A Phenomenology of Depth

Abstract

In this paper, I re-vision the depth metaphor in a more contemporary epistemological frame. Rather than using depth as a “vertical” metaphor referring to the hidden, remote, or regressed, I use depth as a “horizonal” metaphor referring to the dimensionality of experience, to the ways in which all experience is structured in a figure–ground relationship. A foreground is always contextualized in relation to its background, and the series of relationships of form to field, self to world, subject to other constitute the ways in which meaning is formed, unformed, and transformed in a movement that characterizes how experience becomes what it is. The analyst’s role in deepening involves attending to the immediacy of the immersive perceptive moment, where embodied feeling-states might emerge from an unspecified ground, where the gap between what forms and its context becomes the crucible for new meaning. This entails receptivity to absence as much as presence, to the ways in which formation is always a play between what becomes and what it is not yet there.

Notes

1. ¹I follow Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “perception” for all the different aspects of embodied experiencing, the primary synthetic union of senses as an experiential ground.

2. ²See Reis (2009, 2010) for a compelling and complimentary view of the form–field relationship posing a contemporary epistemology for clinical process. Reis draws from the work of Merleau-Ponty and others to develop the concept of “enactive fields.”

3. ³Although beyond the scope of this article, the seminal contributions of Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) and Stern (1997, 2010) to a theory of dissociation provide an important framing for the dimensionality of experience. The dissociative gap and its bridging as developed by these two thinkers has offered a fertile ground for this initial contribution on depth, one that will be explicitly elaborated in subsequent work.

4. ⁴See Matte Blanco’s (1988) differentiation of the finite and the infinite and Lombardi’s (2008) work on the role of the body for important elaborations of transformation related to the current discussion of depth.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John C. Foehl

Jack Foehl, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst at Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, Faculty and Supervisor at Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and Harvard Medical School, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Adjunct), and Assistant Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.