ABSTRACT

This chapter provides some of the limitations of dialogism from the perspective of some of Mikhail Bakhtin's critics, with particular attention to Natalia Reed's critique that comes from a Girardian perspective. The internal dialogism of authentic prose discourse, which grows organically out of a stratified and heteroglot language, cannot fundamentally be dramatised or dramatically resolved. Although polyphony and heteroglossia are closely related and dialogism in the novel requires both, the distinction between them is important. Karine Zbinden argues that missing heteroglossia is to read Bakhtin from a logocentric perspective thereby reducing dialogism to "intertextuality" and, by reducing dialogism to intertextuality, misrepresenting Bakhtin as a semiotician whose only concerns were related to language. Psychotherapy, in its allegiance to professionalisation, is following a path already well trodden by psychiatry, which, as Peter Good observes has, by attaching itself to scientific medicine, solidified its commitment to conservative social goals.