David Peat

66 From Certainty to UncertaintyJust as Bohr believed that complementarity had relevance far beyondthe confines of quantum theory so too the implicate order has awider significance than the world of physics alone. Indeed, it turns outits most immediate appeal has been to writers and artists. Visual artistsare concerned with ways of seeing and structuring the world. Beginningwith Impressionism, painters began to move away from the constraintsof linear, geometrical perspective in search of new orderswithin art. Cézanne, for example, wished to discover a new order forpainting, one that would acknowledge the experiments of the Impressionistsyet, at the same time, have the intellectual rigor of a Poussin.He explored form and space structured in terms of color and light, butat the same time allowed for a sense of ambiguity as, for example, apatch of green could be interpreted both as a tree in the middle distanceand as foliage in the foreground.Cézanne’s paintings come close to an implicate order in the act ofseeing. As with a hologram, each part of the painting is informed andenriched by every other. His portrait of the art dealer Ambroise Vollardrequired over 100 sittings. In the end, the painting was abandoned.Cézanne had left areas of the hands unfinished. He reasoned that,should he begin to fill in those blank areas he would in fact have torepaint the entire canvas. Thus, as Cézanne groped toward a new orderfor visual art, he knew that even the smallest area of the canvas wasbeing visually enfolded into the whole.A similar situation applies to good writing. A novel or short storycontains images and metaphors, plots and subplots, protagonists andminor characters that enfold each other, each enhancing the other, soas to give structure to the overall work. John Briggs has coined theterm “reflectafors” to refer to the way a metaphor can appear in a widevariety of forms throughout a work so that its inner structure is constantlyreflected back onto itself. Likewise, in a piece of music the orderof the entire piece can sometimes be anticipated, as enfolded withinthe opening bars.Psychotherapists know that, if they are skillful enough in their interpretation,the entire course of therapy is contained, enfolded withinthe initial interview. The Jungian analyst Michael Conforti has referredto what he terms “the archetypal field” as being established during this