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Russell Meares, together with Robert Hobson, was one of the pioneers of the ‘conversational model’ of psychotherapy, which they worked on together in the 1960s when Meares, who is Australian, was doing his psychiatric training in London at the Maudsley and Royal Bethlem hospitals. Many readers of the BJP will remember Hobson (who went on to train at the SAP), a wonderfully warm, learned and witty speaker, who directed a therapeutic community at the Maudsley for 20 years and later became a central figure in psychotherapy in Manchester. He died in 1999. Meares too went on to a distinguished career in Australia; he is now Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney.
The conversational model is a psychotherapy approach focusing on self-experience, using ideas from many sources and echoing especially those of William James. Like Winnicott, it emphasized the experience of aliveness and well-being, and one original theoretical feature it stressed is the importance of ‘doubling’, the twofold awareness of how one is and how one seems to another - initially achieved by internalization of the ‘protoconversation’ (Trevarthen's term) between mother and preverbal infant. In health, the outcome is said to be the ‘stream of consciousness’ (James' term), seen as a positive freedom from arrests and fusions (transferences), and characterized by feelings of coherence, continuity, agency and so forth. ‘Conversation’ is the agent of relatedness; it is with an other who is perceived as a ‘fellow’ (as in ‘fellow-feeling’).
This practical and humane model, crudely described in my summary but worked out with great intellectual sophistication, was developed in response to the sort of patients Hobson saw at the Maudsley, deemed at the time ‘unanalysable’ and who would probably nowadays be diagnosed ‘borderline personality disorder’. The conversational model still exists, only slightly modified, under the name psychodynamic interpersonal therapy (PIT). It was well ahead of its ti