ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how a more inclusive reading of Mikhail Bakhtin, together with a qualified reading of Girard, could contribute towards finding a direction for a practice of psychotherapy inspired by Bakhtinian ethics. Psychotherapy has also failed to be explicit about the role of imitation in either theory or practice, although concepts such as mirroring, empathy, reflection, and modelling all depend on it. Traditional psychotherapy tends to emphasise the historical or temporal aspects of the chronotope neglecting spatial aspects that are also relevant. Models and theories of psychotherapy compete with other models, exclude other possible meanings and have profound ethical implications in terms of how they construe mental distress and position the participants in a therapeutic encounter. Psychotherapy and its institutions are engaged in sacrificial politics, where the weapons of exclusion are research and regulation, from which many of its critics inside the professions benefit.
