I am here to document a thought that I will develop further later.
Intelligibility broadly, thinking in general, has something to do with the relationship between structure and process. A historian, for example, has access to certain 'structures': written documents, archeologically excavated buildings and objects, any sort of pattern or stable object. From these structures historians seek to derive and describe process. The Declaration of Independence is not significant in its own right, but is significant in that it belongs to a process whereby people tried to create certain forms of government.
Medicine, similarly, tries to explain processes with reference to structures. We notice that a person's living is painful, that their body struggles or hurts in certain ways. These are fundamentally processes, ongoing activities whereby people live. We try to explain these in terms of structures: this pathogen has entered your body, this flaw exists in your neurology or genetic code. These structures (pathogens, flaws) are then employed to explain the quality of an ongoing process.
Most epistemoligies are overly concerned with structures. As Gendlin says in a provocatively titled essay, however, 'Process generates structure, Structures alone don't generate process'. How do we think in a way that foregrounds process?
This problem is especially difficult because our normal way of using language is structure-bound. I am employing strings of letters into words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are structures. But my use of these structures is in process. I was thinking about these ideas in conversation with someone this morning. I am doing this writing in the midst of the larger process of my day. I am deferring eating and showering because I wanted to document these thoughts.
It seems to me that trauma in the broadest sense is essentially about process: it concerns our ongoing activity. We can certainly say that there are 'structures' associated with trauma: neurological patterns indicative of chronic threat; epigentic change in genetic expression; patterns of speech and activity. But the fundamental reality of trauma is not in the structures, it is in the process of the living body. Those structures are ancillary to those processes.
Gendlin's work shows that structural thinking (language) can be employed within a larger frame of process (experiencing). I would like to propose that medicine and trauma stand in analogous relation to one another. Adopting a process/trauma frame does not mean that we don't value or look to medical intervention. It means that medicine must be situated within a larger trauma framework, just as language/structure must be situated within a larger framework of experiencing/trauma.
These are fancy, high level, abstract things to say. My sense is that it is a basically correct statement or formulation.
But I do not yet know what these structures mean. My process must go further, still.
