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Although Vygotsky and Bakhtin were contemporaries and worked in overlapping fields they did not collaborate and their perspectives were different in important ways. Leiman (1992, 1997, 2002) introduced the ideas of both into CAT thinking and has drawn on the latter to propose a “dialogic” model of the self (Leiman, 1997) that bears some similarities to those proposed by, for example, Hermans (see Hermans & Di Maggio, 2004) or from a clinical perspective by Seikkula (see Seikkula et al., 2006). Further contributions to the dialogic dimension of CAT have been made since then by a number of writers as noted above. A further, illuminating discussion of the implications of the differences between Vygotsky and Bakhtin is offered by Cheyne and Tarulli (1999) which, although at first reading is apparently rather esoteric, in our view merits consideration. They note that Vygotsky was primarily concerned with the ways in which the skills and knowledge of the culture were acquired by the child. A narrow interpretation of his theory of the social formation of mind would define the parent or teacher as an agent or interpreter of the wider culture, aiming to transmit what the culture values and knows to the receptive child. For Bakhtin, on the other hand, the emphasis is different; for him, open‐ended dialog is seen as the essential and most valued basis of human consciousness: “To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293). Dialog is a fundamental human activity; every utterance will be directed to an addressee who may be “an immediate participant‐interlocuter in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists … a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, likeminded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, someone who is lower, higher” (Bakhtin, 1986 p. 95).

To this model of dialog, Bakhtin adds a highly significant idea, that of the third voice or “super‐addressee.” In the address of the first (e.g., parent, teacher, therapist) voice to the second (child, pupil, patient) voice there is this implicit third voice, representing the wider culture or some part of it. The third voice (super‐addressee) legitimizes the first one who is in effect its conduit to the second voice. What is transmitted might be the current paradigm of a branch of science, the membership rules of a club, the articles of faith in a religion, the definition of gender roles, and so on. The social formation of mind, in this view, can be seen as a distillation of the whole range of human history and culture, while being inevitably focused and filtered by the particular time, place, and family into which the child is born.

The discussion by Cheyne and Tarulli on the forms of dialog employed as scaffolding sets the comments made above on the effect of different styles of parenting in a wider context. Drawing on Bakhtin's ideas, they propose a spectrum of scaffolding styles from the authoritative “Magistral” dialog typical of religious training in the Middle Ages through the “Socratic” questioning dialog to the “Menippean” upturnings and carnival. The voice of Menippean dialog is described (Cheyne & Tarulli, 1999) as a mocking and cynical questioning after the Menippean satire which Bakhtin considered and associated closely with the notion of carnival. The “Magistral” voice provides a restrictive scaffolding which imposes compliance on the pupil or initiate. In the “Socratic” form of dialog, the scaffolding is less rigid; the first voice (parent, teacher, etc.) will question the second (child, pupil) but may in turn be questioned. Through this, the child, pupil, or patient not only receives a broader and more complex introduction to the conceptual tools of the culture but may actively enter into dialog, using, modifying, and elaborating the ideas provided by the other voices and not necessarily arriving at an agreed conclusion. This is clearly the preferred therapeutic mode, although Cheyne and Tarulli, in a significant aside, point out that some psychotherapies, while supposedly “Socratic,” in reality impose a disguised form of the “Magistral” approach in which clients are taught to ask the right questions. Such an approach would clearly militate against beneficial change. Psychotherapists should aim to provide a reparative scaffolding, explicitly “Socratic,” respecting and caring, creating descriptions of current roles and procedures in words and diagrams that open for reflection the patterns that have operated automatically since their early formation.

It is of interest that whole cultures may be characterized by certain dominant modes and voices in this fashion. Protestant cultures, for example, would be partly characterized by harshly (self) critical (or “Magistral”) voices and the task of therapy may be at times to work explicitly with a patient to question internalized culturally derived voices.

In Bakhtin's words: “Just as the body is formed initially in the mother's womb (body), a person's consciousness awakens wrapped in another's consciousness” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 138). In a related understanding, Winnicott's “there is no such thing as an infant” emphasized the need to make the unit of observation in understanding development this infant–caretaker dyadic system rather than the infant alone. In essence, the dialogic approach replaces the “I think, therefore I am” of Descartes with “We interact and communicate, therefore I become.” This dialogic model presents an unproblematic way of understanding the acquisition of a theory of mind.

In a more overtly “political” contribution, the Bakhtin‐inspired philosopher Terzakis explicates further the enmeshment of the socio‐political with the intrapsychic, as illustrated by the following quote: “We should then talk of official consciousness and unofficial consciousness, official language and unofficial language: this reformulation does not only re introduce the dialogic principle deep into what we tended to consider as strictly the intrapsychic but also reincorporates the artificially isolated island of the self in a great field of social and ideological currents. Behind every individual symptom hides the conflict between opposing significations of the world. The problem of so‐called psychopathology is always in the last analysis a political problem: managing relations between the individual and the group, choosing a moral or political stance” (Fotos Terzakis unpublished, personal communication).