Dialogue and Transformative Liminality
摘要
This chapter is about the positive, life-sustaining aspects of transformative liminality. This form requires brief immersion into deep dialogical moments to facilitate one’s personal responses to life’s ultimate questions that the individual is struggling with during the transition. Traditional rites fulfilled this function through connecting the person to the community’s shared interpretations of transcendent dimensions, while in individualized societies, this may occur in the intersubjective domain, and, occasionally, in the institutionalized liminality of psychotherapy and counselling. Dialogue is a discursive framework for identity reconstruction processes. It is a basic human condition that we are born into, and occasionally must return to. Classical theories on dialogue by Bakhtin, Buber, and Rogers are complemented by more recent ideas on mirroring, mentalization, and the concept of second stories to propose a transdisciplinary approach for studying dialogue as our fundamental relational pattern.