Boundary Disturbances

By Joel Latner, Ph.D.

We do not passively meet the environment. We pick and choose and at the same time are picked and chosen. Although this interplay is a complex one, it is only part of the way that we participate in organizing our experience. Another important way we structure our experience is by altering our experience by manipulating the contact boundary. This can be done in many ways. Its location can be altered, so that the meeting is somewhere else than where it appears to be. The nature of the boundary itself can be changed, its characteristics altered or the boundary dissolved or ignored. These are the contact boundary disturbances.

Confluence and Projection

An instance of confluence was described earlier, in the discussion of the first, forecontact phase of figure formation. The reader will recall that the field in that phase is not differentiated, meaning that while the elements of the field are distinct, no element or elements stand out in front of the rest. In that case, there is no contact, no figure, and no boundary. When the boundary does not exist, the elements are confluent.

Another instance was mentioned in the description of the third, contact phase of figure formation. There, the individual is absorbed in the figure, not (as in the first phase) in the field. The boundary disappears when the absorption is total. We generally prefer to say that the boundary has been dissolved as a function of that phase of figure formation.

This confluence is the experience of no difference, no contact, and no meeting (because no difference). It is even so an experience. In fact, some of our most important experiences have this boundary-less dimension. Confluence is the contact boundary involved in experiences we call oceanic, when we feel at one with the universe or with God or our beloved. The boundary is dissolved in this experience of inseparability; the dissolution of the boundary provides the condition for the experience of inseparability. It is a frequent occurrence in infancy, when the child's ability to experience a meeting of differences is more occasional than it is for us. Later on, it is the characteristic contact boundary disturbance in empathic experiences, when we know another's experience because we are experiencing it as well, and perhaps, in the background, it contributes to the fellow feeling we have at those times when our relations with others are most human and special. If we create confluence by dissolving the contact boundary without knowing we are doing so, we create a situation in which we will confuse another with ourselves. We may not be able to distinguish our own thoughts or attitudes or feelings from something or someone else. This phenomenon underlies the psychology of crowds and mobs, and it is commonplace in personal relations as well. We may think we are in contact, but we are not.

Projecting, we do not dissolve the boundary; instead, we relocate it. For example, looking at a landscape, a sunny hillside, we typically make the boundary meeting between the scene and ourselves. But, if the hillside is bare and we imagine the house we might like to build on it, we see what is in our mind's eye projected onto the hillside. Projecting, we change the location of the boundary. We are looking at our own wishes against the background of the hillside, instead of looking at the bare hillside. At the boundary, we meet our own thought or feeling, something within us. If we can see that we are doing this, it is aware projection; if not, if we believe the house is out there, we are unaware that we are not just making the boundary but manipulating it

Whereas in confluence we are indistinct and the boundary is absent, in projection, we are on both sides of the boundary we have created. We make an environment of an element of ourselves, and then we meet it. If at some time in the past, you became angered by a friend and did not recognize your feeling, you may run into your friend subsequently and, looking at the friend, believe he or she is mad at you. In doing so, you disturb the contact boundary between you, relocating it so you are seeing your own anger. You project your own feeling onto the friend. Though it appears to you that the boundary joins the friend and you, it does not. You are only meeting yourself. (Of course, you will see other salient pans of the friend at the same time; the boundary disturbance concerns only the anger you have that you are projecting.)

Introjection and Retroflection

As creative synthesis, figure formation reorganizes the field according to the requirements of the present situation, in the service of growth. Using the example of our metabolism, we transform the field by choosing and taking in something from the environment and subjecting it to the digestive process. lntrojection treats digestion differently. It avoids it. In introjection, we take in an element of the environment without digesting it. Since we have not digested it, it is still in its original form (though it is in a new context).

If we imitate a gesture we have seen in a movie, we introject it. We have not made it ours--we have merely swallowed it. If we try to be the kind of person our parents wanted us to be--a dutiful husband, say, who acts responsibly and does what his wife, bosses, and peers expect--without making our own choices about these goals and attitudes so they are our own, we are acting on the basis of what we have introjected. lntrojecting is swallowing whole; introjects are what we swallow. Awares introjecting is trying something out; unawares introjecting is playing a role without knowing we have taken it on. Faintly sensing our introjects, we are like Pretty Nurse in "Penny Lane," "And though she feels as if she's in a play / She is, anyway."

When we are introjecting, as when we are projecting, we retain the nature of the boundary as a meeting of differences, but we place it farther away. What belongs to the environment--these values, or that gesture--seems to be within us. Thus, we avoid the aggressive digestive labor, the tearing and separating and destroying which is an important part of our way of making things our own. We slip out of the obligation to assess what we encounter in the light of our own values, needs, and circumstances. Instead, we swallow them just as they are given, hook, line, and sinker. As with projection, introjection sets the boundary not between ourselves and the environment, but between one part of ourselves and another.

If our lives are based on what we have introjected, our behavior may well be vague and colorless, our figures lacking in the incisiveness and definition which come from using our own compasses to guide ourselves. We will seem inauthentic to others, and we are. We are almost believable; what we say and do is nearly heartfelt, but not quite. (To the extent that what is termed "the superego" represents values which are incorporated in this fashion, we see it as a constellation of introjects.)

If we bite our tongue to keep from sniping at someone who has offended us, if we titillate or masturbate ourselves because it seems inappropriate to us to act sexually toward another person, we are retroflecting. Similarly, if we control and channel the excitement of a high-powered tennis match into our strokes and strategy, resisting the impulse we feel to hit the ball too hard or throw our racquet in the air, we are retroflecting. When we chew on the inside of our cheek and do not recognize that we are angered by someone and unwilling to chew them out, we are retroflecting unawares. In all these cases of retroflecting, we allow the boundary to retain its properties--it is not dissolved, for instance--but we disturb it by changing its location so as to alter what is being met. The boundary, typically between us and the environment--to that person who has irritated us, or turned us on--is placed instead so that we are our own environment. Then, we do something to ourselves. We are on both sides of the boundary, doing to ourselves what is intended for the other.

Egotism, Deflection, and Other Contact Boundary Disturbances

You have surely met someone who talks to hear herself speak, or to let you know how smart she is. Or someone who, while seeming to listen to you, is listening only to prepare his next response, or to convince you of his sincerity or concern for others. These interpersonal events involve the contact boundary disturbance which Gestalt therapists call egotism. Egotism is a boundary disturbance of a different order than any we have described thus far. In egotism, the boundary is not relocated, nor is it dissolved. Instead, something which is characteristic of contact boundaries is eliminated: the interplay of the meeting.

The contact boundary is the location of a meeting of differences, where the interaction of the elements which are meeting contributes to the forming of the figure. In egotism, there is a contact boundary event, a meeting. The person making the figure is intent only on his or her own contribution to the meeting. Mutuality is absent or exceedingly diminished here, the boundary seemingly one-sided because the concern here is almost exclusively with one's sense of oneself. Thus, there is no interplay, no give and take. Egotists are so tuned to their own voice, thoughts, actions, or feelings that they proceed without full knowledge of who or what they are meeting.

We may manipulate the boundary in this way, with awareness, in insisting on our right to be heard in a situation where we are being made unwelcome, for instance, or in restraining ourselves during a lengthy period of preparation and maturation during which premature commitment is invited. But egotism as a contact boundary disturbance substitutes looking at oneself for a more embracing focus upon the entirety of the meeting. The result is that you are out of touch with the part of the field which is outside oneself.

For the most part, egotism in contacting makes for stiffness and rigidity in figure formation, the quality of figures, and personal demeanor. Abandon, or just flexibility, requires a keener sense of the other that is being met than egotism allows. Nor is true spontaneity possible, because that also requires contact, not just an impulse. The only thing possible is the impulse itself without any contact, which is impulsivity.

These five contact boundary disturbances, which the authors of Gestalt Therapy described, do not exhaust the ways in which the contact boundary can be manipulated. Primary among the others which have been proposed is deflection, in which the individual relocates the boundary so that the contact is with some other individual or topic or idea or feeling--some other element of the field. If you are annoyed by your employer and come home and kick the dog, you turn the action meant for your boss to the dog by creating a boundary meeting between your dog and yourself. If you do not allow yourself to know you have been irritated by your boss and believe instead that your dog's insistent jumps onto your leg are the sole reason you are kicking him, you are deflecting outside awareness. If you bite your tongue when your boss is bawling you out unfairly and then come home and kick your dog out of frustration at the boss, your retroflecting (the biting) and deflecting (the kicking) are awares. In deflection, the impulse is directed toward a substitute in the environment. You may substitute an object, as in the example of the hapless canine (object deflection), or you may substitute a subject, as happens when a child complains about the way in which her day will be spent, "Mom, I don't want to go see those stupid people today," and Mom replies by changing the subject to the way she expresses herself, "Honeybunch, don't talk about your Aunt and Uncle that way" (subject deflection).

This listing of the contact boundary disturbances is no doubt incomplete. As Gestalt therapists continue to look at the events at the contact boundary, new structures will undoubtedly be recognized. For instance, an additional boundary disturbance, provisionally named conflection, consists of doing to yourself what you wish for yourself. An example is the kind of idle caressing--rubbing their face or arm or fingers with their own hands--which people do sometimes while talking about themselves. Here the desire is not to caress someone else; that would be retroflecting. Rather, it is to have another caress you. In this instance, the boundary is relocated as it is in retroflection, transferred from its intended place where you and the other meet and placed instead so you meet yourself. You have made an environment, an other, of yourself. Some forms of masturbation are instances of this, as is the action of a woman who says to the person to whom she is making love, by way of instruction, "Here, touch me like this," and touches herself to illustrate her words.

Boundary disturbances play an important role in the formation of good figures, as tools in the service of the creative imagination and healthy, free functioning. When the boundary is disturbed unawares, however, these creative energies become implicated in the disabilities and miseries which beset us. They allow us to avoid aspects of the field and thus make it possible for us to construct the inadequate and unsatisfying, painful and destructive solutions and achievements which typify those miseries and disabilities. The use of the term "disturbance" in contact boundary disturbance, however, is intended to suggest only which the normal boundary functions have been interrupted or altered, not that the individual is disturbed.