Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory.

`The body', long a practical and theoretical focus in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, has gradually emerged as a problem for psychology. The volumes by Harré, Radley and Ussher exemplify this trend-not only in their rejection of understandings of the body as entirely and implicitly biological, but also in their use of the body as a medium through which human experience may be articulated and socially grounded. This review considers the ways in which each author understands embodiment and suggests that these works are tied together by a desire to bridge individual/biological and social conceptions in such a way that an element of lived experience remains as a focus of their analyses. Nevertheless, tensions within these works as well as variations between them point to the (perhaps inevitable) lack of a consensual way of talking about bodies.

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