found guilty, in Bakhtin’s terms, of an abdication of our personal responsibility.

The Significance of Metaphor in Creating Meanings

Supporting evidence for a base level of commonality of experience between human beings seems to be found in how we use language to share ideas and feelings. I use the word “share” deliberately because ideas are not conveyed from one consciousness to another but continue to stay in the consciousness of the person speaking (Harris, 2002). As Lakoff and Johnson show (1980; 1999) metaphors, metaphorical concepts, and metonymies are pervasive in language, writing, and everyday speech. Many commonly used metaphors are based on embodied conceptual systems, a conflation of early sensory motor experience with subjective judgments²⁰ that usually operates outside of consciousness. Common examples of metaphorical concepts are related to having bodies that are upright in relation to a gravitational field and as having an “inside” and an “outside.” Hence we talk of inflation or mood states going up or down and of an abstract concept such as love as being a container that we can fall into or out of. Without such shared bodily experiences, we would not be able to use these metaphors ourselves and understand them when used by other people. Metaphors can be understood as ways of describing abstract concepts in terms of more concrete embodied experience and our interactions with the physical environment. Some common metaphorical concepts are culturally specific and profoundly influence how we experience certain situations or aspects of our lives. For example, when we talk of argument as war, we evoke militaristic images of winning or loosing arguments, attacking our opponent’s position, defending our own position, conceding a point, and marshaling our facts. Another example is time as money; we talk about spending time or losing it, of having our time wasted, or of making time. Arguments and time have different meanings in cultures that do not use these metaphorical concepts (Lakoff and Johnson, 1988).

Thinking about how we use metaphors and metaphorical concepts²¹ can help to illuminate how we unconsciously structure or give form to our experience and that of others. For example, we talk about falling in love or sinking into depression, being a burden on other people or other people walking all over us, hitting rock bottom, getting our life back, living on borrowed time, being out of control or all over the place, feeling stuck or trapped and moving on. All such metaphors and many others like them are commonly used and understood, but also carry values that affect the meanings we ascribe to them. Increasing self-understanding often involves recognizing metaphors that were previously unconscious in order to understand how they structure how we live our lives. This is particularly important in psychotherapy, as metaphors can be created to give new meaning to subjective experience and to ascribe values to that experience. A metaphorical concept of particular relevance to psychotherapy, which Lakoff and Johnson (1988) highlight, is that of problems as puzzles to be solved. Failing to solve the problem or its reoccurrence is more likely to lead to demoralization than if problems were understood metaphorically as “things” that, even if they can temporarily ousted, are likely to return. Such metaphors highlight some aspects of reality whilst hiding others, so the metaphor of problems as puzzles to be solved hides the reality that some problems are recurrent and intractable, beyond the scope of individual human agency.

New metaphors have the power to define reality.²² The dialogical self is a complex metaphor that, like other metaphors of subjectivity, does more than merely describe an abstract phenomenon in terms of something more concrete; it also creates the reality that it describes. Psychotherapy theories are metaphorical descriptions of subjectivity that not only selectively highlight and conceal aspects of subjective experience but also shape subjectivity by influencing how we conceptualize ourselves.²³ It follows, therefore, that how we use everyday metaphors in psychotherapy is an important consideration for ethics in practice.

In psychotherapy, a certain level of shared experiences as human beings is a prerequisite for exploring different possible meanings. Participants in any intersubjective encounter will have varying degrees of difference and commonality according to their cultural background and life experiences. Different cultures and languages may share some metaphors and not others. Nevertheless, the value of the therapist’s perceptions lie in the experiences s/he has in common with the patient as another human being as well as his or her position of “outsideness.” When dialogism is seen in the context of Bakhtin’s thought as a whole, the apparent limitless possible meanings and differences are constrained by the shared experience of embodiment.

The above discussion suggests that it is the social bond engendered by embodiment that supplies continuity and contiguity of meaning. Without this, I do not think that the practice of psychotherapy and related human practices could exist. Our basic common humanity enables us to understand or imagine some of the experiences of others who are different; these differences also constrain the extent to which knowing or understanding another person is possible.

Conclusion: The Position and Positioning of the Psychotherapist

In this paper, I have discussed how Bakhtin rejected transcendental ethics in favour of a horizontal ethic of what Beasley-Murray (2007) terms “a non-categorical imperative.” In Bakhtin’s scheme of things, we are uniquely responsible for deciding what constitutes an ethical response to a specific situation. As every situation will be different, we cannot appeal to or attribute responsibility to any authority higher than ourselves. A horizontal ethic that embraces the differences between people, with all the complexity that this entails, is integral to a dialogical conception of language and subjectivity in which the possible meanings created in any inter-subjective encounter are potentially limitless. This requires what Bakhtin referred to as participatory thinking, an active engagement in evaluating our perceptions and responses. This is not a recipe for moral anarchy, as Bakhtin did not in anyway discount the importance of ethical codes, laws and moral values, whether religious or secular. Instead he insisted on our responsibility to actively engage with these, rather than to passively submit to them.

Despite the linguistic emphasis in the dialogical conception of subjectivity, the human body was, for Bakhtin, central to his understanding of the self. As well as being universal and permeable, inter-connected to other human beings, the environment and the cosmos, the body is also the site of the unique and unrepeatable aspects of each human life. It is our particular situation in time and space that allows us a unique and unrepeatable subjective experience, outside that of everyone else, but it also excludes us from knowing completely how anyone else experiences the world. Our shared experience of embodiment is what brings us together in terms of a basic commonality of experience but it also separates us from each other, rendering each human life and experience different from that of everyone else. Language also occupies an ambiguous position, as it both assumes a shared basis of embodied experience whilst reflecting value systems that are often outside the conscious awareness of the speaker or writer and that are different and sometimes alienating and opposing. That these aspects of language can be intertwined in complex metaphors and metaphorical concepts adds to the complexity of the decisions we make when we choose our words. As the socio-linguist Edda Weigand has noted, (1999) misunderstanding in dialogical discourse is a frequent occurrence, not only because of the words we use, but also because the contexts in which we express them are as variable as the words themselves. How then does the psychotherapist choose or find a position that both acknowledges the common humanity they share with their patients whilst also offering an outside perspective that enables the patient to give form to their own experience in a way that extends their self-understanding and is not experienced as oppressive or pathologising? To be able to find the appropriate balance between relating to someone from a position of sameness or of difference, that is from a position of insideness or of outsideness and to know the difference between them, is perhaps the beginning of wisdom in psychotherapy.

However complex the positioning and responsiveness of the psychotherapist is from an ethical perspective, this is still ethics at the micro level. The question we might be asking ourselves is “Who am I in relationship to the other facing me, and what is my obligation towards her/him?” Bakhtin’s template for intersubjectivity is the author’s creative and loving relationship with his fictional “hero,” a relationship he conceived of as being equal and, if it were not for the fictional element, mutual. The disproportionate distribution of power that applies in all therapy relationships, which varies according to the institutional and socio-political context, is not directly accounted for in this ethic. Psychotherapists position themselves and will find themselves positioned by the expectations of the organizations that employ them, the institutes that trained them, the therapists who work with and supervise them, as well as the expectations of the society and cultural groups in which they live and work. There are further ethical choices to be made about how to respond to these varied, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, and often conflicting, expectations. Again, Bakhtin would remind us that there is no such thing as passivity. We cannot take the expectations others have of us as psychotherapists for granted, but we are responsible for our compliance with these expectations as well as our decisions to challenge or reject them. Hirschkop’s (2001) analysis implies that if we take on board Bakhtin’s ethics, we cannot avoid taking up a political position beyond the immediate concerns of the clinical encounter. If we extrapolate outwards from the micro ethic of the consulting room, we are obliged to engage with the social and political issues as well as the intrapsychic factors that can profoundly affect and influence subjective experience.