Paper short abstract:

For Bakhtin, the power of dialogue lies in its capacity for love as a gesture of response. A community of clinicians has built an alternative therapy grounded in this formulation, and their practice reveals listening to be both a means of discerning love and a complex labor of love in and of itself.

Paper long abstract:

In the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the power of dialogue lies in its capacity for love: to be heard and to be responded to, to attend to and respond to others. The labor of listening is nothing short of the labor of love. A community of clinicians has built an alternative psychotherapeutic practice grounded in this essential formulation, employing a radical intervention for psychiatric crisis grounded in the principles of Bakhtinian dialogism called Open Dialogue. The root cause of psychiatric distress, they argue, is the existential trauma of not being heard. Through the slow work of careful listening, the construction of a shared language, and the engagement of social networks in the provision of care, these practitioners foreground an understanding of psychic life that turns on the capacity to listen and be listened to; to love and to be loved. Many of these practitioners find themselves deeply changed by their engagement with this model. Situated on the margins of psychiatric treatment-as-usual, and facing relentless institutional, temporal, and financial pressures, their acts of listening to and for love exceed the boundaries of the therapeutic encounter and shape a radical political subjectivity that imagines an alternative psychiatric future grounded in mutual recognition. This paper draws on ten years of fieldwork with the international Open Dialogue community to posit listening as both a means of discerning love and as a complex labor of love in and of itself.