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The different ways in which people apprehend life are constitutive of their natures and determine the shape and substance of their psychological worlds. Psychological research in the area of perceptual styles (e.g., Witkin and Goodenough, 1981) has yielded data indicating that people apprehend life in fundamentally different ways, with these modes found to be correlated with different clinical categories (Witkin et al., 1954). Psychoanalysts have generally accepted the dominance of patients' particular experiential styles, while working to elicit other tendencies within them (i.e., uncovering hysterical characteristics, such as extreme dependency needs or affect spread, within an obsessive-compulsive personality structure). In contrast, the purpose of the present study is to present a psychoanalytic perspective that focuses on lifting some of the constraints imposed by functioning within these dominant experiential modes themselves, while aiming towards helping patients achieve a fuller sense of phenomenological completeness. A bipolar, dialectical approach will be the method employed in exploring the relationships of certain of these modes of apprehending life to one another.
Two categories that pertain to how life may be apprehended will be discussed. Each of these categories is comprised of one set of opposite phenomenal modes, or orientations. Inwardness and outwardness have been selected as the orientations for the first category, and close and distant awareness for the second. By experiential confinement, I refer to the predominant and, at times, exclusive adherence to one such orientation (e.g., inwardness or closeness) within either of these two phenomenological sets or groupings, without the corresponding