Plenary paper to be given at 19th World Family Therapy Congress, Family Therapy: Peace, Justice, and

Healing, in Amsterdam, March 30th-April 2nd, 2011

Therapeutic Realities and the Dialogical:

Body, Feeling, Language and World
John Shotter
Emeritus Professor of Communication
University of New Hampshire, U.S.A.
Martin Luther King said: Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of
justice. I will remind myself of those words when I try to take part in the work of peace
that therapy is (Andersen, 2006).
The phenomenon is not detached from the observer, but intertwined and involved with
him (Goethe, 1998, p.155, Maxim 1224).
Because I worked with Tom Andersen, and because I was so closely in agreement with him... especially in
relation to the overall themes of this conference: Peace, Justice, and Healing... I want to begin with one of
Toms sayings, for it will set the scene for all the other themes that I want to introduce in a moment.
About how we come to an understanding of what is going on e around us, he said:
What we come to form, and thereafter understand (both the formed and the forming),
emerge from us being in language in conversations in movements in relationships in
culture in nature (we do not have language etc in us). The Being in these various ins
can best be understood by letting the feeling that comes (by being in these various ins)
create its own metaphors, and let those metaphors be part of the language one searches
through in order to find a meaning. (Tom Andersen, no date).
In this, Toms thinking was, we might say, comprehensively ecological rather than having life and
language in us, as he saw it, we have our lives and language within our living relations to our
surroundings, with a languaged flow of activity being an aspect of our surroundings. And this is one
feature of the major theme that, in a moment, I want to explore further in some detail: our embedding in a
ceaseless flow of spontaneously occurring bodily responses and reactions continually occurring between
us all in the background to all that we do a set of stranded, self-intertwining flows of activity each with
their own distinctive characteristics many of which we have been trained to participate while young by
those around us.
Another scene setting remark is one we can take from Bakhtin (1986) one of the originators of
the whole dialogical approach to human relations: An utterance, he says,
is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it
that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something
absolutely new and unrepeatable... But something created is always created out of
something given... What is given is completely transformed in what is created (pp.119120).
In other words, what is so special about all our dialogically-structured exchanges with the others and
othernesses in our surroundings is their intrinsic creativity: within them all, sooner or later, something
uniquely new will be created that is intricately related to the situation within which it is created. In other
words, therapeutic moments just happen. They cannot be caused to occur or deliberately made to happen
by people following intellectually devised plans, procedures, or protocols this is because the
coordinated execution of all planned activities depends upon all concerned already sharing the already
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existing concepts relevant to the formulation of the plan, thus all new plans depend on old concepts.
Consequently, all planned activities result in the continual rediscovery of sameness.
Further, genuine therapeutic changes are deep changes in that they are not just changes in what
we think about, they are not to do with learning some new and previously unknown facts or bits of
information, but changes in what we think with, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward
our surroundings, and as a result as Tom might put it to find ourselves immersed in a situation quite
different from what we felt ourselves to be in previously.
Putting the issue in this way has, I think, a surprising consequence: It means that there are two
kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one: There are those kind of difficulties that we might,
following Wittgenstein (1980), call difficulties of the intellect (p.17). These are difficulties that we can
formulate (or form) as problems and solve by constructing an appropriate theoretical system within
which to think them through. But overcoming orientational or relational difficulties requires a quite
different approach... and that, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of our difficulty: What actually
is involved in our approaching a situation or circumstance that we at first find quite bewildering or
confusing or dis-orienting? Wittgenstein (1980) calls these kind of difficulties, difficulties of the will
(p.17) making use of a word, I venture to surmise, with a very bad press among us here in this
conference. But by it, he means, he says, to draw attention to what people want to see (p.17), what it is
they look for or expect to see as they begin to try to get a sense of where they are, and how they might
go on within the situation within which they find themselves.
In other words, a change in what we think with changes the anticipations and expectations that
we have at the ready, so to speak, as we go out to meet each uniquely new situation, each uniquely new
client. Indeed, such anticipations are the glue holding all of our communicational activities together.
Thus, as I see it, the happening of a therapeutic moment occurs when a uniquely new something
created in the dialogically-structured exchanges occurring in the dynamics of the unfolding relations
between us enters us, and as a result, opens up previously unnoticed new ways forward into the future
by creating within us, new expectations as to what will happen next in our current situation.
But these changes, as Ive already indicated, are not simply to do with learning a new fact. As
Bateson (1979) notes in Mind and Nature, we must distinguish between feedback and calibration: in the
feedback process, a person does not need to change him- [or her-]self (p.218), while in the calibration
process this is precisely what must happen. He brings out the differences by comparing the marksmans
firing of a rifle at a static target with the huntsmans firing of a shotgun at a flying bird. What is significant
[for the marksman], says Bateson (1979), is that the act of self-correction can occur within the single act
of shooting (p.211). Whereas, what must happen [with the huntsman] is that an aggregate of
information is taken in through the sense organs... [Thus] the man who would acquire skill with a
shotgun... must practice his art again and again, shooting at skeet or some dummy target. By long practice,
he must adjust the setting of his nerves and muscles so that in the critical event, he will automatically
give an optimum performance (p.211).
In other words, the crucial changes the orientational changes of our concerns are not
cognitive, but bodily changes. And they are changes motivated by as Samuel Todes (2001) puts it in his
book, Body and World a basic bodily need for orientation that is continually at work within us; we need
to know where we are, what actually is the situation that we are in. Thus, the whole quest of
discovery is thus initially... directed not to get what we want but to discover what we want to
get(p.177).
**********
These, then, are the basic themes that I want to pursue further in this talk, and in a moment, I want to try
to bring out the radical nature of the changes to many of our current orientations towards our treatment
of the others and othernesses around us that they suggest. But before I do, I want to back-track a bit, to
say something about our current academic and intellectual orientations to psychological matters, and my
own feelings of disquiet in relation to them.
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In the cover blurb to a very early work of mine, called Images of Man in Psychological Research
(Shotter, 1975), I said: Modern psychology promised to discover the true nature of man [forgive the
sexist language] in its laboratories. But it hasnt. It has only discovered there what happens when men are
led to behave as if they are rats, machines, information channels, etc.... Constructing a true image of
ourselves demands a radically different approach, and what the nature of that true image of ourselves
is, both as human beings and as persons, has occupied me ever since.
Bill Nichols, in inviting me to give this talk mentioned my efforts alone these lines. He talked of
me as trying to humanize the way(s) in which we, as psychologists and therapists, treat those with whom
we work. As there are certain bits of influential history to the development of these efforts of mine, let me
very briefly mention some of it.
I trained as a Radar technician in my National Service, and then in 1959 while training as an
academic psychologist, doing a psychology with mathematics degree I worked as an electronics
technician in the Speech Laboratory in University College London, between 1959 and 1963. My first job
was not in a psychology department, but in electrical engineering with a very famous professor, R.L. Beule
(1956), who did the very first nerve-net computer simulation way back in 1956. The buzz-phrase at the
time, coined by the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was that the new way forward for Britain was
going to be forged in the white heat of the technological revolution. Great! I felt I was poised to be an
active participant in that revolution, and my first published paper (Shotter, 1966) was in the prestigious
journal Nature (London) in 1966 influenced by Chomskys (1957) then thought to be brilliant work on
syntax, it was to do with a computational process for extracting grammatical rules solely from examples
of their use.
But my enthusiasm for technology didnt last very long, and by 1967/68, I was beginning to have
disquiets, feelings that we must be more than just machines!... Surely?... I felt that theres something
wrong here, but I dont yet know quite what it is!
Others were having similar disquiets. Anthony Burgess had already written Clockwork Orange
in 1962 about what might happen, he said, when an organic entity full of juice and sweetness and
agreeable odour is turned into an automaton. Something crucial to being human although I didnt then
quite know what was somehow being lost. And when in 1968 I read the social anthropologist,
Macfarlane Burnet in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Newsletter No.2, saying that: "In the
eyes of the modern anthropologist the problem of today is how to use the intelligence of a relatively small
number of men and women to devise ways in which patterns of behaviour laid down in a million years
can be modified, kicked and twisted if necessary to allow a tolerable human existence in a crowded
world" I began to feel that the time to be seriously worried had come.
But then what? Just to protest at the wrongness of it all was, and still is, not enough; we need to
inquire into possible alternatives to our current ways of proceeding? But what is the character of our
current forms of inquiry? What is it that is not being recognized or acknowledged that alternatives need
to address? A bit of reflexive self-awareness would seem to be needed.
**********
But what we need to inquire into is something that cannot be explored by any of the methods of inquiry
well known to us methods in which we formulate and test theories. For it is the whole structure of the
ways of acting and ways of being in the world that we acquire in the course of our first language learning
in learning how to be a little Dutch person, English, German, French, or Polish person, able sooner or
later to make Dutch, English, German, French, or Polish sense of whatever we at first find bewildering
that is at issue. And what we do in our first language learning is quite different from what we do in
learning to make sense of things in theoretical terms... as I have already indicated, that kind of new
learning only elaborates what we already recognize as existing in our world.
In the course of learning our first language, we must first learn to relate ourselves to a something
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in our surroundings in a certain manner, to distinguish it and to act towards it as an X rather than, say, as
a Y. And to the extent that the somethings in question are new, never before encountered somethings
that needs to be uniquely responded to as themselves, we cannot be told about them in words
representative of things already well known to us. We need first to be introduced to them, to meet them
face-to-face, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole
range of our actions in our relations to them. In other words, in learning to respond to the unique whatness of previously unencountered things in the same way as those around us do, we must learn to make
judgments as to what a something is similar to their judgments.
This is, perhaps, a surprising conclusion. Wittgenstein (1953) acknowledges the unexpected
nature of this in remarking: If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not
only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments, and he goes on to note that it is one
thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state the results of measurement
(no.242). For even in the activity of measuring, to make sense of it in ways intelligible to others, we must
be able to structure our doings as a sequence of events similar in kind to those already known about
within a particular societys ways of making sense of things. If we cannot, then others simply will find fault
with our measurements. We learn these ways of judging in the course of our practical involvements with
others, prior to our gaining a self-conscious sense of their nature conceptually: they simply show up in
how something is done, in the course of their doing it.
Learning theory-talk, on the other hand, is like learning a second language. It is not concerned
with things and activities as they are in themselves; its function is not to help those confronted with raw
appearances make a first sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which things and events, which
already make one kind of sense to us, may be talked of as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be
for instance, a theorist might tell us that what we talk of as love is really object cathexis.
Further, unlike our everyday talk which, as first-persons, we address to the second-persons
involved with us in a particular practical situation face-to-face, a theory is of use to third-person outsiders,
standing over against and uninvolved in the personal situation of the first- and second-persons. Thus,
rather than being context-dependent and personal, theoretical talk, strictly, must be context-free and
impersonal. Consequently, these really rather strange and unusual forms of talk must always be
accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how they should be understood and put to use; in other
words, we must be especially taught, as specialists, to put our everyday ways of understanding and acting
on one side, and to function as our theories require. (What some might call, becoming a professional!)
In all of this, there is a remark of Vygotskys (1962) that impressed me right from the moment I
read it, and it has stayed with me to structure many of my subsequent inquiries: It is that one of the basic
laws of development is that,
consciousness and control appear only at a late stage in the development of a function,
after it has been used and practised unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to
subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it (p.90).
In other words, what later we might talk of as the child developing language and concepts, and the
capacity to act deliberately and to implement planned behaviour, and so on, depends on them earlier
performing similar activities, as they spontaneously respond to calls occurring around them in their
surroundings.
But what impressed me about it was, that this process need not stop with our maturing into
adults: even as adults, at this very moment, we are perhaps doing something spontaneously, out of our
own control, that we might with the help of another who notices an aspect of what we are doing, and
draws our attention to it come to gain a degree of deliberate control over, thus to do it again,
deliberately, when we felt it to be fitting.
So, how might we come to a reflexive self-awareness of how some of our usually taken-for-4-

granted forms of talk and acting while quite helpful and practical in many everyday practical situations
can in some others, work to seriously mislead us, by arousing in us a whole set of simply wrong
expectations as to how next things will develop? And how might we find starting points for the
development of alternative to them?
**********
This is where Wittgensteins (1953) later philosophical work became crucial for me. He takes our
everyday forms of talk entwined activities as basic, and by looking into their logical grammar that is,
at the expectations they arouse in us as to the next steps they could lead us into taking shows us how
easily we can (mis)recognize the unique what-ness of the things or events before us: how, for example, we
can treat something that is a living and still developing organism as if it was something dead and finished,
how we can treat something that arouses an anticipatory response in us (a tense feeling of expectation) as
simply presenting us with a picture (an image, shape, or form) that requires our interpretation, and so
on. He is thus concerned, as he says, ... to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an
order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order. To this end we shall
constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us
overlook (no.132).
What Wittgenstein is particularly concerned with, then, in his philosophical investigations, is to
make a comparison between (1) our everyday spontaneous uses of language in which we are
spontaneously responsive both to those with whom we are speaking and to the situation within which we
are speaking and (2) our more deliberate uses of language in which we, as experts, speak as our
professional theories, models, or frameworks seem to require us to speak, while cutting ourselves off from
the influences in our surroundings. Indeed, he tells the following little story about the crazy1 ways in
which philosophers sometimes talk: I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and
again I know that thats a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and
I tell him: This fellow isnt insane. We are only doing philosophy. (1969, no.467).
**********
But how do we think we must talk while making our deliberate inquiries into a bewildering circumstance?
We seem to begin our inquiries with a taken-for-granted picture or image of ourselves, of our actions, and
of our relations to, and nature of, our surroundings. To bring the features of this picture into sharp focus,
we can, I think, turn to Descartes, Discourse on Method, of 1637, in which what appeared to him to be
clear and distinct ideas in his reflections, formed the foundations for his further inquiries.
Of the many features structuring what he thought was the Method of Rightly Conducting the
Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Ill mention here two that bothered me greatly (Ive picked
these, as I think they are still at work in how in fact we conduct our inquiries): (1) One is to do with his
aim of seeking a practical philosophy which if we can get to know the power and the effects of fire,
water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us... would allow us to put
them... to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and
possessors of nature (p.78). It bothers me for one very obvious reason: It is aimed at the exploitation of
Nature, not in our own interests, but for our own desires. This might be excusable in our search for
energy resources, for instance, but when other people are studied for the uses fro which they are
appropriate, the unethical nature of this aim is clear. But there is another more implicit reason: because it
also entails sharp divisions between subjects, their doings, and the objects subjected to their doings a
sharp split reflected in the subject-verb-object structure of many of our sentences as SAE (Standard
Average European) speakers, as Whorf (1956) terms it.
The other theme that bothers me is Descartes (1968) determination, to speak only of what
1

It is only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems (Wittgenstein,
1980, p.75).

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would happen in a new world, if God were to create... enough matter to compose it, and if he were to
agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, and afterwards did no more than... to
let her [nature] act according to his established laws (p.62). For this again, as with his clear and distinct
ideas, is an injunction to think only in terms of partes extra partes, that is, in terms of separate, selfcontained parts, existing only in external relations to each other, that contain nothing in themselves
belonging, so to speak, any other parts. Such parts do not have an internal dynamic of their own
determining their behaviour. Instead, as inert objects, they need to be ruled by forces external to them
hence our search in many of our inquiries for rules, laws or principles, for the patterns they are
thought of as exhibiting in their behaviour.
But this is not how living entities come into being and develop: Rather than being constructed
piece by piece, they develop themselves from simple individuals into richly structured ones in such a way
that their parts at any one moment in time owe not just their character but their very existence both to
one another and to their relations with the parts of the system at some earlier point in time rather than
being externally related to each other their parts are related internally, with later more well articulated
structures emerging as descendent children from predecessor parents in a process that is always
unfinished and open to further developments.
**********
But there is more to it than this, much more: We need to take a living beings surroundings into account
too. And when we do, we will begin to find ourselves moving into a much more strange and unfamiliar
world than we are used to in our reflections even though, I will claim, we shall be moving more fully into
the everyday world of our practical lives together.
To begin this journey, consider first a tree growing from a seed, an oak tree from ana acorn: The
acorn, as such, makes a negligible contribution to the material substance of the oak tree or to the energy
needed to make it grow. The materials needed come from the air, water, and soil, while the energy comes
from the sun. In the acorns surroundings, these all move around, clearly, in a not very organized manner
as inanimate matter, they are simply re-configured. But as an open, living system, able to take in
selected aspects of this material, the living acorns DNA molecules work to intertwine the streams of
energized material flowing through it to produce the growing tree. While outside of the growing region of
the tree, they continue to flow in an unorganized fashion, within it, they come to flow in such an organized
intermingled manner that the oak tree grows, matures, produces acorns itself, dies, and eventually decays
to return its material substances back into the unorganized flow of inanimate matter from whence it and
they came.
Where, then, is the life of the oak tree? Is it in the tree itself ? No. It is in the relations of the tree to
its surroundings. In other words, trees and plants as such live within the land rather than simply on it.
But what about us? As the recent spate of storms and earthquakes can perhaps remind us, we too
live in the midst of a somewhat turbulent earth/water/air (wind) mix. My friend Tim Ingold (2008)
depicts the character of our lives thus:

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In line with our separatist, Cartesian forms of thought, it is only too easy for us to think of ourselves as
occupying the world, with the earth beneath us and the sky above (as depicted in (a) above). But a world
that is merely occupied, he argues, is furnished with already-existing things; whereas, one that is
inhabited, within which we and many others exist as living beings, is woven from the strands of their
continual coming-into-being (p.1797). He calls such a world, which, as such, is still coming into being (as
depicted in (b) above), a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity
intertwine, intermingle, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, the weather
world. I will just call it a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-inthe-making.
**********
If we cannot begin our inquiries by formulating theories or hypotheses to guide us in taking a few first
exploratory steps, how can we begin our inquiries? By noticing, like Freud, the occurrence of either our
own, or of other peoples, spontaneous responses to the happening of an event.
Thus, if I was allowed only one word in which to express what I think to be most important in our
lives together, it would be the word: responsiveness. But if I was allowed to add another word to it, I would
say spontaneous responsiveness, or to offer a whole phrase, I would say that it is the way that our living,
bodily responsiveness to the movements and activities the others and othernesses around us that is
expressive of the meaning of those movements and activities to us, and thus crucial to our being able to
communicate with each other. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it, I inevitable grasp my body as a
spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it (p.93).
In ending this all too short presentation, I would like to return to Toms work. First, just to offer a
couple of quotations which I think very important:
Language and words are like searching hands (1996, p.122)... words are like gestures,
they can touch people, they can also point beyond themselves to something in our
surroundings.
Words are not innocent. I used to think that the thought came first, then it was conveyed
through words to others. Now I think differently. We search through words in order to find
the thought. As the highly respected theoretician and clinician Harry Goolishian used to
say: "We don't know what we think before we have said it" (1996, p.122)... what just
happens to us over and above our wanting and doing is more important that want
results from our desires and interests
And then to refer to a case which I think exemplifies exactly the Vygotsky point I made a moment ago:
that we can gain control over some of spontaneously performed acts by, so to speak, giving words to
aspects of them at the appropriate moment.
In Andersen (2008), Tom describes working with a father who had been physically abusive to his
son in many awful ways. After beginning to explore with the man how he hit his son, he turned to the son
to have him describe in much more detail how the hitting took place a description that was clearly
aimed at taking the father into the lived experience of the hitting. Ill take up the episode at the point
when Tom asks the father:

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Tom: When you hit, is the hand closed or open?

[He did not know and I turned to the boy and asked]
Tom: When your father hits you, is the hand closed or open?
[ The boy, now sitting on his knees on the floor with his upper part of the body lying on the
chair, lifted his arm and by turns opened and closed his hand, and said]
Boy: He pushes with the open hand and hits with the closed
..... (and Tom continued to question the boy in a way that allowed to father to gain a sense of
the boys feelings)
Tom: And what hurts you the most?
[ The boy indicated the closed hand, and I turned to the father and asked as I supported the
question with bringing my closed hand (my fist) through the air towards the father]
Tom: If your hand, on its way to hit, stopped and talked, what might the words be?
[He had difficulties to comprehend the question, so it was repeated three times, and as that
happened I spoke to myself: it is not surprising that he can not find words for some in
some situations (may be most often men?) it might be more easy to beat than finding words..
Finally he said:
Father: Stop doing what you are doing. What you do is not right.
[Then he was asked how he would say those words, and that question also had to be repeated
several time before he said]
Father: I would say it calmly, slowly and firmly.
**********
What, then, are the conclusions that we might draw from all of this:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

That words are not innocent, and that one of our most misleading uses of words of nouns is
our giving names to things and then going on to treat them as if they have a distinctive existence
in complete separation from their surroundings;
That there are two kinds of difficulties in life, not just one, and that before we can turn to solving
problems, we need to gain orientation, to gain a sense of what in fact is the situation we are in;
That the search for repetitive patterns can be misleading, each new circumstance we confront is
uniquely itself and we need to meet it face-to-face, so to speak, to become acquainted with it;
That as result of the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, we can learn about events and
happenings in our surroundings that we can learn in no other way;
That, although bewildering at first, as we move around within each new circumstance we
encounter, the responsive movements occurring within us begin to take on their own distinctive
character;
That character has similarities to others already encountered, thus we can give it metaphorical
expression in many different ways but we must be careful, words are not innocent, and no
single metaphor can capture all its aspects (and metaphors conceal as well as reveal);
That the way we word our experiences influences what we will anticipate as following on from
them;
That, as a consequence of all of this, we must give up Descartes nice clear and distinct idea of a
world of matter in motion according to laws, and embrace the very strange, flowing, turbulent
world of our everyday lives in which we, like plants growing from a seeds, have our existence
within a special confluence of flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are
continually working to organize, to intertwine or to orchestrate into the unbelievably complex
forms of our human achievements and behaviours to come.

Tom (Andersen, 1992) expresses it thus:

I see life as the moving of myself and my surroundings and the surroundings of those
surroundings towards the future. The shifts of life around me come by themselves, not by
me. The only thing I can do is to take part in them. To take part is to learn to use the
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repertoire of understandings and actions that have come from the various experiences I
have had over the years. What seems to be most important is to learn what I shall not do
again (p.54).
All his life, Tom retained his disquiets with what seemed to be finished and finalized stabilities in our
treatment of others: What other ways might be open to us? What might we do instead? And those
disquiets have motivated me also and indeed, I venture to suggest, that same restlessness, that need to
know: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Gauguins questions) still sits
with us all here in this hall, now.
References:
Andersen, T. (1990) The Reflecting Team: Dialogues and Dialogues about Dialogues. Broadstairs, UK:
Borgman.
Andersen, T. (1991) The Reflecting Team. Dialogues and Dialogues about Dialogues. New York: W.W.
Norton.
Andersen, T. (1992) Reflections on reflecting with families. In S. McNamee and K.J. Gergen (Eds) Social
Constructionism as Therapy. London: Sage.
Andersen, T, (1995) Acts of forming and informing. In S. Freidman (Ed.), The Reflecting Team in Action:
Collaborative Family Therapy. New York; Guilford Press.
Andersen, T. (no date) Stones and Hands
Andersen, T. (2008) Chapter 29 - Reflecting Talks: My Version. In Karin Jordan (Ed.) The Quick Theory
Reference Guide: A Resource for Expert and Novice Mental Health Professionals. New York: Nova
Publishers, pp.427-443.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M.
Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx:
University of Texas Press.
Bateson, G. (1973) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin.
Bateson, G. (1979) Mind in Nature: a Necessary Unity. London: Fontana/Collins.
Beurle, R.L. (1956) Properties of a mass of cells capable of regenerating pulses. Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society London B, 240:5594.
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