Stanford Siver

Applications

Process work grew out of Arnold Mindell's Jungian clinical therapeutic practice, which began in the 1960's. By the 1980's he was a senior Jungian teaching analyst at the Jung Institute in Zurich and had, along with this friends and colleagues, begun to experiment with following the patterns between presenting clinical problems, night time dreams, somatic body experiences, and movement. He postulated that there was something akin to what quantum physicists call a pilot wave that lay behind the parallel experiences in these different channels of information flow. This lead to the original term "dreambody" work, which was later replaced by the term process work when it became clear that the mathematical structure in the background, the pilot wave, was shaping the experiences that occurred in each of the various channels through what Mindell called conservation of information. Process, in this sense, was then defined as the constant flow of information.

The first wave of process work, evolved from work with life issues, relationship conflicts, body symptoms, and night time dreams. Throughout the 80's it became clear that the constant flow of influences to process didn't stop at the boundaries of the therapeutic practice, or even of the client's daily life. Another channel of information flow had to be considered, the world channel.

Clinical symptoms such as depression, for example, are often related to social issues such as sexism and racism. Today this seems obvious, but in the 1980's it was considered radical to focus on these with clinical interventions. This lead to the further development of process work's model of deep democracy, a political principal that suggests that not merely all individuals but all voices, experiences, somatic experiences, nature, and spirits are important aspects of the collective chaotic dynamic in any given organization and must be listened to, interacted with, challenged, and processed for the group to develop its creativity and fluidity, leading to more sustainable solutions to group problems and disturbances.

Deep Democracy was further developed by Max Schupbach and colleagues into multi-dimensional model of organizational leadership.

Collectively these various approaches have application in individual clinical work, couples and relationship work, professional and life coaching, conflict facilitation, and organizational transformation.