A Phenomenology of Depth

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 betw...