Abstract

The margin is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, it exists only when someone chooses or is forced to live there. The margin is a boundary that no longer simply separates an inside from an outside, but expands and becomes “something.”

In this article we address the characteristics of margin and marginality both as anthropological and social phenomena and as intrapsychic and field phenomena.

Margin plays an important role in both social and individual equilibrium. Above all, it is a phenomenon that allows us to survive discrimination and develop awareness, and can become a driver of important changes in the organizations that generate it and the individuals who inhabit them.

For Gestalt Therapy, the margin takes on a further meaning as a variant of the “contact boundary” phenomenon where all exchanges between the individual and the world take place, where we assimilate what makes us grow and reject what harms us.

Becoming aware of how we ourselves sustain the marginalization of people, events and our own identifications is essential to give dignity to necessary changes that we continue to avoid due to old fears, prejudices and/or complacency.

The margin is a border that becomes habitable.

A border isn’t a habitable space; it’s a limit that has both a here and a there. It can be rigid, flexible, permeable, or impassable, but in any case it simultaneously unites and separates two different entities.

One lives on this side of the border and one lives beyond it. On this side of my skin there is me, on the other side there is the environment, the world, the other. On the border one comes into contact with the world, but one cannot live there.

Borders identify and differentiate. Without borders, differences would not be possible, and without differences, there would be no life as we know it.

Every living organism, from bacteria to plants to animals, lives by transforming what is outside itself into itself. And all this happens thanks to boundaries.

For us human beings, “boundaries” have become particularly important because they separate not only what is me from what is not me, but also what is permitted from what is not permitted within a given historical, cultural, political, and religious framework. For example, with the invention of private and state property, what is mine has been separated from what is not, what is ours from what is not.

Consequently, in patriarchal societies, boundaries acquired an additional function linked to the ownership and control of sexuality. In matriarchal societies, where matrilineality prevailed, there could be no doubt whose children belonged to whom and in which family they should grow up. Patriarchy introduced patrilineality, but since there was no clear evidence to determine whether the children belonged to a specific father, it became necessary to invent boundaries that limited women’s freedom and sexuality.

It has become crucial to define a space where those in power can apply and enforce their laws and have their language spoken: the homeland, the heritage, the patriarchal family are surrounded by secure and often rigid borders. The defense of these borders becomes such a priority that one can die and even kill for them. The border thus becomes a place of control and to be controlled.

 

“When we try to analyse a system of imposition we must always look at the margins. These are part of the system itself, which in turn creates them. At the margins are lives for which it is impossible to access the system which has nevertheless been imposed on them. Imposition is not about remaining outside the system but on its margins: they are the monsters that confirm the normality of normality.”[1]

 

It may be useful and important, at this point, to mention the intersectional approach that has become widespread in political and academic debate and owes much to the feminist and anti-racist struggles of the late 20th century. Intersectionality offers a perspective that connects all existing post-colonial oppressive/normative systems; they exert synergistic control and power through social, cultural, national, and geopolitical interconnections. In other words, systematized discrimination and social divides—that is, the production of margins and marginalizations such as sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia—are connected and intertwined across the board. Consequently, their impact on the experiences of people with different minority affiliations is amplified, and single identity categories are insufficient to grasp the complexity of the marginalized phenomenon. This reading also highlights the privileges of belonging to majority groups, often experienced unconsciously. [2]

When control and power replace free and spontaneous interest in human relationships, tension, discomfort, suffering, and even compensatory phenomena easily develop, one of which is marginalization.

It can happen that a boundary is “expanded” and becomes a habitable space: that is, a margin develops. Any entity has a single boundary that surrounds and identifies it; as we have said, it separates and unites the inside from the outside. The margin, on the other hand, has the characteristic of being able to have two boundaries: one that separates and unites it from the outside of the entity of which it is a part, and another that separates and unites it from the inside of the entity of which it is a part. The margin is therefore part of a larger entity but is separate from it, and whoever or whatever lives within it is part of the larger entity but is also differentiated from it.

Sometimes margins are created entirely within an entity. This is only possible if the entity that produced them finds a way to use them, to make them functional to a balance[3]. If this does not happen, either they are reabsorbed and the people who inhabited them are pushed towards the external margins of the entity where the marginal zones can be recreated, or they become ghettos. Whoever or whatever lives within a margin is marginalized, and marginalization is the phenomenon we will now try to understand.

I said who or what inhabits the margins because they are not only living beings marginalized by social phenomena such as tribes, families, cities, states, but also characteristics of the human being, emotions, identifications, experiences that can be marginalized in being and end up inhabiting “places” that could otherwise be uninhabitable.

To better understand this phenomenon we must refer to the Gestalt concept of “contact boundary”[4]. For Gestalt therapy a boundary becomes a contact boundary when I, the subject, become aware of the actions that are taking place on the boundary between me and the environment at that moment.

Gestalt therapy defines the experience of the self as the experience of the contact boundary in action. I fully experience what it means to be myself, that is, the self, when I consciously live the experience of being simultaneously united and separate from the environment, when I experience sensorially, emotionally, cognitively and, for those who believe, spiritually the continuous flow that occurs in the “organism/environment field”[5].

As long as this phenomenon, which Gestalt defines as “full contact”, occurs, the border becomes a place inhabitable by me and the environment at the same time and we become a new entity that we could define as “organism-environment”[6].

It would be useful to delve deeper into the concepts of Satori and Enlightenment, with which Indian philosophy describes this state of awareness. But for this essay, I’m interested in another phenomenon: what happens when people are forced to live on this uninhabitable space called the border. That is, when inhabiting a border isn’t a consequence of an active contact boundary but rather the consequence of an experience of danger and/or coercion and/or escape and/or refuge and/or maladjustment and/or expulsion, etc. In other words, when we inhabit a margin.

We’ve seen that turning a physical boundary into a contact boundary requires awareness. Awareness of the assimilable novelty and the actions needed to assimilate or reject it in that context.[7].

Margins are functional to societies because they become a habitable place for those who do not conform to the dominant identifications within it but whom the latter cannot eliminate or lock up in prisons or mental institutions.

Likewise, the margins are functional for the marginalized because they become a habitable place for them to protect themselves, support themselves, and create families alternative to the socially recognized ones.

Like all phenomena that develop in the organism/environment field, the margin is a phenomenon that we find not only in the environment in which human beings live, but also in human beings themselves.

We humans do not live in objective reality, but in lived reality[8], in which we can hallucinate any reality and create margins in which to inhabit when the suffering caused by living in a difficult and dangerous environment becomes unbearable for us.

This is what happens in a striking way in psychosis; even in what we call neuroses we can witness the marginalization of parts of ourselves, which I prefer to call possible identifications, unacceptable due to introjected and unassimilated rules.

It’s not just the environment that marginalizes those who hold beliefs unacceptable to the dominant society. People also marginalize themselves and seek out margins in which to live out these beliefs, to try to be themselves.

We can therefore hypothesize that the “edge” phenomenon is a variant of the “contact boundary” phenomenon. A variant that becomes necessary, useful, and possible when being myself is made painful or impossible by threats to my survival.

These threats can come from the external environment or the internal environment, but they have in common the belief that there is nowhere else to go, a place where one can be free to be oneself.

So we create this place in a place that doesn’t exist and, if it doesn’t exist, it can’t be subject to those pressures and threats: we create a margin or we go looking for marginal areas that already exist and where we can find experiences similar to ours.

Much has been written on this topic by authors such as Michel Foucault, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and others. Their writings reveal that awareness appears to be present and necessary in these phenomena, albeit in different ways.

If we are free to assimilate or reject the novelty we develop in our encounter with the environment, then awareness of this novelty creates a contact boundary that generates the experience of the self. If, however, the novelty is overwhelming and/or terrifying, unbearable for my dignity and my being, some alternatives open up. If I can find help around me, I can fight and regain the right to reject the novelty. If I am alone and can only endure, I will experience trauma. If I manage to escape, I become an exile, a migrant, I will seek a better environment in which to live. If I find a margin in which to take refuge, I will create or join communities of people like me, of marginalized people with whom I can build solidarity and support.

When there is solidarity and support, contact processes restart[9], in these marginal areas new awarenesses develop which will become novelties on the border with the marginalising society.

If this marginalization concerns the individual’s inner life, new awarenesses put the ego and above all the personality function into crisis.

To explain myself better I must refer back to the concept of field.

The most accepted etymology for the word “field” comes from the Greek “skapto,” meaning to split, to dig. A piece of land became a field when the farmer plowed it, transforming it, making it suitable for his needs.

This is also the GESTALT definition of creative adaptation: adapting to the environment while changing it.

As humans began to clear the land, cultivate it, and modify it, they began to be changed by these new environments. Cultivated land provided more food, but less variety. Diets changed, and so did social interactions. The field was no longer just an environment that had been altered by humans to produce different crops, but an environment that made human beings different.

Nel campo organismo/ambiente si sviluppano le novità che modificano sia l’ambiente che l’individuo.

Being forced to live on the margins is a novelty that generates awareness in marginalized people. This awareness will be novel for the institutions[10] that host these margins. If the novelties are assimilated, they will generate new awareness that will be novel for marginalized people, and so on in what becomes a hermeneutic circle.

If the novelties coming from the margins are not assimilable then the entity will tend to become rejecting and aggressive towards the margins.

Both of these phenomena occur continuously and simultaneously.

The marginalization to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and ageist people were subjected generated the awareness that resulted in the LGBTQ+ movement. The novelty represented by this movement was easily assimilated by some sectors of the host organization, generating new awareness. For other sectors, it was a novelty that could not be assimilated and generated rejection and repression.

When the answer is twofold, complexity increases because even on the margins, new awareness, rejection, and aggression will develop.

For hermeneutic circles to develop that ensure continuous growth in awareness and new changes, it is important that judgments be suspended and that new developments generate curiosity and a desire to understand those strategic identities/identifications, the narratives outside the norm, that can transform reality as a whole.

We have seen the phenomenon of margin and marginalization as a consequence of discrimination, repression, expulsion, etc. This too seems to be a consequence of the use of borders in patriarchal societies.

In Mosuo society, a matriarchal ethnic group living around Lugu Lake in southwest China, girls live in special rooms called “flower rooms.” These rooms have two doors: one facing the outside of the family home where they live, through which they can let their lovers in, and one opening into the interior of the house or courtyard through which they interact with their family. This system is part of their marriage practice called “walking marriage,” where relationships are often temporary and men visit women at night but do not live with them. Children born from these unions belong to the mother’s family and are raised by the maternal community, maintaining a matrilineal family structure.

Thus, these girls’ rooms become the edges of the maternal community’s boundaries. They have a boundary toward the outside of the community and a boundary toward the inside.

In this case, however, the margin does not arise from an attempt to distance or expel unwanted people, people who challenge the dominant culture. On the contrary, there is a real need to create privileged places of contact where girls, and even those they invite, can meet in a space of safety and autonomy, protected from the temptations of control by the family.

A margin is created to preserve the balance and internal coherence of an entity while allowing for the existence of minority differences that cannot be assimilated for the moment[11].

The fact that in patriarchal societies, dominance and power develop with expulsive and repressive characteristics fuels the emergence of margins that become places primarily of survival and, with difficulty, of the birth of new awareness.

In matriarchal societies where participation and support develop with inclusive and creative characteristics, the margins become places of free experience, protected even from the interference of society itself.

The function of the margin therefore seems to be to contain experiences that bring novelties that cannot be assimilated by the host organization but which can produce new transformative awareness for the organization as well.

This doesn’t make the margins idealized places. If the entity that develops the margin uses repression, oppression, and violence to maintain power and balance, we will easily find these dynamics within the margins as well, and new awarenesses will often be tainted by them.

In Gestalt therapy we work with experiences of marginalization. Those experiences that in PHG are described as “Triumph over the self” [12].

Our studios, the rooms where we train, are not marginal; no one can live there. They become marginal spaces of full citizenship and the coexistence of differences. As sufficiently safe places, they enable the emergence and sharing of experiences of discrimination and discrimination, suffering, and internal marginalization built to resist the stigma of external marginalization. They are places where new awarenesses can be developed that enhance human excitement and growth. This can only happen, however, if our work continually challenges us as professionals, reveals the impact of dominant stereotypes within us, and brings to light our own internal and external marginalizations.

But it is important that we are aware that we are challenging, at least for the duration of our sessions, patriarchal introjects and not only, in human relationships.

This is important because the people in our courses and sessions experience a quality of being that they can’t immediately reproduce or find in the external environment. I always tell our students, at the end of the five-day intensive residential programs, that people at home haven’t had their experience; they will be in a different dimension of being, and this doesn’t make them wrong.

Our patients and students modify the functioning of their personality function by developing a matriarchal intentionality[13], even if we do not often use these terms, which will put their environment into crisis. It is important that they are aware of this.

 

NOTE

[1] Brigitte Vasalo – PER UNA RIVOLUZIONE DEGLI AFFETTI pag. 94)

[2] Crenshaw Kimberlè – Demarginalizing the intersection of Race and Sex. A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics – University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol n° 1 – 1989,

[3] See the areas where prostitution and/or drug dealing are particularly concentrated.

[4] Perls, Hefferline, Goodman – Teoria e Pratica della Terapia della Gestalt- Astrolabio – Roma .1971

[5] For Gestalt Therapy, the organism/environment field is a phenomenon that must always be considered in its symbiotic unity, since there are no organisms that can live separately from an environment and there are no environments that do not host organisms.

[6] It is not a typo, it is a proposed neologism, to describe the experience in which organism and environment are no longer distinct entities, even if in symbiosis, but become a single being.

[7] PHG – Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy

[8] E. Husserl – Ricerche Logiche – Il Saggiatore – Milano – 2015

[9] Laura Perls – Living at the Boundary – Rivista Gestalt Pr – 1 gennaio 1991

[10] I use the term Entity in the Husserlian sense of “object of consciousness” that the individual intends, that is, to which he or she attributes meaning. A trans woman, a white entrepreneur, an illegal immigrant, and a middle-class student may live in the same city, but the entity of the city is very different for each of them.

[11] Like the marginal notes of the text

[12] Perls, Hefferline , Goodman – Teoria e Pratica della Terapia della Gestalt – Astrolabio –

[13] An attribution of meaning that influences vision and movement towards the external environment

Bibliography

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• Crenshaw Kimberlè – Demarginalizing the intersection of Race and Sex. A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics – University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol n° 1 – 1989,
• Perls, Hefferline, Goodman – Teoria e Pratica della Terapia della Gestalt– Astrolabio – Roma .1971
• Foucault – Sorvegliare e punire – Einaudi – Torino – 1975
• Foucault – Storia della follia nell’età classica – Einaudi – Torino – 1961
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