A concise manifesto for an anthropology rooted in lived experience, it critiques abstract, system-driven models and centers the ordinary, contingent, and relational facets of life. Emphasizing intersubjectivity, narrative, and the ethical stakes of fieldwork, it shows how people improvise meaning, sustain agency, and endure suffering amid uncertainty. Drawing on existential and phenomenological insights, it reframes ethnography as a collaborative practice of attending to movement, betweenness, and transformative thresholds. The approach privileges practical wisdom over theory, seeking to understand how possibilities are opened and constrained in everyday worlds.

This work proposes that much of human life is lived as “unformulated experience”—felt but not yet symbolized—and that dissociation, more than repression, organizes these unarticulated states. Within a relational-constructivist perspective, meaning emerges in dialogue, as clinician and patient co-create language and images that give shape to previously unspeakable experience. The clinical task is to cultivate curiosity, play, and imagination so that split-off self-states can be recognized and integrated, opening new possibilities for living. Through theory and case material, it shows how uncertainty, mutual influence, and emergent meaning drive therapeutic change.

A collection of clinical journeys illustrating how dissociation and multiple self-states shape psychic life and the therapeutic relationship. Through vivid case narratives, it shows how the capacity to dream experience—while awake and within the analytic dyad—emerges in a relational field, transforming enactments and trauma into meaning. Emphasizing intersubjectivity and the therapist’s participation, it invites living in the spaces between selves rather than pursuing a single, unified identity.