Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World: A Practitioner's Reading

Abstract

While Bakhtin's contribution to dialogical practice includes his conceptualisation of dialogue and polyphony, the literature on dialogical therapies including Open Dialogue makes little if any mention of another of his major contributions, Rabelais and his world. This theoretical paper makes available to interested practitioners the author's distillation of key ideas in Rabelais and his world following a careful reading of the text. Reflective prompts are offered that invite the reader to consider the relevance of these ideas to practice. The six key concepts presented include laughter, the language of the marketplace/billingsgate, the body and the bodily lower stratum, ambivalence, the grotesque and carnival and the carnivalesque.