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When I started writing this article my intention was to focus on a theoretical discussion of the topic of dialogue, based on my research conversations with Patricia. I planned to quote from the authoritative voices of my theoretical background-from the work of philosopher Martin Buber, and that of the originator of person-centred therapy, Carl Rogers-because their ideas and values are close to my heart, and also because of the status and authority of academic, theoretical and conceptual knowledge. However, I came to feel that conceptual analysis alone would not capture a sense of the relationship between Patricia and myself, the dialogic and dynamic nature of the research process, the feel of its impact on the stories Patricia tells or its affect on my own stories. I wanted to create a resonant text, which would represent something of the immediacy and particularities of Pat's experience as she expressed it in relationship with me. Therefore, I decided to write a story, Shoes, butterflies and devils , based on our research conversations, which would invite affective engagement and resonance, and follow that with a separate and more theoretical perspective. This distinction between a paradigmatic mode of knowing and a narrative mode is one that Jerome Bruner makes. He writes that each provides "distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality". 1 Although the paradigmatic mode represents categories, concepts and propositional knowledge, and "seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction", narrative knowing focuses on "the particulars of experience located in time and place" (Bruner, 1 p 13). I wish to approach my research material from both modes of thought. For, as Bruner argues, we need both narrative and paradigmatic "modes of thinking" in order to make sense of the world and our lives in it.
The tales told by Oliver Sacks 2- 4 and those by Irvin Yalom 5 work, I believe, because they are compelling stories, beautifully told, which invite us into the lives of others; tales which arouse our curiosities, but which above all engage our sympathies; tales in which we come to care about the people and through which they matter.
UNTOLD STORIES
When I read Into the silent land , neuropsychologist Paul Broks' account of his work, the people...