Communing and Relating: Part V—Separateness and Togetherness

As There Are many steps on the way to communing, paths to it and forms of it, so there are many theoretical guides and feeling experiences to aid in its happening. The concept relationship and the experience relating are of such help. It is via them that we finally come to communing, and that is what we have in the evolution of psychoanalysis. It has been my main thesis that relating is an aspect of communing and a special case of it. Only after having had long experience with relationship and relating do we become aware of the more comprehensive process of communing and the need for it.

Some recapitulation and filling in may help us move along the continuum transference, relationship, relating to communing. Science, from Galileo on, was based on the notion of an object that would remain the same and could be examined without being influenced—changed—by the observer.1 A human being was considered as an object and so viewed. As the scientific method evolved, it became apparent that only isolated aspects of human beings could be examined. To describe aspects laws were formulated, but they applied to ideal situations which, in fact, did not obtain. The law was a concept, an idea. Of a human being, of an I, concepts were formed. Here we have the beginning of the concept of an ideal I, of an ideal human being.

As the social sciences came into being, the importance of environment became apparent and had to be taken into account. Of environment another object was made. We now had the individual as object and the environment as object being examined by what we now call non-participating observers. Here again hypothetical ideal cases were used: an ideal human being and an ideal environment. Because of the nature of western thinking, they had to be seen as a dualism and as in opposition. Regarded as two separable and separated objects when juxtaposed, they had to be seen as irreconcilably opposed. The formulation always was individual versus environment, natur