David Peat

From Object to Process 67first encounter—as if during this 50-minute meeting a field of attractionbecame structured, a field that would persist throughout the entirecourse of therapy that could last months or years. In turn, whattranspires during therapy is so often an aspect, compressed within eachtherapeutic session, of the pattern of an entire life.Indeed the Jungian archetypes themselves have something in commonwith Bohm’s implicate order. The archetypes are the structuringprinciples that underlie individual and collective behavior. As structuringprinciples they are never perceived or experienced directly butappear as images and myths and are manifest within dreams and patternsof behavior. Someone has a dream of a person, lost in a darkwood, who encounters a white-haired man holding a map and plasticcompass. The person in the dream is not an actual archetype but aparticular symbolization, or manifestation, of an archetypal structuringprinciple. Just as one cannot encounter the implicate order directlyso too one can never “see” the archetypes. Rather, one encounters theirmanifest forms or explicate orders. A Jungian analyst would recognizethe man encountered in the wood as a particular manifestation of thearchetype of the Wise Old Man and would begin to look for similarfigures in the patient’s dreams. Since such figures are universal to allcultures, what is of more interest are the explicate details in the dream.These have been added or created by the patient’s personal unconscious.Why is the compass made of plastic and not metal? What maythis be saying about the patient’s relationship to his or her therapist?From within their respective disciplines, Bohm and Jung discoveredunderlying and hidden orders that structure the world around us.In Jung’s case, the archetypes or structuring principles of the collectiveunconscious can never be touched directly. They appear only throughtheir manifestations in the consciousness and personal unconscious.In Bohm’s case, one infers the implicate through its various manifestationsand unfoldings into the explicate.Archetypes and the implicate order are less theories about theworld than explanatory principles. Yet Bohm also wished to develop ascientific theory appropriate to the order of the quantum world andthis meant a mathematical language that would express the implicateorder. Along with his colleague, Basil Hiley, Bohm studied an algebra