Mikhail Bakhtin's contribution to psychotherapy research

Vygotsky clarified the methodological foundation that, in his view, characterizes every scientific discipline by elucidating the concepts of subject matter, explanatory principle, and unit of analysis. In this article, these concepts are used to explore and organize Michael Bakhtin's relevance for psychotherapy research. Client and therapist utterances can be regarded as the object of research. Bakhtin's theory of utterance provides the basic abstractions that define the facts, or the subject matter, of the research area. Semiotic mediation will be considered the explanatory principle that accounts for the utterance as a tool of interaction as well as an expression of intra-psychic processes. Neither Vygotsky's instrumental nor Bakhtin's dialogic conception of the sign are adequate for explaining the great variety of semiotic mediation in communication, object-oriented actions, and intra-psychic processes. A revised conception that articulates the dual reference of sign meanings will be introduced. Finally, Bakhtin's contribution to the unit of analysis in psychotherapy research will be illustrated by elaborating his concept of semantic position.