ABSTRACT
So far, in the chapters in this part of the book, I have been developing a theory of mind and social relations as complex responsive processes of relating between human bodies. In this theory, mind and social relations form and are formed by each other at the same time in the iterative, nonlinear processes of interaction between human bodies. It is the actions of bodies that are iterated from one moment to the next, where that iteration is understood as the perpetual repetition of patterns of interaction, always with the simultaneous potential for transformation because of the possible ampli®cation of small differences from one repetition to the next. This is a bodily action theory of mind and social relating and it makes no sense to talk about an action being inside or outside of anything. So, unlike cognitivist, constructivist and psychoanalytic psychological theories, there is no notion of mind being inside an individual or of society being outside of an individual. Since mind is not thought of as being inside a person, it is not thought of as consisting of internal representations of external stimuli or objects. In the theory of complex responsive processes, then, the notion of representations does not feature at all. It follows that memory is not thought of as the retrieval of representations of past experience that have been stored somewhere. Instead of containing representations, in the theory of complex responsive processes mind is thought of as the pattering of bodily actions in the form of narrativelike themes of silent conversation and private role-play. Instead of thinking of memory as retrieval from a store, the complex responsive processes perspective regards memory as the associative repetition of habitual thematic patterns of bodily action, always with the potential for transformation. This is a view in which memories are perpetually reconstructed in the living present and they are potentially transformed in this reconstruction simply because
reconstruction is always affected by current context, including expectations of the future. From this perspective, memories of the past are changed in their reconstruction in the living present. These are major features distinguishing the theory of complex responsive processes from cognitivism, constructivism and psychoanalysis, all of which think of mind as consisting of representations and memory as retrieval from a store.
