In this series of posts for the EPA Blog I invite you to join me in an exploration of words we might draw on to distil and convey what happens in the therapy space. Each of the words I share carries in its belly a vital image or story that can help us convey the art of psychosynthesis therapy. Our word this week is understanding.
3. Understanding (v.) "to comprehend, hold a sympathetic view, appreciate the essence or root of something"
Before healing, before change or transformation, we turn to therapy to understand and to have the experience of being understood. We seek to understand the turmoil of our feelings, the legacy of our childhood, the longings of our hearts. We ache to be held in the cradle of understanding, to be intimately ‘known’. I have come to believe that understanding (and being understood) is not a prelude to transformation. It is the very heart of transformation itself. Understanding, it seems to me, is that aspect of knowing and being known which
constitutes love.
So what is the nature of understanding? Through careless use words often find themselves cut off from their roots. We forget that they began as living fires burning bright, as flickering images casting light on the intricate particularity of experience. Over time words get re-purposed and even distorted beyond recognition. So it is that the verb to ‘understand’ has come to infer the ‘grasping’ of an idea, the ‘capture’ of a nugget of knowledge. Viewed in this way understanding might give us a sense of control, a satisfying experience of encapsulation. I want to offer a rather different view of understanding as I have experienced it within the therapeutic encounter.
Held in the warmth of our attention, the word 'understanding' quickly offers up the perspective of standing-under something. Under-standing, it seems, rests in a profound humility of perspective. It surfaces from a willingness to stand in ‘negative capability’ 1 , in the vulnerability of not-knowing. As a psychotherapist I am blessed with knowledge and experience, but I do not know this incomparable being who sits with me now, this person who barely knows herself. The stance I offer is not that of being ‘the one who knows’, but of someone who is open and committed to a gradual dawning of understanding which unfolds through a sustained attitude of wondering together.
This attitude of ‘negative capability’ is particularly important within a psychosynthesis context since we understand that the person before us does not arrive fully ‘made-up’ (a mere consequence of history). They are a living story continuously unfolding, forever bringing forth new dimensions of being (see my earlier blog ‘conceiving’ 30 May 2025). Since the human being is always ‘becoming’, the process of understanding is never complete, never fully comprehended, never finally grasped.
To recover an even more vital sense of understanding, I find myself looking into to the linguistic roots of the word. It turns out that the ‘under’ of under-standing originally stems from the PIE root *nter- which means ‘between’, ‘amongst’ or ‘amidst’ (as in the Latin inter). This same root gives us ‘intermediate’, ‘interaction’, ‘intercourse’, ‘internal’ and ‘interest’, words which imply an intimacy of relational encounter. To understand we need to ‘stand in the midst’ of the psychological field, to enter into the dynamics of interaction. We pay attention to what bubbles up in the intermediate space between us.
This insight into the relational nature of understanding came home to me with heartfelt clarity on a recent visit to an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. In my wanderings, I stumbled on a little painting from a sixteenth century Persian manuscript 2 . A tender portrayal of what we might know as the Rapunzel story, the painting depicts two figures, a woman reaching down and a man reaching up in an intimate gesture of reciprocity and longing. A braid of jet-black hair stretches taut between the woman and the man, simultaneously separating and connecting them.
Long after I have left the museum, the motif of the braid of raven hair impresses on my imagination. Reflecting on it since, I realise that the braid makes visible the connective tissue of the gap. When we offer one another our wholehearted attention (a-tension), this intermediate space becomes a medium of transmission, a living field of potential inter-standing. This inter-standing cannot arise through identification or merger (from closing the gap). Nor does it arrive from standing-apart in an attitude of objective observation. For inter-standing to arise, both ends of the gap need to be held firmly in place.
Conceived in this way, understanding is not the excavation of buried knowledge, not something to be hunted down or captured, and certainly not something to be bottled and labelled. Understanding is essentially co-created within a field of awareness which is conceived from the tautness of attention which holds the gap between us.
You can find a more detailed exploration of this little painting at
www.susanholliday.co.uk/articles
REFERENCES
1 The concept of 'negative capability' was first coined by John Keats in a letter to his brothers in December 1817. Keats defined it as 'the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'.
2 ‘Zal approaches the palace of Rudabeh’ – Persian miniature from a manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nama c.1590 currently on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.