The book
The Method & Atlas
For the problem every experienced clinician meets — the intervention that is right and still doesn't land — you need a language and a map that no single school provides. That is what this book sets out to give.
What's inside
The full architecture, in three parts plus the Method Atlas and Appendices A–K: the two domains and the canonical operator; the variables of reality-formation; the axioms; the phenomenological invariants; and the clinical configurations for working with patients.
From the book
How the theory was built
I didn't set out to build a system. DDSRF was collected in the consulting room, over years. The phenomenological invariants came first — recurring structural features of experience, the same ones surfacing across very different patients; in time they came to about thirty. It took longer to see that experience forms not from a single source but in parallel layers, and longer still to see that the layers have an order: the same material, taken in a different sequence, comes out differently. I ended up calling that contextual non-commutativity. The notation came only when none of this would pass to anyone without it; then the configurations, the patterns the invariants settle into; and finally the axioms — eight of them by the seventh version, A0–A7. The book lays the architecture out in full.
Two domains, one phenomenon
Take a patient in derealization. You can describe it from inside: the world has gone flat, like a backdrop; familiar things lose their density; faces look subtly other; time passes as if behind glass; he watches himself from a step away. That is the experience itself — what DDSRF calls the phenomenological domain. Or you can describe what produces it: a particular autonomic state, a shift in how the body registers itself, certain developmental conditions behind it — the mechanistic domain. Both are about the same derealization, and neither reduces to the other. DDSRF asks that a serious clinical claim hold in both at once — not one in place of the other.
A formal language, not mathematics
The notation isn't there to calculate anything — it's there to keep the levels from blurring into each other. Bion used algebraic signs in Learning from Experience, and Freud built his metapsychological schemas, for the same reason: to think more strictly, not to do arithmetic. The central line reads R(t) = Cα[Pσ(t), S(t), N(t)] — the reality a person forms at a given moment (R) as an integration (Cα) of predictive activity (Pσ), the intersubjective field (S), and narrative (N); body, life-world and history enter the fuller version. It is not mathematics; like S/N/T/F in a personality typology, it is a short name for something complex. The fuller form, and the axioms behind it, are in the book.
How it relates to the tool
The tool is for daily, pre-intervention reading. The book is the full Method & Atlas — the source text the tool draws on.
For whom
Clinicians of any school, supervisors, teachers, and researchers. It can be read linearly or used as a reference through the Atlas.
Editions & where to read it
Planned in English (6×9″) and Russian (A4 hardcover). When it is available, you'll be able to choose where to buy it.
Notify me when it's availableThe Method & Atlas is forthcoming. There is no purchase here — when a listing is live, this will link out to your choice of retailer. Until then, you can ask to be notified.
Based on the DDSRF Method and Atlas, forthcoming.