Psychomaterialism

the long version

Psychomaterialism arose out of a desire to understand relationships in the most fundamental way possible. The authors used their behavioral training to notice how people responded to their circumstances. They used their psychoanalytic training to get at meanings. They used their experiential training to keep their feelings available. They looked at body movements, the way people affected one another, how people thought and felt, and then they learned to look at all of these things together. They identified the resulting whole as "energy." Over time, they learned how to track energy, see where it went, and how it behaved in all kinds of exchanges. Psychomaterialism is a way to track how energy connects to other energy, cuts off from other energy, and returns to itself. Energy becomes a richer source of information than the person's feelings, self-reports or ideas alone. It is finally a way to appreciate the other person in a relationship, and understand his need--and ours as wel--more intimately.