Chapter 1 Introduction Emergent properties of the interpersonal field
Emergence in the third person
The field comes into being between two or more people in a way that cannot be predicted or controlled. It can only be accepted or rejected. To the extent that we can accept it, we sense and understand (and these are not necessarily the same thing at all) something of how this emergent quality informs and shapes the clinical process. (Page 8)
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In psychoanalysis, we often experience the phenomena that we understand to “emerge” to be separate from us. That is, we think of emergence in the third person—some “it” emerges, so that the quality of emergence exists apart from subjectivity. (Page 9)
The emphasis in this work is not phenomenological—the primary emphasis is not the experience of the analyst or the patient, but on their interaction as a self-organizing system. (Page 9)
Emergence in the first person: the “felt sense” of emergence
“Emergence” in this frame of reference describes a certain affective state of things. It is the felt sense of moments that portend the unexpected, or are themselves unexpected. In moments of emergence I am connected to unseen things that feel, despite their invisibility, greatly important to matters at hand. There is a sense of nascence, of budding, of coming-to-be. Jack Foehl, in describing the quality of “depth” in clinical work, brings words to what I am trying to express: in moments of emergence, we are suddenly privy to “a sense of the boundless reaches of what we do not yet know” (Foehl, 2014, p. 295). (Page 11)
It is a feeling of opening-into, of possibility, and so it is generally welcome even when whatever will come next does not necessarily feel pleasant or fulfilling. (Page 12)
Is “depth” exclusively associated with the internal world?
Poften lose sight of the fact that the idea of depth is a metaphor, mistaking it instead for a feature of the natural world and thereby creating some unfortunate effects on psychoanalytic understanding. Depth, Wachtel (2003) observed, is equated with profundity: the “farther down” something lies, the closer to the beginning, the more profound, it is. Wachtel’s primary objection to this equation is that it leads us to accept unthinkingly the view that earlier, “deeper” events in a person’s history are therefore more profoundly influential than events that come later. For my present purpose, while I appreciate Wachtel’s point, my primary objection is the equation of depth with internality. We take for granted that the internal is more profound than the external, and therefore more important in the creation of experience and living. (Page 13)
En psicoanálisis relacional, la profundidad no se relaciona con lo interno.
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What I mean to argue is that profundity is not exclusively associated with the internal. (Page 14)
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Just as social phenomena can be unconscious, they can also be emergent. That, as I have said, is in fact my understanding of the interpersonal field.
The felt sense of emergence and the phenomenology of depth: depth as a field concept (Page 15)
Foehl replaces the vertical, internal-world metaphor of depth with one rooted in relationships: between figure and ground (“ form to field”), self to world, and subject to other. (Page 15)
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Depth is our awareness of the possibility that relations we have not yet imagined will emerge, and it appears only when those possibilities, like three-dimensional perspective, are already present and alive in our experience. (Page 16)
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Enactment feels as if it is just the way things are. One’s own involvement with the other—that is, one’s motivation to create and maintain the very state of affairs that is later revealed to have been problematic—is invisible. It often feels as if the enactment is the other’s fault, as if one is being provoked into an uncomfortable affective state that one would be able to avoid if it weren’t for the troublesome behavior of the other, or as if one is reacting to the other in a way that is nothing but reasonable. (Page 17)
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Enactment is defined precisely by that taken-for-granted attitude, that feeling that what is happening in the clinical relatedness means what I think it means, and nothing more. Depth and ambiguity collapse. (Page 17)
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The Barangers (1961–62/ 2008), for instance, write, “It could be said that every event in the analytic field is experienced in the ‘as-if’ category… . [It is crucial that] each thing or event in the field be at the same time something else. If this essential ambiguity is lost, the analysis also disappears” (p. 799). (Page 17)
During an enactment, we can say, the foreground and background of experience, or conscious and unconscious, are broken off from one another. Or we can say that they are fused. Either metaphor works, because both portray a consciousness that no longer exists against a background. 6 Things are flattened; there is no depth. There is a sense of certainty about things that are perhaps better left uncertain, because uncertainty allows possibility. The possibility of new meaning is shut down. Things are what they are, nothing more. But as the new perception of oneself and the other resolves the enactment, conscious and unconscious come back into communication with one another (cf. Ogden, 1992). Foreground disembeds from background, once again existing in relation to it. The possibility that things could be otherwise, or also otherwise, returns, and the picture deepens. (Page 18)