Talking to Transform: Aesthetic Experiments in Conversational Inquiry

Finbloom argues that conversation practices from philosophy, therapy, spirituality and teaching share techniques that perform “transformative inquiry”, that these techniques can work apart from the institutions they come from, and that they can be recombined in artworks. Authentic Relating and Circling appear as examples: the sentence stems “I notice”, “I feel” and “I wonder” that drive inquiry in Circling, and the Authentic Relating habit of starting with “I’m curious about”.

He also notes, in passing, that Circling, like psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy and Quaker meetings, does “not contain a thorough body of scientific experimental justification”.