Letter from the Editor

There are many beginnings in a therapeutic relationship — from the first phone contact, to the initial session, to the moment when two people find themselves poised between merger and otherness. When a patient wonders: “Are we from the same dirt?” I'm aware of the awkward beauty of a question that asks: “How is it that we feel so similar?” To offer the fantasy of a shared origin story may be an expression of the desire to begin once again, perhaps with the hope that this time things will be different.

Bollas (1979) writes about another type of origin story: how it comes about that we enter into lifelong search for an object outside of us that promises internal transformation. The experience of having oneself or one's inner states transformed is originally encoded in the body when, as infants, we are cared for in ways that alter our physical and mental states, long before we acquire language or the ability to distinguish between self and other. For adults, traces of this identificatory process of change remain mostly outside of awareness, but can continue to influence present experience as the search for “an object (person, place, event, ideology) that promises to transform the self” (p. 97). The search for objects that function as signifiers of this archaic somatic/environmental state, in order to surrender to a process that influences the rhythms of self-experience, can never be fully satisfied — and this has a tragic feel to it, especially when we are trapped in mis-locating the source of transformative internal experiences as exclusively outside of ourselves.

Dirt can occupy the mind in a number of ways. To the alchemist, dirt is a materia prima, a substance that is dull and formless as well as alive with potential, a substance waiting to receive what has yet to be articulated or containing meanings outside of language. It is a state of mind that sees everything in nothing. This transitional space between inert formlessness and generative potential brings to mind W