Glossary
Each term is defined once and used consistently everywhere — in the book, the papers, and the essays.
Field (shared field)
The totality of psychological process — relational, affective, and symbolic — considered as a single continuous movement. Its capacities exist in the mode of structural potency: determinate forms the process can take, real in their structure, inexhaustible, and present wherever the process occurs.
Continuity
The field’s primary characteristic: the process has no closed boundaries — between individuals, among capacities, or across time. Continuity is what makes potencies present wherever the process occurs, and what makes every exclusion unstable: the filter selects expression but cannot interrupt the process.
Potency
A determinate form the psychological process can take: real in its structure, inexhaustible through disuse, and present wherever the process occurs. Potencies are not stored anywhere; they are structural properties of the process itself. Potency designates possible forms of experience, not equal ability or access across individuals.
Expression
The assumption of determinate form by a potency at a focal point of the process. Identity is a consolidated expressive pattern; exclusion is an expressive pattern stabilized in one region of the spectrum, with the complementary potency intact.
Filter
The stable pattern of selection that determines which potencies pass into expression at each focal point, and in what form — a functional membrane deciding what is lived as inside and what is lived as outside. Its origins remain an open question; the pattern is identifiable by what it includes and what it leaves out. Stabilized, it is lived as identity.
Fragmentation
The structural condition of any filter stabilized in one region of the spectrum while the complementary region remains unexpressed. A condition of every developed identity to some degree — a description, not a pathology.
Porosity
The filter’s informational permeability: how much field-level material — others’ affective states, group atmospheres, symbolic patterns — enters a focal point. Distinct from reactivity (a porous person may be emotionally steady), and distinct from accuracy: porosity increases exposure and sensitivity, not the correctness of interpretation.
Field Force
The structural instability of any partial expressive pattern: the corrective pressure generated when a configuration stabilizes in one region of the spectrum and must work continuously to maintain its exclusions. Not an agent or intention — what returns is excluded potency re-entering expression through the filter’s own dynamics.
Evocation · Selection · Interpretation
The three mechanisms of return. Evocation: a stabilized pattern elicits complementary behavior from others. Selection: the filter builds the environments in which the excluded pole will be demanded. Interpretation: what cannot appear as one’s own appears in the world, with disproportionate charge. None has purpose; none requires hidden agency.
Recurrence
The return of excluded potency to expression — the corrective movement generated by the maintenance of the exclusion itself. Diagnostic, not punitive: a recurring pattern indicates which polarity has had restricted access. Recurrence reads the response, never the purpose of events.
Integration
The passage of a potency into expression. Not the destruction of who one was, but the widening of what can be lived. As exclusions no longer need to be maintained, nothing returns with force.
Coherence
The state of a filter whose expression spans enough of the spectrum that emotional states grow proportionate, contradictory impulses coexist, and recurrence turns informative rather than destabilizing. Coherence — not perfection.
Local field
The configuration that emerges in a specific interaction or group. Coherence and incoherence are properties of local fields and collective filters — never of the shared field, which has no configuration to lose.
Collective filter
The selective organization of a family, culture, or institution: the pattern determining which capacities the group can hold, and which stabilize into expression in particular members.