Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 
 

We have no shortage of "in" statements in Psychology. We proclaim the "true Self" to be located inside, and so create an "outer" counterpart. Then we proclaim that "inner truth" is more valid than its "outer" counterpart. We recommend taking care of our "inner" child, and use words like "in"-trapsychic, "in"-trojective, and the "in"-tersubjective. We are forever asking ourselves to turn "in"-ward. That is is presumably where our true feelings are located...that is where we ourselves are located! But the use of "in" has two senses, one of which is typically ignored. The first is "in" as with chalk-in-a-box. It describes containment. The second is "in" as with the existential sense of being "in" love, or being "in"-to tennis or the theater, or music. It describes involvement. This work will explore the nature of these two alternative uses of "in", and they describe our own containment and involvement with the modern paradignms of psychology.

One might be asked to explore his or her own sense of "in"-ness. It is important to grasp the experience of being "in" and to ponder its meaning. The appropriate tool for exploring this can only be one of hermeneutic inquiry, beginning with one’s own experience of the phenomenon. For example, as I sit at my word processor typing this article, I experience various images and thoughts comming and going. I sometimes think of these images and thoughts as being inside me somewhere, for the most part inside my head because that is where my brain is located, I suppose. I experience my body seated before my computer and sometimes, when I turn my attention to it, I think of objects like my computer as being separate from me. I feel the skin of my fingers at each touch of my keyboard, and I sometimes think of my skin as a kind of boundary tissue between the inner me and the outer world.

In each of these examples one might note the difference between my description of the directly given phenomena -- the experience of images and thoughts comming and going, the experience of my body seated before my computer, the feel of the skin of my fingers -- as opposed to how I think about, or thematize that experience -- my thinking about these images as being inside me somewhere, my thinking about objects like my computer as being separate from me, my thinking about the skin of my fingers as a kind of boundary between two worlds.

In fact, the thinking that generally accompanies the experience of "in"-ness invariably evokes a world of dual realities realities. Specifically, our subjective world of "in"-ness is opposed to the world’s objective "out"-ness. Later, we will talk about this splitting in more detail but for now we ask simply that the reader explore how he or she personally experiences the sense of the "inner," and how this experience differs from the experience of "outer".

Note as well the spontaneity of this thematizing. It is the way we usually are in the world, and we have to stop and pay special attention to what we sometimes call the "Moment" of that which is present, in order to get at the direct experience itself rather than how we think about the experience. But one should not jump to the conclusion, as we all do, that because such thematizing is spontaneous it necessarily describes reality.

This would be a fatal error. In fact, it is precisely because of this spontenaity of thematization, that we are generally fooled into (mis)interepting ourselves relative to the objects in the world with which we deal (Heidegger). And by so doing, we also (mis)interpret our experiences. Sitting in awe of a brilliant orange sunset, we tend to miss the fact that we are every bit as much with the so-called "external"-ness of the sunset as with our "internal"-ness of emotions, bodily sensations, or feelings... none of which are authentically experienced as a withdrawl from the sunset to some abstract realm of "in"-ness. Nor is our experience "with" some representation of the sunset concocted inside our heads as a collation of responses to external stimulae (light waves and molecule vibrations). Instead, the phenomenon of the sunset as a sunset is directly reached.

We are attempting here to make a clear distinction before moving on. We want to distinguish between the experience itself and how we think about the experience itself. We do not question the viability of the former, while the later we view as derivitive. It is a secondary abstraction which in most cases is antithetical to the experience (and therefore the phenomenon) itself. Why antithetical? Because experience is a fluid temporal phenomenon while thematized abstractions are fixed objectifications. (Heidegger) We accept the philosophical rule that all thematization objectifies. (Dreyfus)

Now let us return to the sense of "in" and consider for a moment the primordial sense of "in" as originally "to reside" or "to dwell." Of critical importance here is the sense that "in" cannot be understood on the model of subject and object describing the relation between me and the world I inhabit in Cartesian terms. (Dreyfus, 1991) To illustrate this particular point here we will draw upon various selections from a collection of papers from the First Conference of the Sigmund Freud Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem held in the mid-1980s attended by some of the most prominent Analysts of the day. We will also draw from the work of Thomas Ogden, Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Michael Fordham, Mario Jacoby, GRS Mead and Clark Moustakas in an attempt to outline a crossection of theoretical perspectives.

We will use the experience of the interactive field to demonstrate the issues of "in"-ness. We could have chosen any number of experiences to demonstrate our point, as the issues we address are deeply ingrained in our western culture and provide myriad examples of their operation. The interactive field seems especially pertinent, however, since psychotherapy so often relies on its presence. Our position is that the interpretation of the interactive field is significantly affected by a traditional metaphysics that tends to split our being-in-the-world in such a way that tends to push the individual toward a solipsism that directly competes with the persuits of psychotherapy.

What is this metaphysics that keeps carving up the world into pieces distributed between the within and the without? How does it do this? How does it influence our interpretations of ourselves?.
 
 

Our interpretations of the way we relate to others vary, but one of the most striking involves positing the Interactive Field as a third "thing"which will be discussed more fully in the next section. The grounding gestalt of this interpretation, however, begins with Plato’s reformulation of the pre-Socratic speculations about the nature of Being. The question for pre-Socratic thinking was, "What is the nature of Reality?" Plato’s reformulation read, "What are the things that are real?" (Dreyfus, 1991). With the question thus reshaped, the next logical step was to ask after our relationship to the things that are real. We asked first, "How do I know that the things that are real... are really real?" Then we asked, "How do we know that what we know... is really true?" The former is the fundamental question of metaphysics, the later is its epistmelogical component. Of course there were many answers to these questions, but Plato set the course for our western line of thinking about them by suggesting that the really real was "form" (Dreyfus, 1991).

Let us return to my example of sitting before my computer, contemplating my experience of "in"-ness. You will recall that one of the phenomena I described was the computer before me. I saw it, experienced it, then thematized my experience into some sort of explanation about the fact that the computer was an object differing from me as a subject. If I were to think further, I might also note that the material substance comprising the computer is basically ephemeral. It comes into existence, is around until it becomes obsolete (two or three weeks, it seems), then eventually dies out. Were I to come back in a couple of hundred years, the chances are that all of the substances of my computer would have been disolved into some other form of some sort -- ashes, recycled coffee cups, polyester underware... whatever. But the computer’s specific thing-ness, what might be called the blueprint or the idealized template for the computer "thing" as an idea would, in this case, be all that remained. My particular computer would be gone, but the notion of computers in general would still exist. My particular computer was ephemeral, changing, like everything in the material world. But the "idea" of computer-ness was still around. In such a case... where might one locate the "reality" of the computer? For Plato, the reality was located in what was unchanging, the extra-temporal -- i.e., the "idea" of the computer. Similarly, in Jungian psychology, my computer might be thought of as an occurrence(s) of archetypal projections of one sort or another which stand "behind" the particularity of my specific computer.

C.G. Jung is credited with reviving the ancient consideration of archetypes as the primordial, extra-temporal "reality" behind the ephemeral particulars of the world, and it is perhaps instructive to consider this idea as it graphically demonstrates the way an abstract parallel world is contrived from the given-ness of our being-in-the-world, which then calls for a bridging "third" (as with synchronicity) of some sort the patch the two worlds back together.

In promoting the term "archetype" from antiquity Jung was reviving an ancient term for an idea very much alive in our culture (note its appearance in words like archeology, archetecture, and archbishop). The term itself has been around long before Jung. Every Greek philosopher from Thales to Plato struggled to define the primordial "stuff" of the extra-temporal Arkhi. For Thales, Arkhi was water. For others it was air or earth or fire... The midievel alchemists continued the notion with reference to the alchemical prima materia (first or primary matter). For Plato, the Arkhi was "form." But notice here that already contained within this consideration is the metaphysics of seperating "image" as the appearance of the perceived, from the really real, which is the archetypal "form." And notice as well that from Plato to Descarte to Kant, the archetypes accessible only to the mind. Let us take another example:

With the archetype of the Mother, attributes of motherness like nurturance, warmth, or love on the positive side, or clinging, devouring witchiness on the negative side, are archetypal. These attributes represent the genus of motherness to which the specific mother, in terms of "your" mother, are particular occurences. These particulars are not the archetypes themselves. The archeytpes themselves are something akin to organizing "principles" that cannot be accessed directly. As C.G. Jung puts it:
 
 

The reader might recall that with Kant ( The Kantian Proposition.html ) the the formula proposing the mind’s access to the really real was altered by his conclusion that the thing-in-itself could never be reached anyway. But this did nothing to deal with the split between world of reality and world of abstraction. It was simply the next most logical step to take in the working out of the original Platonic contrivance positing separate worlds. For two thousand years scholars struggled the make Platonic dualism work only to end up with Kant telling them that when all is said and done we are unable to access any really real world at all. From here it was a small step for Friedrich Nietzsche to conclude that there is no such thing as meaning or God (he is the one who proclaimed God’s death), and perhaps all existence itself is an illusion. This is the famous end-point of the traditional metaphysics that began with the Greeks.

It is with Nietzsche’s Nihilism that the Modern paradigm finally, after 2,500 years of holding on, collapses in on itself. This opens the door for thinkers like Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Derrida, and a host of so-called "Post-Modern" thinkers to begin formulating a new paradigm. "Non-objective" artists like Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, and a host of others bring this new interpretation of reality to the world of art. Robbe-Gliett (literature), Samuel Becket (theater), Arnold Schoenberg (music), Martin Heidegger (philosophy) do the same for their respective fields. Physics too begins to recognize the faulty ontology of Newton’s extention of Platonic dualism. Accordingly, Briggs & Peat (Turbulent Mirror) write that:
 

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Michael Staples

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