Good Form
As children develop skills within the core of experience established at the first tier, their responses are honed for precision and efficiency. They identify features in their surroundings more quickly through constellations of sensory inputs and navigate through the world more effectively. These inchoate constellations of sensory guidance remain grounded on a viscerally guided experience base and are only gradually differentiated into recognizable entities at the verbal-symbolic tier.
We increasingly rely on sensory guidance because the form-based world we create offers a degree of mastery and control that would otherwise be impossible. It provides a more rapid, accurate and reliable means of identifying the significant realities we encounter. It is more rapid because it enables minimally detected contours and forms to serve as the basis for family resemblance identifications and more accurate because constellations of contours and forms trigger identifications with a high probability. It is more reliable because form identifications are less swayed by visceral processes that vary from one moment to the next.
Picture a gradually evolving landscape as the dominance of visceral guidance gives way to identifiable forms and recognizable entities. We become increasingly dependent on form-based identifications and gain competence in exploring an expanding range of experiences. We are led to exploration by visceral processes that incline us toward our interests, and we learn to recognize a seemingly unlimited variety of new forms. The speed and accuracy of form-based identifications enable us to quickly discover a broad spectrum of experiences in an ever-expanding world.
We are led away from a realm of visceral dominance toward the form-based world throughout childhood. Identifications that are initially identified viscerally as personally significant become articulated as recognizable forms. This process governs our development and continues as our primary path to knowledge as we explore and expand the world we know. New aspects of the world are identified viscerally because of their personal significance and differentiated by form as entities. They can then be designated with names and recognized by name alone.
The development of “good form” occurs gradually as we become increasingly guided by the identification of sensory guided contours and forms rather than by visceral sources of personal significance. We thereby distance ourselves from the visceral underbelly that grounds our world of entities. This is not a process of “covering up” an “unsettling way of being” as Heidegger suggests; it involves identifying a simplified version of the world that gives us more power and greater control. As we assume control of the world we learn to recognize, we lose awareness of its visceral significance. We take our part as rational actors on a world stage of our own construction.
We remain in control as long as we initiate responses in accordance with the form of the entities we have identified. Our adherence to “good form” can slip in response to the force of persistent, powerful visceral states like anxiety and depression. Rorschach’s test is highly sensitive to slippages in the quality of the “good form” determinants we rely on to generate well-defined perceptual responses to its ambiguous inkblot images. In psychosis, “good form” is lost as the visceral ground breaks through the boundaries of our rational, form-based façade and the primary process thinking of our visceral base intrudes upon our waking thoughts.
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