A conversation with Maurice Friedman

Abstract

Maurice Friedman is Professor Emeritus of religious studies, philosophy, and comparative literature at San Diego State University, where he taught from 1973 to 1991, and is codirector of the Institute for Dialogical Psychotherapy in San Diego, where he teaches in the two‐year training program. Professor Friedman has taught at over fifteen universities, colleges, and institutes and is the author of twenty‐three books, including Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue; The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader; Touchstones of Reality: Existential Trust and the Community of Peace; Martin Buber's Life and Work (3 volumes) The Confirmation of Otherness: In Family, Community, and Society, and, most recently, The Affirming Flame: A Poetics of Meaning. In recent years, Friedman has been closely involved with the communication field and with the development of a dialogic perspective within communication. In 1986 he cochaired with Kenneth Cissna a full day seminar devoted to the topic of confirmation for the Speech Communication Association convention in Chicago. There he came into personal contact with Ken Cissna, Rob Anderson, Ron Arnett, and John Stewart, with whom he had already had correspondence in the 1970s. In the years that followed, Friedman had on‐going interactions with all of these communication researchers. In October 1991, Cissna, Anderson, Stewart, and Arnett made presentations at Friedman's international interdisciplinary conference on “Martin Buber's Impact on the Human Sciences” at San Diego State University, and later he was featured at a program centered on his work at the 1996 NCA conference in San Diego. Kenneth Cissna and Ron Arnett have both contributed essays to The Way of Dialogue, a forthcoming volume edited by Kenneth Kramer devoted to the work of Maurice Friedman.