Background Fields
In the Tschierv seminar, Mindell. began the seminar by
telling a story about carrots in a garden. He used an
analogy of how we tend to focus on the carrots and to forget
about the earth that the carrots are growing in. The carrots
are like the issues and problems we encounter in groups, and
the earth, which is often ignored, is the dreambody or
dreaming process in the background of every group. This is
what Jung would call the collective unconscious, Pribram and
Bohm would call holomovement, and Lewin would refer to as the
field.
This background field, or dreambody, is seen as being
organized by the patterns of behavior present in the group,
at any given time and is not dictated by time and space.
This background field is one of the most important components
of group process work. It contains, as I mentioned before,
the secondary process of the group. Within this container
are both au the causal and noncausal aspects of groups. The
causal structures are those such as the primary and secondary