ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relevance of holism through a phenomenological lens, teasing out what purposes and developmental realities (and illusions) are revealed through the presence of the ‘wish’ to experience personal, relational, communal, and/or spiritual wholeness. This wish may take many forms, from a fleeting moment of felt and sensed integration which gives birth to a wish for something more long-lasting, through to a mentalised commitment to adopting attitudes and disciplines which aim at fostering a sustained sense of wholeness. Phil Goss argues for the presence of more than a classical Jungian emphases on archetypal polarities between wholeness and plurality (or even disintegration) of being and describes the mechanics of a tendency in the psyche, illustrated by some fictionalised clinical material, to ‘migrate’ towards holism as a desirable state even when life, and powerful social and intellectual influences, have us migrating in the other direction.
Applying a predominantly Jungian lens to this exploration, with Fordham’s de/re-integration dynamic as a guide, and drawing on other frames of reference including neuroscience to approach questions about holism, Goss posits that the human instinct to wish reflects the presence of a searching function (‘the holistic wish’) which seeks a sustained sense of organismic integrity.
