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Brent: How does “radical openness” relate to our prior theories about the world, the mind, the particular other, and ourselves?
Anton: The concept of radical openness proposes not that we empty our minds but that we open our minds to the prospect of losing the understandings to which we are attached. In order to engage in a dialogue that could be described as radically open, we bring our prior understandings into the new, emergent conversation with the idea that they, when brought into contact with the speaking and listening of the other person, may be subject to revision, augmentation, or even relinquishment.
If a conversation is pursued with an aspiration toward openness, then there is no “opinion” that exists outside of the relational context. (Well, there might be such an opinion, one that one partner or the other holds tightly to, but that “holding on” would have to be considered as a way of resistively responding to the possible emergent understandings that come from speaking and listening to a particular partner in the here and now.)
Betty: Brent's question prompts me to ask how radical openness might alter our notions of interpretation itself. If an analyst and analysand come together in radical openness as equals, to bridge their separateness and “merge dialogic horizons,” then it seems the nature of interpretation would be profoundly altered, perhaps even be rendered obsolete.