¹ Even where separate individuals appear as shamans who are more or less permanently in a state of consciousness identified as that of one or another animal, magical and meditative work is still needed to preserve the shamanic boundaries. Thus, according to some thinkers, while the shamanic state often begins with the suffering of an ego-shattering experience in middle-childhood, it is only because it is valued, and therefore nurtured and developed in adulthood, that it continues and flourishes thereafter (Campbell, 1976); when the social structure that gives it meaning disappears, however, it takes on a form that locks it into pathological systemic structures, as Jaynes (1990) and the ‘Anti-psychiatry’ movement of the 1960s (Laing, 1960; Szasz, 1972, 1973) have pointed out with regard to the way that schizophrenics in particular are seen and responded to in modern day society.

² In the psychiatric literature it has mainly been time and temporality that have been discussed in this context (see Minkowski, 1933).

³ Sources for the material in this and the preceding paragraph are quoted in Jaynes (1990, pp. 425—430). There would therefore seem to be a strong connection between schizophrenia and what we have earlier referred to as the paleolithic form of ‘participatory’ consciousness. We could speculate that what today is a handicap—given our abstract form of reasoning, and its containment within a spacio-temporal dimensional framework—would have given a distinct evolutionary advantage to schizophrenic tendencies within the paleolithic world. Jaynes makes a similar point from a different but related perspective.

⁴ Some post-Coasian economic theories of the firm and its boundaries also provide interesting models for theories of personal boundaries. Many of the more sophisticated models have felt the need to include cooperative and symbiotic elements in them—the equivalent of what we have referred to as the participative function within ecological accounts of the person (see Axelrod, 1984; Richardson, 1972).

⁵ Understanding boundaries as facilitators of distinct modes of connection rather than as excluders of connection (as in the classic account) or as completely open doors that do not modulate the inner/outer relationship at all, is not at all restricted to the implications that can be drawn from Piaget's account alone. Gibson's ecological account of perception, for example, has similar implications. Based on a process view of evolution, in which phenotypic creativity rather than genotypic accident plays the major role, and in which the sources of this activity rather than the consequences are stressed, Gibson goes on to analyse this activity of species into two modes—‘effectivities’ and ‘affordances’. Effectivities are the powers that members of the species have on their environmental context, while affordances are, conversely, their susceptibilities to this context. These are not to be seen simply as causal mechanisms because they are—even in rudimentary life systems—semiotic processes as well, involving as they do meaning relationships in the mediation process (Gibson, 1979). A different but related view is also to be found in Volosinov (1973), who places the subjective psyche itself (or at least that part of it that carries out linguistically-based operations) already in the transitional space of the boundary: ‘… the subjective psyche is to be localised somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline … but the encounter is not a physical one; the organism and the outside world meet here in the sign. Psychic experience is the semiotic expression of the contact between the organism and the outside world’ (quoted in Leiman, 1992). It is worth while noting that this is also Vygotsky's view and in the latter it is based on a wider view of what constitutes the sign than the more narrowly linguistic notion of Volosinov. Here, therefore, the view of the function of the boundary as mediating the form of contact between inner and outer is quite explicitly stated (Vygotsky, 1978).

⁶ Related to field theory, and derived from the same source, is General Systems theory; associated with the approach of Von Bertalanffy (1968) and his followers. Reversing the classical paradigm in which the physical is seen as the one-sided derminant of the biological, open systems are, in this theory, characterised by a continuous cycle of input, internal transformation, output, and informational feedback. Environment and system are understood as being in a state of interaction and mutual dependence, though which a regularity of form and a distinctness of the system from the environment are maintained. Unlike closed systems, which form idealised models for the operation of the laws of thermodynamics, open systems are characterised by attempts to sustain themselves by importing energy to offset entropic tendencies. They are thus seen as exhibiting tendencies towards an increase in negative entropy. While the early development of systems theory was characterised by a concern for equilibrium and homeostasis, more recently emphasis has shifted to instability, systemic transformation, learning, etc. (Maruyama, 1963, Bateson, 1972, Prigogine, 1984, Maturana and Varela, 1992).