Back in 2023 I had a brief back and forth exchange with Gestaltist, Ruella Frank. I had approached her with a question that had come up in a peer supervision / study session with a colleague: a curiosity about Frank’s use of the word transubjective to describe the relational quality between therapist and client. Along with “subterranean” (a word that Focusing oriented therapist Greg Madison had shared with me), I have come to hold Frank’s phrase close to me – a descriptor that feels (to this more transpersonal leaning humanistic therapist) more evoking of what happens when two persons meet than the commonly used and theorised intersubjective.
In brief, intersubjective is what emerges when two selves come together in relationship.
Transubjective is “more experience near, as it connotes moving through the world as the world moves through us” so explains Frank.
The world moves through. As Merleau-Ponty conveys in his notion of flesh, self, other, world are contiguous i.e. not separate. Two “separate” selves are not creating a third, intersubjective. Two people come to know their selves as they fall out of (or emerge) from the relating.
Not long after my conversation with Frank I was sitting on Brighton beach, watching the starling murmuration over Brighton pier. Appearing like one organism, the more than a sum of its parts, as I was watching this spectacle ‘out there’ I recognised I was feeling them ‘in here’. The movement moved me (on many levels). The contraction, expansion; the sweeping, the climbing; the up, the down; the out, the back; the speed, the slowing. I imagined what it would be like to be a starling, the one in the middle, the one on the periphery. “How do they know” to move with one another, to climb, to dive; “do they know what they are doing” and all sorts of curiosity as I witnessed. I doubt the starlings cared much for my questions, they were too deeply immersed in the suchness. In fact, they taught me a great lesson that late afternoon as the sun was setting: to let go of the questions and open to experiencing itself; as Frank would say, the embodied move from curiosity to wonder.
The starlings often return to me. As I stand in a classroom in front of a group of trainees, trying to convey an experiencing that is beyond words and certainly concepts. I sometimes find myself swaying on my feet as I describe the dance of therapy; its verticality (the inward relation to self) its horizontality (the outward relating to other). Similarly, in experiential workshops, I might sway in my chair, leaning forward, resting back as I give feedback to the trainee in “the hot seat” and what I felt in the relating; my see-feeling as the dyad were see-feeling one another. We, the fishbowl, are not separate; we can feel the energy, the transubjective. We are starlings on the edge of the murmurating “field”.
It can actually be easier to pick up on relational patterns and themes when sat in these particular co-ordinates of the field (or nodes if we use the phraseology of Gill Proctor). The murmuration is a great example of intraconnection. We are both starlings AND the murmuration, both at once. At the edge, we have a Birds Eye view; the concertina is easier to see-feel. At the centre, the strength of the contraction is greater – like being at the middle of a black hole; yet less movement means it’s harder to detect. It’s no wonder we need to harness our sensitivity to the felt sense of relating to become more efficient psychotherapists. We are right in “it” with our clients, the epicentre.
Learning the turn inward, dropping the anchor so to speak, gives us a greater gravity, presence. We drop into the river of experiencing, our own subjectivity, the sensible…in the French manner of that word; or more precisely, in the Merleau-Ponty manner who uses sensible to refer to the realm of lived experience, encompassing perception, embodiment, and the world as it is directly encountered through the senses. Dropping down thus gives us contact to the world. The world is not ‘out there’; nor is the client. When we drop into presence, we realise the client lives in us: I can only know you ‘over there’ through my experience ‘in here’. Anything else is speculation. The relational, the horizontal, is thus the vessel that contains all the process.
We are both starling and murmuration.
I can only know my own experiencing
And yet this is not separate from you; we exist in an intraconnected, moving and always re-configuring, whole.
Being and becoming
Continually
IF, I can open and let this happen. At the beginning of our practice career, our scripts and beliefs can obstruct our capacity (one that is our inherent nature by the way) to open to this flow. We fear we might ‘lose our self’ if we surrender and dissolve the boundaries. As I discuss with many of my supervisees, there is a lot of difference resting in the intraconnection than merging. By leaning back in our chair we can open to the field; if we get too busy “helping” we might find ourselves leaning forward – and we topple ‘in’. The latter might manifest as confluence or its polarity, making the client the object of our doing to. Either way, we lose ourselves. In intraconnection, we keep a foot in our experiencing, the self-ing that happens at contact.
If this sounds paradoxical, it is! As Iain McGilchrist, proponent of a two hemisphere model of attention and ways of understanding the world, says “that we have the ability to see this both and is a function of the way our hemispheres co-ordinate…paradox very often represents a conflict between the different ‘takes’ afforded by the two hemispheres [of the brain]. However, we must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not”.
We are fortunate, as humanistic practitioners, that our entire working method rests on riding these kind of paradoxes: the view of dialectics, the practice of dialogue. What is skilful to keep in mind that these operate in the vertical and horizontal; through being and becoming; in connection and separation. 100% starling, 100% murmuration.