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The ancient Greek poet Archilochus suggested that ‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing’. Following Isaiah Berlin's application of the metaphor of the hedgehog and the fox to western civilization, Russell Meares may be compared to Tolstoy, who, according to Berlin, has the talents of a fox, but the conviction of a hedgehog. The hedgehog's view of the world is refracted through the lens of a central defining idea. For Meares the central idea to which he returns over and over again is the role of healing conversation in the creation of self and the ways in which a poetic, analogical mode of thinking is essential for the flourishing of human life. This theme is at the heart of the Conversational Model, originated by Robert Hobson and developed by Meares and his colleagues. To this central theme Meares brings a fox-like erudition covering neuroscience, physics, anthropology, philosophy, literature, psychology, child development, linguistics, poetry, and art. This theme has been explored in books such as The Metaphor of Play (1992), Intimacy and Alienation (2000), A Dissociation Model of Borderline Personality Disorder (2012) and numerous articles in academic psychoanalytic journals.
In The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind, Russell Meares continues his exploration of how self begins and evolves through early mother-infant communication, expanding through childhood symbolic play and the development of an inner life and imagination. He shows how conversation is central to the development of self and that a poetic and analogical style of thought is a biological necessity. To elaborate on this central current flowing through all Meares' works, he brings in an impressive array of theorists, philosophers, psychologists and scientists such as William James, Hughlings Jackson, Janet, Tulving, Hobson, Gerald Edelman, Wolf Singer, Vygotsky, Frederic Wood Jones, Trevarthen, Carl Jung, Piaget, Levi-Strauss, Cassirer, Wolfgang Pauli, Maturana, Varela, Mandelbr