Paper

The Shared Field Model describes psychological life as organized by one kind of entity at several scales: the mental field.This paper states the model in its full form, as an idealist account of nested mental fields, developed as an extension of Michael Levin’s proposal of a space of forms.

10.5281/zenodo.23789427

In Brief:

1. Psychological life is organized by one kind of entity, the mental field, which appears at several scales.
2. The largest the model treats is the shared field: a structured space of mental forms (capacities, polarities, and recurring relational and affective configurations) common to all.
3. Cultures, families and persons are fields nested within it, each drawing on the whole and expressing a selection.
4. Each is bounded by a reduction valve, a stable pattern of selection that limits which forms can be expressed, held in place by a goal for as long as the pattern has a purpose.
5. Because every polarity is one form with two poles, a person stabilized at one pole has to keep excluding the other, and that ongoing exclusion is felt from inside as charge.
6. What a person excludes tends to be expressed around them: evoked in partners, sought in environments, read into situations.
7. Within a family, the excluded is distributed as roles, which is why roles reassign when a member leaves; across generations, the same exclusions can be staged again with new casts.
8. Between persons, nothing needs to be transmitted: both draw on the same field, and ordinary channels carry only a selection among forms both can already reach.
9. What requires explanation is therefore not connection but the appearance of separateness, which the model locates in the boundary of each nested field.
10. The field exists and it is mental: the model extends to psychology Levin’s proposal of a structured space of patterns that in-forms embodiments, and adds that the space is mind.