This paper will explore the possibilities of teaching conversationally, outlining how conversational teaching might be done in person and online. The aim of conversational teaching, as with all teaching, is to help a pupil transition from relying on subconscious guidance and control to a plane of ongoing constructive conscious control. Where constructive conscious control includes the ability ‘to apprehend and to respect others’ points of view’ and is therefore located in a world of others with whom we relate and are different. Such a transition involves de-concealing what is hidden in Alexander’s theorising about manner of reaction and stimulus-response.

Thought of this way, our earliest habits of subconscious guidance and control are found to evolve within those interpersonal or intersubjective relations we are born into and on which we depend. To come to maturity in being with others requires not just inhibition but the cultivation of habits of understanding, where their ‘points of view’ can be understood and ‘respected’.

Such habits are not just fundamental in acts of living but in acting as a teacher. In teaching conversationally one uses this facility to outline and role play to a pupil their habits of subconscious guidance and control, within their context of interpersonal relationships. In an evolving conversation the pupil finds their own way to their expansion. They then can gain the necessary experience to reach a plane of constructive conscious control in their inter-personal and social relations. This, it will be suggested, is what Dewey meant, when he wrote that Alexander’s work was a ‘completed psychoanalysis’.