notes

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
====== The Field ======

It will look like a blizzard of the possibilities in the situation, emitted from parts of people and things they are hidden on, faces, tracksuits, footy boots, rucsacs, cones, grass, the clouds, offering glimpses into the times and places they are from - and moving out into space to compete for the viewers attention. 

Below is a description of *the field*, a key concept in gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy focuses on what emerges between us instead of focusing on what's happening inside individuals. It's had a huge impact on how I feel about myself and my art practice.

My understanding is that gestalt therapists develop a particular embodied sensitivity to feelings they experience as being strange or off in rrlation to a client. These part formed, dissociated feelings are present in the field as the presence of absences, undeveloped parts of the self that haven’t had the support they need to develop and become integrated into who we are. Though this has parallelles with transference and counter transference their thinking is less concerned with with who a thought or feeling belongs to, it's understood as something in and of the relationship that is more than the sum of it's parts. 

Through my work with Sharon, I developed my capacity to pay much more attention to what is happening in my body and use that to discover and begin to integrate parts of myself I had repressed.

I'd always thought that if I found the right kind of digital visualisation format then I and other people could bring their neglected thoughts to it. I'm now realising that there needs to be at least some kind of therapeutic space to support people to feel and articulate their proto-emotions. I'm also realising that I can't depict thoughts and feelings directly, as abstract things. I just need to find different ways for people to communicate by moving and arranging material things, bodies and images in scenes - with the aim to reveal the affects of emotional energies, intentions and absences in between.

This would be different to providing wellbeing support alongside an artistic project or art for wellbeing. It would be therapy to enrich the quality of the artistic collaboration. 

For future artworks I would like to offer ghestalt therapy sessions for people I'm working with, focusing on body work, helping them to feel and describe how their body responds emotionally to the situation. Which past experiences are pressing on that and what they feel might be going on with other people. My role would be to develop creative activities that help the group describe proto-emotions in relation to the space of their bodies, each others bodies and in the space between. 

The focus would be less on trying to recreate a scene from my life, instead it would be more using that scene as a stimulus and then seeing where the energy is for them now. Use a mixture of activities through which we communicate with each other by moving things around the scene, both physical and augmented reality objects, with imagery from scenes in their lives and from tv, games, films etc.

Much of the artistic work will be in choosing which materials to bring into the scene. 

The undulating squishy energies of emotions in an around our bodies affecting and being affected by the material fabric of the space we're in. The flickering speed of feelings, thoughts, conversation, movement and body language compared with the slowness that furniture, wallpaper, trees and roads fade, grow and decay.

Enacting a scene with a group, finding ways to manifest things that could be said, thought, felt and done in that situation. Revealing the social, psychological, behavioural and social affordances affordances of a situation by manifesting its absences. All the things that the people in a scene could feel, think, see, say and do. Including things they imagine other people (present, absent, known personally or known through media) doing and experiencing. 

Manifesting traces of disembodied voices, movements, gestures, actions and expressions captured reenacting and reimagining the scene and from people in the group doing other things, communicating through different media and in different situations.

Everyone in the group does some therapy focused on their response to the scene, whatever it brings up for them. 

Then for the artistic production they come together and communicate through different activities by moving material objects, movements and gestures, vocal but not verbal sounds, printed and virtual imagery, particle systems. Everything but verbal communication.

 We can all bring our enhanced capacity for psychological/emotional awareness to those creative activities, but we don't have to talk directly about what we discussed with the therapist. 

Question. The thing I always go back to at the root of my practice is the tension and conflict my Dad and I had as I used his garage to make art, the mess I made and how so much of the intentionality of our relationship was brought to the surface through that argument about how tidy or messy the garage should be left. What is the media equivalent of that? Disagreeing with friends about the meaning or how good a piece of music film or game is? What we should watch? What should be shared?

How can I use popular media as well as physical materials as medium to capture the inherent tensions in a scene? Where are the gaps or cracks in the conversation? Where are the things we say that feel off? What if we found a way for our social media feeds to be present in between us and explored the tensions, cracks and relationships between them? How do these videos, posts, memes affect and reverberate with each other? Picturing the field as social media and analogue media. The tensions between John's latest conspiracy heroes rant defending family values against perversion and posts defending kids rights to choose their gender in my mastedon feed hang in the air. I'm imagining the field made visible by disturbances between these different media contents floating in the space between us.

**Two types of activities to capture tensions in the field**

- Activities that feel for tensions in the space between
- Activities that manifest tensions through materials in between

**Excerts from**

### Gestalt therapy, the field and our painfully unrealizable desires. Veronique Vermeir.

Each self carries the whole world within itself, this whole world is the other in me, and, like Patricia De Martelaere (Standard Magazine, October 1995) puts it, there are as many worlds as there are people. Only the unique exists and at the same time this unique is an articulation of the whole, the universal: every Gestalt is a manifestation of the field.

### Francesetti G., Roubal J. Field Theory in Contemporary Gestalt Therapy. Part 1: Modulating the Therapist’s Presence in Clinical Practice. Gestalt Review

Some authors, in line with the original understanding of Kurt Lewin (1952), hold that, at any specific time, everyone has a specific organism-environment field, just as everyone has their own visual field, consisting of the horizon of all that they can see (i.e., Robine, 2008). Other authors, more in line with the original understanding of Jan Smuts (1926), have proposed another conception of the field, which allows the focus to be placed on the bigger, irreducible whole that people engaged in a common situation perceive, and which in some way influences them all.

Parlett (2005, p.60) frames in a very clear way a crucial point: “A particular question eventually becomes unavoidable. Is ‘the field’ ultimately just a metaphor, a useful derived concept and framework that can be used to explain what is difficult to explain? Or is ‘something there’ in the form of an explicit energy field in the ‘space between’?” In this paper we consider the phenomenal field not just as a metaphor, but rather as an emerging ‘something there’. We do not enter into the ontological debate over ‘what it is,’ whether it is energy or not; we do not need to resolve that question for the clinical implications we want to focus on here. We simply consider that the ‘something there’ can be perceived as an emerging phenomenon (Francesetti, 2019a; 2019b), which transcends the sum of the parts. 

**The phenomenal field**

It can be considered as the here and now horizon of the probable emerging forms. On the one hand, it constitutes the possibilities for the many different forms of experience which can emerge in the situation. On the other hand, it also constitutes their limitations, because not all forms of experience can emerge.

The phenomenal field is perceptible by the senses as the atmosphere of the situation (Francesetti   Griffero, 2019; Francesetti, 2019d), in which the forces that condition the emergence of phenomena move. Those forces of the field are intentionalities: intrinsic tensions moving towards the fulfilment of the potentialities of the situation. Similarly as with black holes, where the force that bends the event horizon is gravity, within the phenomenal field, it is the intentionalities at play that bend it.

**The psychopathological field**

In every field, there is a certain degree of absence and presence. The more a field is psychopathological, the more absence is rigidly present, and the more potentialities there are for presence. Psychopathology can be seen as the study of the ways of being absent, and therapy as the art of presence to those absences. Compared to a psychopathology of the isolated individual, understanding psychopathology as a phenomenon of relational suffering that becomes real and alive in the therapeutic encounter can be revolutionary, since it offers direct access to psychopathological field transformation.

**How do we encounter psychopathology during the session? The stranger knocking at the door**

In the therapeutic session, the psychopathological field emerges. It is the result of the forces that are intended to bear the absence and to open a possibility for its transformation into presence. The absences are moments when experiences that are not assimilated emerge. They are feelings that are not integrated into the personality-function, so we cannot differentiate ourselves from them. We call them proto-feelings, according to the definition of the proto-self provided by Antonio Damasio. They are the signs and footprints of an unfinished business, something that, due to the lack of support, has not been processed and closed. The proto-feelings can be organized as repetitive patterns in the relationships, and as such Enduring Relational Themes (Jacobs, 2017) they become part of the personality.

What is not assimilated and transformed nevertheless emerges in the therapy situation, together with the potentiality for its transformation. The more the proto-feelings are unformulated and dissociated, the more they appear as something disturbing the therapist. They are like a stranger knocking at the door. Such disturbing feelings can be called atopon (from Greek, out of place) (Francesetti, 2019a; 2019b)—something that the therapist would rather not feel, something meaningless, strange, embarrassing, interfering, disarraying, annoying, unsettling. Something out of place, which the therapist would rather not feel or think. What was not shaped, formulated, and assimilated, what has had no right to exist, pushes to come to life in the here and now of the therapeutic situation.

Therapy is basically support for the potentiality brought by this stranger at door. The forms that the unformulated proto-feelings take in the session are original and unique. What pushes in the situation is embodied by both the client and the therapist. The therapist contributes to the emergence of the unformulated by lending her flesh to the forces of the field.

The fact that the therapist feels moved by a force does not mean that it is the client that moves him, as it would be seen from mono-personal or bi-personal psychological perspectives. The forces belong to the situation—it is not just about the client and it is not just about the therapist. What emerges is different from the sum of the parts, in much the same way as when a molecule of oxygen and two molecules of hydrogen meet and a new, unique quality of water appears. That is why it is not important, or even possible, to distinguish ‘what is mine’ from ‘what is yours.’ What matters is to recognize the forces that push and to let them transform the field.