Reflections On Field Theory - Parlett, Malcolm
Reflections On Field Theory - Parlett, Malcolm
Reflections On Field Theory - Parlett, Malcolm
by Malcolm Parlett
Commentary: The following is an edited version of a plenary lecture given at the 4th British Gestalt
Conference in Nottingham in July 1990. I introduce the basic features and history of field theory and
suggest that it provides a foundation for Gestalt therapy theory and practice. Five basic principles
of field theory are explored. I then argue that the models of knowledge and knowing embodied in
field theory form part of the emerging epistemology that characterises many new areas of inquiry
e.g., holistic medicine and ecology. In the second half of the lecture I apply field theory thinking to a
discussion of the Self in Gestalt therapy and to the mutual effects on one another of two (or more)
persons relating together. I focus on some new ways to think about the psychotherapy field of
therapist and patient and end by discussing the importance of presence.
Introduction
The organiser of this conference, Ken Evans, invited me to talk about field theory, and I am glad to have had
the opportunity to review this area. As Gary Yontef has said, field theory is "the least adequately
discussed aspect of Gestalt therapy (and) ignorance of (it) seriously distorts the basic conceptual
understanding of Gestalt therapy", (Yontef, 1981). I agree with him.
My intentions today are, first, to lay out the principles of field theory as I understand them to be from the
point of view of a Gestalt therapist. Second, I want to suggest that field theory thinking can be allied to the
whole movement in thought which is taking place today, as reflected in, for example, ecology, holistic
medicine, and many other alternative approaches which have reacted against the predominant assumptions
of conventional science. Third. I will elaborate field theory thinking as it applies to a simple social unit, the
two person system, and specifically the relationship between therapist and patient.
Gestalt "Maps"
We all know that "the map is not the territory" and in Gestalt work there are usually various applicable maps
which we can refer to, in order to make sense of what we encounter in the territory. Confronted, say, with
a young woman struggling to clarify her experience, or to release herself from knots of past confusion,
there are alternative ways of characterising or making sense of her experience and of the encounter. Thus,
we may be thinking in terms of the balance between, on the one hand, support and, on the other, challenge
or contact. This was a favourite map of Laura Perls.
An alternative map, the Gestalt experience cycle, was originally developed at the Gestalt Institute of
Cleveland (e.g., Zinker 1977) and recently expanded on by Petruska Clarkson (1989) in her welcome and
useful new book. The map used here would make sense of the territory by portraying what is happening in
the woman's experience as a sequence of steps in organismic self regulation, as an unfolding gestalt in
time.
There are many such maps in Gestalt therapy and as abstractions they are all potentially useful. And they
can also trap us, if we use them too exclusively or without reference to others. (And of course there is
variation in which ones we use at different times. For instance, I noticed that in my work in the weeks
leading up to this lecture I have tended to bring into my therapeutic encounters outlooks which derive from
field theory.)
In talking about field theory I am drawing your attention not to one particular map but to a whole section of
the atlas. Arguably this section includes all the maps concerned with how the organism relates to the
environment, and thus the needs cycle, organismic self regulation, and the contact boundary and its
disturbances could all be depicted in field theory terms. However, the focus here will be the narrower one
of drawing your attention to what field theory is and of exploring one particular area of application. My hope
is that you will recognise that field theory is not merely an abstraction, a set of ideas that exists in books and
in the minds of a few theoreticians, but is the basis for a way of perceiving and knowing and understanding
that can be assimilated, as it were, into our vision and sensibilities as working Gestalt therapists.
Field Theory
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the present.
Lewin points out that "the character of the situation at a given time" may include the-past-as-rememberednow or the future-as-anticipated-now, which will form part of the person's experiential field in the present.
Thus the individual sees not only his present situation, he has certain expectations, wishes, fears,
daydreams for his future (ibid. p. 53) as well, and such notions, along with his concepts about the past,
constitute part of his present reality:
the psychological past and the psychological future are simultaneous parts of the psychological
field at a given time. The time perspective is continually changing. According to field theory, any
type of behaviour depends upon the total field, including the time perspective at that time, but not, in
addition, upon any past or future field and its time perspectives. (Lewin, 1952, p.54, my italics.)
In short, it is not the actual events, past or future, which concern us because the actual field conditions at
these other times are not present now.
We can notice here what a radically different conception of causality is implied from what is more general in
our culture and in other varieties of psychotherapy. As Gestalt therapists, with our focus on present
experience, we are not explaining phenomena by reference to past or future "causes". Instead, we
concentrate on "what is" rather than "what was" or "what will be", not because we wish to ignore a
person's history or her future intentions; say, her past sexual abuse or her plans to marry; but because our
attention is directed, in the case of the abuse, primarily to how the abuse is being recollected or by-passed
or made light of or magnified now; and, with her marriage plans, we are interested not so much in the plans
themselves but in the whole way in which they form part of her present actuality, or; using another term of
Lewin's; of her "life space.
Taking this example further, we can see that in the therapy itself, what also forms part of the present field is
the person and presence of her therapist. The recollecting or anticipating (of the past abuse and the future
marriage respectively) are, therefore, taking place in a present day human context where there will be a
greater or lesser degree of trust in the therapist, a lot of or little support offered, and where the therapist
may have clear or unclear boundaries. These contemporary circumstances inevitably are part of the present
field, and in turn will affect how the past or future are evoked; just as their present evocation in turn affects
the total situation (perhaps the future course of therapy) as it subsequently evolves. Gestalt therapy, as a
phenomenological approach, is thus looking at the actual present happenings within the therapy situation
itself.
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attention is concentrated on these, as it so often is, in an attempt to explain or account for something in
terms of a comfortable seeming, lawful, and general truth, the actuality of the present situation may not be
appreciated in all its specificity. As Lewin reminds us, we are always dealing with a "multitude of
coexistent interdependent facts" as well as "conditions which influence behaviour in one direction or the
other" and we need on outlook and method which covers "the exceptional" as well as the "usual case",
(ibid., pp. 150 - 51).
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is not content just to look at the pictures in themselves but will be open, at least, to the possibility that the
style of frames may play an important part in how the paintings are appreciated, or that the context of the
exhibition as a whole provides a particular gloss on the nature of the pictures.
This openness to anything in the field is not a call for exhaustive inclusion in which each and every
contributory influence within the person's or group's reality has to be accommodated. Not only would this be
an impossibly infinite exercise, and geared to a static conception of the field, but it is unnecessary; the field
is organised and what is most relevant or pressing is readily discoverable in the present. Instead of
exhaustively documenting what is in the field, there is attention to what is momentarily or persistently
relevant or interesting; and this will show how the field is organised at the moment. The point is, however,
that the range of possible relevance is not restricted to some parts of the total field.
An example would be if a medical specialist gives a patient an explanation of his illness, the specialist
herself may imagine that what is relevant for the patient is how clear she was in providing him with
information. Yet suppose that what actually was most relevant (i.e., of present concern) was the degree of
personal interest and warmth (or lack of it) the doctor communicated in the course of giving the information:
this might be what is really organising the field for the patient, not just the content of the information.
Similarly, paying attention to a pre-arranged agenda without giving space to what arises in the moment may
be persisted with because of a fixed criterion of what is relevant. The reality is that we have to be open to
the present configuration of the field, whether anticipated or not.
One particular aspect of the field may be so "invisible" that it is persistently overlooked as having any
relevance: the presence of an observer. Yet the observer or commentator or investigator is always part of
the total situation and cannot safely be excluded from it. In a similar way, in old style Gestalt therapy groups,
the presence of a "hot seat" inevitably is a major part of the framing or context of what happens in the
group. Likewise the presence of a video camera
can profoundly affect the total situation. The Principle of Possible Relevance reminds us that taking into
account the total situation requires doing just that.
Ways of Knowing
The five principles laid out above are overlapping and not discrete. Rather they are five windows through
which we can regard field theory, exploring its relevance in practice. In a sense, there should be no
surprises: the principles are intrinsic to the practice of Gestalt therapy, even if practitioners have not
realised before that these insights could be described in field theory terms.
As a general outlook, a way of talking about and making sense of human experience, field theory attempts to
capture the interrelated flow of unfolding human reality, impregnated as it is with our personal meanings and
significance. Because we are, most of us, members of families, communities, social groups, organisations, it
is also a vehicle for exploring ourselves in relationship. There is no sharp cut-off between "internal" and
"external"; the unified field is the meeting place of the two.
Field theory, I have intimated, provides a way of appreciating reality. As such, as an overall system of
knowing, it can be said to be an "epistemology" (Bateson, 1979; Berman, 1981) which is at odds with the
general or prevalent epistemology of normal science, of present day academic and clinical psychology, and
of many forms of psychotherapy other than Gestalt.
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To summarise: with the growth of the scientific outlook, of mechanisation, and the importance given to
quantitative approaches, objectivity, and rationality, came a fundamental separation between the world as I
naturally experience it and "the world as it really is" (supposedly), i.e., as it is described by science. And it
is this separation, or alienation as Berman calls it, that has become enshrined in the dominant epistemology
of today and which field theory, coming from a totally different perspective, stands in contrast to.
New Directions
Well, it is worth acknowledging that the dominant epistemology is now under attack from many quarters, not
just from field theorists. All acknowledge that what Donald Schon (1988) calls "technical rationality" has
indeed been stupendously successful in promoting the machine world.
Yet it is now found wanting by many, including ecologists, modern physicists (in the aftermath of relativity
and quantum mechanics), holistic medical practitioners, community architects, alternative economists and
many others, including Gestalt therapists.
Indeed, we live at a time of unprecedented activity and innovation, in which new thinking is being applied to
many areas of science and human effort. There are moves towards more holistic approaches, more
relativistic outlooks, and there is more reflexivity regarding the role of the observer; interdependent
relationships are more widely acknowledged, and the limitations of applying mechanical-type thinking to
areas way beyond engineering are more frequently acknowledged. (See Capra, 1982, for an early
discussion of what he calls "the rising culture").
Specifically, as the old epistemological framework begins to break up, and the whole intellectual and cultural
climate continues to shift, we can expect changes in conventional psychiatric practice as well as in much
psycho-analytically derived therapy. I imagine that the tendency of others to re-invent Gestalt therapy will
continue. Others will be joining a train on which Gestalt therapists have been travelling for many years.
What I am saying is that many of the assumptions and working beliefs intrinsic to Gestalt therapy, like holism
and organismic self-regulation and present-centredness, all of them woven together in the field theory
outlook, are being independently discovered and the thinking of people like Lewin acknowledged for being
ahead of their time. The Gestalt movement has an important part to play in the emerging new era.
The Self
In Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1973), the self is "the system of contacts at any moment ... the self is the
contact boundary at work. Its activity is the forming of figures and grounds" (page 281). Joel Latner (1986)
refers to the self as "our essence, (the self) is the process of evaluating the possibilities in the field,
integrating them, and carrying them through to completion in the cause of the organism's needs ... the self
works for its completion ... the self is us-in-process" (p. 38 - 39). And to quote Goodman again - the "self is
the integrator ... the artist of life" (Perls, et. al. p. 282). Perhaps the best phenomenological description of the
self which I have heard is attributed to Sonia Nevis: "The self is the quivering mass of our potential".
Hunter Beaumont (1990) has suggested that it would help enormously if we took over the German practice
and used the word "gestalt" not only as a noun and adjective but also as a verb. Thus, to gestalt something
is to create or constellate it into a patterned whole, to make something into a configuration. I intend to follow
this practice and to use gestalt as a verb as well as a noun.
Using the language of field theory, and again I am indebted to Hunter Beaumont for this, we can think of the
self as being that which constellates the field. This is a different definition of the self, but compatible with
others given here. How do I frame my reality at a particular moment? How do I arrange my "life space?"
How do I organise my experience? I do these by constellating or organising (or configuring) the field
according to particular meanings, a personal process in which certain parts of my total experience become
figural and other parts are organised around them, as ground. And this process can be construed as the
self at work or, in Latner's phrase, "us-in-process." The self is therefore (as in all Gestalt theories of the
self) definitely a process and not a static abstract mental entity; it provides a way of describing an ongoing,
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evolving and transforming process in which we continuously engage, configuring the experiential field, or
choosing our reality.
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of our personal reality. Two individuals, relatively free of neurosis, can approach the creation of a shared
reality with a lot of creativity available. The dance, the co-created gestalt, can be fun, can be play.
Suppose, however, that one or both parties to this activity have particularly stereotyped ways in which they
configure their field, so that the gestalt formation process or the constellating itself has become fixed, what
happens then? Suppose a man approaches a woman rather as if he has filters in his eyes, perhaps the
particular distorting spectacles which result in his regarding women as being like his mother or a former
school teacher, (very rare occurrences, as we know!) In such cases he is introducing into the co-created
mutual field a significant element of inflexibility. (Another, more familiar way of mapping this process would
be to speak of there being a disturbance at the contact boundary, that of projection.)
To stay with the analogy of dancing, when the contacting process is disturbed in this way by one party, the
dance between the two dancers is inevitably affected. Thus, suppose that whenever she dances in a
particular way or has a certain expression, he perceives her, because of his projection, his fixed mode of
configuring, as being critical, or as needy, or as flirtatious or whatever the overall meaning is that he is
making, he will then dance with her as if she is critical, needy, or flirtatious, irrespective of what her
experience actually is or how she is configuring her reality of being with him. Dancing with her in this
particular way, he will be moving, perceiving, and reacting in ways that go with his particular way of
configuring the field and differently than if he was seeing her in another way; say, as creative, strong,
aggressive. Given that her reality of him and of the dancing is governed in part by how he is dancing with
her, her own dance will naturally be influenced. The dance, the communal event, will be biased in a direction
of being fixed and stereotypic, even if only one party to it is configuring his or her field in a self-limiting way.
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and from a field theory perspective there cannot be. My interviewer was immured in the old epistemology
and was still operating with its flawed assumptions about objectivity and value-free science.
Similarly, I would argue, attempts by psychoanalysts to "ring fence" (to use a banking term) the entire
therapy relationship, setting boundaries so inflexibly that, for instance, there is no talking if they bump into
one another in the street, and no self-disclosure on the part of the therapist except in extreme
circumstances, are just as absurd as the sociologist's attempt to keep herself from influencing me. The
analyst's patient, responding to the total field, to all the circumstances, cannot be but affected by them; "no
talking" is therefore as significant a message as is talking more naturally. This is not meant to imply that
boundaries are unimportant, they help to structure the mutual field in ways that can offer safety and build
trust. But a case could be made that the hypothetical analyst in these circumstances, by following a
theoretical outlook that objectifies the patient and ignores the field conditions of therapy, is acting out a form
of fundamental disrespect, modelling distance, artificiality, and inauthenticity.
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affected by them. We help create or organise the mutual reality or shared field and in turn are created and
organised by it. Reciprocal influencing of this kind, as we have seen, has important implications for
professional practice.
A particularly provocative idea for therapists follows from the notion of reciprocal influence, namely that
change in the client may be achieved by the therapist changing her or himself. Since it is a co-created field,
a function of what the therapist brings to it as well as what the client brings, a change in the way the
therapist acts or feels towards his client and inter-relates with him will affect the mutual field and have
consequences for the client. The extent of what is possible via this route is obviously difficult to assess. But
it strongly endorses the idea that in the impeccable practice of Gestalt therapy there has to be a central
place for continuing supervision, as well as daily attention to our fitness-to-practise.
More generally, the implication is that in order to become better therapists, we need to become more evolved
beings, not simply by being more aware, nor even by being more aware of our patterns of becoming
unaware at times, but by allowing what Yontef (1988, p. 31) calls a fundamental "phenomenological attitude
(to) permeate ordinary life", effectively as a way of being-in-the-world.
In this sense, I wish to argue, Gestalt therapy is not something we simply use, like some suit of clothes we
temporarily put on and then leave off. It is not just a bunch of techniques, nor is it some kind of therapeutic
equipment that we wheel on for a particular clinical purpose and then substitute with another kind of
equipment shortly after for another purpose. If we choose to work with the Gestalt discipline, we find the
ways of thinking and perceiving that characterise the approach filtering through into our lives and
relationships. If we are to act congruently and authentically as therapists, we have to acknowledge that the
way we are and the way we live cannot be entirely separated from our work as professional Gestalt
therapists. Everything in our own phenomenal field becomes part of the matrix from which we co-create
fields with others. And when there is clarity of our own present field, a minimum of distracting unfinished
business, and good self-support, the greater the likelihood of our dancing creativity and centredness being
available in our interactions with others.
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So whether I am cast in the role of, or play the part of, patient listener, or of confronter and limit-setter, or of
supportive presence, I am inextricably part of the dance, part of the co-created field, the common
interpersonal home.
Concluding Remarks
Today I have examined with you some of the maps that relate to field theory, and attempted to show you
that Gestalt therapy is rooted in the particular perspectives that characterise field theory. The more this
connection is made, the more will Gestalt therapy be seen as truly a contextual therapy. In particular I have
concentrated on how attending to the "between" in relationships, and the co-influencing, interactive nature
of the dance between people, can make us see therapeutic work in a fresh light.
In this final section, I want to focus on several themes which go even further into the issue of how we may
affect others and be affected by them. In so doing I am going to touch on issues that are rarely addressed in
Gestalt therapy but in my view need to be. Some can be fairly easily integrated with field theory thinking as
described earlier. Others, however, while dealing with the "in between", go beyond the realms of
conventional thinking, and embrace "fringe" concerns of a kind which are regularly and casually dismissed
by medical and scientific establishments. I believe that Gestaltists need to be open to areas of enquiry which
delve into phenomena that have often been noted and anecdotally reported but which happen to fall outside
the realm of "respectable" science or at least do not seem to have a simple explanation.
Let me give some examples.
First, I am often amazed by how parallel realities and processes become established. For instance, in
supervision it very easily can happen, and frequently does, that what is happening in the therapy situation
under discussion gets re-enacted and played out in the supervision session itself. Thus, the
therapist/supervisee may be unduly passive vis-a-vis his patient and suddenly the supervisor becomes
aware of his own passive response to the supervisee. Such phenomena are well known, and often are
attributed to "unconscious processes" by those who speak of the unconscious. But how does Gestalt
therapy treat such parallelisms? Well, it seems possible to think of the co-produced field getting configured in
a certain pattern, and this becoming transferred to another location/time period, perhaps (in the supervision)
through there being common features in the two situations. This is, of course, no more an explanation than
is reference to the unconscious, but it may provide a more fruitful descriptive starting point. And we may
see here, in miniature, the same process, involving wholesale transfer of field-configurations, as may occur
when skills, attitudes, and fashions spread very rapidly across the globe, or when an "atmosphere" in an
organization is communicated very quickly throughout it (see Note 1).
Second, there is the phenomenon whereby over a particular time period, say during the course of a week,
patients seem all to be raising similar issues that happen to be those with which the therapist is also
currently concerned in her or his own life. At the time when a relative of mine was dying of cancer, there
were so many references to cancer by my patients that I lost any sense of surprise, I almost came to
expect patients to mention cancer, or to report knowing somebody with it, and they did, far more than I could
have expected by chance, and without any prompting by me at all. But did I "prompt" them in some other
way than talking about cancer? Was there some subtle mutual configuring of the shared field in which I was
myself implicated, that led to a greater chance of certain issues being evoked? Do we influence others
around us by what we are thinking about? Difficult though the issues are to research, they deserve to be
carefully examined, if necessary by other than usual methods of research (e.g. co-operative enquiry,
Reason, 1989).
Third, there are often informal references made about how young children, especially at a pre-verbal stage,
can "pick up" the emotional tone and unspoken feelings of their parents and home life. Surely what must be
happening here is some overall sensory/feeling reaction to the overall, holistic quality of the total field (see
Note 2). Yet how little investigation has there been, particularly by Gestaltists, of such phenomena.
Likewise, casting the net further out, there are numerous anecdotal references to animals anticipating
danger in advance of the danger arriving. Such phenomena may not be understood, they are not, at least in
any mainstream way, but, recognising the full extent of organism/environment interaction, and the
extraordinary number of ways in which we are influenced by our surroundings, perhaps we should, as
practical field theorists, at least be inquisitive, and more open to examining such phenomena. The writings of
Jung, for instance on synchronicity (e.g., Jung, 1952), discuss these various kinds of experience, and,
without giving up the earthy groundedness of the Gestalt tradition, Gestalt therapists might well become
more open to talking about, and documenting, some of these phenomena.
Fourth, more directly evocative of field theory, with its "field of forces" physical science metaphor, are
suggestions that there exist actual electromagnetic and energy fields around and between humans; there
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are those who claim they can see auras; and acupuncturists, shiatsu specialists, and complementary
medical practitioners of many different types take very seriously notions of energy flow and the power of
healing from another person. I will not stray into the controversies that these raise between complementary
and orthodox medicine (Fulder, 1988; Staeker and Gilmour, 1989) but simply say that the questions about the
effects of human beings on one another form one part of the debate.
Following from this, I suspect that many of us may have had the experience of being markedly affected
simply by being in the presence of someone with a highly developed consciousness, Perhaps a spiritual
teacher or even someone who simply meditates a great deal. And this raises the question of our own
presence, as therapists. Sometimes I think that the most important function we can have as therapists is to
be fully present, to be clear, to be "all there," to attend fully with an uncluttered consciousness. Even if the
client is not in contact with me or with her own process, I can at least remain in contact with her and with
my needs, feelings. and thoughts. Arguably, simply by being fully present, we are already helping to
constellate the mutual field in a life-enhancing way. And being "fully present" is, of course, another way of
talking about "presence.
Joseph Zinker (1987) has written about presence and I am impressed by what he says. I will therefore
finish by quoting him at some length.
Presence (he writes) hints at that special state of being fully here with all of oneself, one's body and
soul. It is a way of being with, without doing to. Presence implies being here fully, open to all
possibilities ... The therapist's presence is ground against which the figure of another self (or
selves) can flourish, brighten, stand out fully and clearly.
For the client, for the other, "the therapist's intrinsic-being-here stimulates stirrings in the deeper parts of
one's own self." He goes on:
When I experience another's presence, I feel free to express myself. to be myself, to reveal any
tender, vulnerable parts, to trust that I will be received without judgment or evaluation. My
therapist's presence allows me to struggle with my own inner conflicts, contradictions, problematic
questions, paradoxes; without feeling distracted by leading statements or overly determined
questioning. My therapist's presence allows me to confront myself, knowing that I have a wise
witness.
Zinker goes on to say what presence is not.
Presence is not a way of posturing or self-conscious posing or strutting before another. Presence
is not style. Presence is not charisma. Charisma asks for attention. admiration. Charisma calls to
itself, while presence "calls to the other." Charisma is a figure competing with another figure, while
presence is ground, "asking to be written on." Presence is not posed religious humility (which is
really a form of secretive pridefulness). Presence is not polemic, it does not take sides, it sees
wholes. Presence does not compete. Presence is not flamboyant or dramatic.
And to conclude, Zinker discusses the development of presence. "Sometimes", he writes,
therapists have appeared who simply always had presence. They seem to have been born that way.
(However) most people acquire presence through the continual pounding of time, time which
reminds them again and again how much there is to learn and how little they know. Presence is the
acquired state of awe in the face of an infinitely complex wondrous universe.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Hunter Beaumont, Marianne Fry, Peter Hawkins, Gary Yontef, Ray Edwards, Judith
Hemming, and Pat Levitsky for their comments and encouragement.
Notes
1. For readers familiar with the revolutionary biological ideas of Rupert Sheldrake (1987), involving
'morphic resonance', there are some intriguing overlaps with field theory thinking, including the
phenomena mentioned here, of transfer of complex patterns of behaviour and experience.
2. Some evidence that young infants respond to the holistic qualities of the total field is emerging within
a small-scale research project, directed by the author, which is investigating the long term effects of
having participated in the Second World War as an infant. It appears that while few, if any,
'conscious' memories may be available to the adult looking back, there may be 'preconscious'
memories of the original experiences of the wartime situation, in the form of diffuse and non-specific
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feeling states. It may well be that both mother and child may have had similar overall reactions at a
feeling level to the shared field conditions of the time, including the atmosphere and public mood at
that point in history, but that while the mother may have had all sorts of ways of coping and selfmanaging, the child did not. and simply responded to the prevailing climate, ethos, or atmosphere of
war in which she/he was immersed. Early findings suggest that the felt reactions of those born in
similar extreme circumstances (e.g., in London in 1940-1944) may be strikingly similar, along with the
long-term effects.
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