ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a theme that is widely seen as being common to all Mikhail Bakhtin's writing, which is an ethics of interpersonal relatedness that is grounded in the principle of incarnation that is the Word made flesh. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson argue that in divorcing ethics from rules, Bakhtin makes a principled refusal to make ethics a part of religion. Bakhtin's ethics are a materialist ethics characterised by a refusal of systematisation and a unity of experience alongside an overriding insistence on individual difference and the ultimate unknowability or mystery of each human being. From a psychotherapy perspective, the significance of Bakhtin's thinking about embodiment is that it potentially extends and modifies the dialogical and social model of consciousness by its insistence on the inseparability of corporeal and chronotopic aspects of experience from its cognitive and emotional aspects.
