If Shotter argues that the individual's sense of self is generated in conversation with others, several theorists in Burkitt's survey - including George Herbert Mead and Rom Harre - propose that our subjectivity is itself structured as a conversation. Harre writes: 'The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed.

• self
• conversation
• identity
• subjectivity
• reality
• perception
• conditioning
• scripts
• utterance
• consciousness
• early childhood development
• time
• mead

Not only were Marsh's theories now beyond all scientific credibility, but his methods— such as quoting Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross or Graves' The White Goddess as if they were as reputable as Boas, Mead, or Frazer— seemed to indicate senility. This impression was increased by the eccentric dedication 'To Ezra Pound, Jacques De Molay and Emperor Norton I.

• discordianism
• reference point
• mead
• goddess

Greek gods cannot create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis. In the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialectic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might occur between two people. The Greek god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be. He simply leads, advises, and orders. Nor does the god occasion humility or even love, and little gratitude. Indeed, I suggest that the god-hero relationship was - by being its progenitor - similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead. The strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amazement or wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the solution of a particularly difficult problem suddenly pops into our heads, or in the cry of eureka! from Archimedes in his bath.

• ancient greece
• ego
• emotion
• freud
• god
• mead
• relationship
• love
• self
• emotions
• fear
• gods
• other