[OSList] Earliest known reference to {holding the space}

Mon Oct 20 20:21:34 PDT 2014

Brilliant work Harold. I also was thinking about the famous pediatrician and therapist Winnicott and his theory of the mothering 'holding environment' in which children develop. As the child grows, the space being held grows too, tho not named that way specifically.

Another child therapist Sandner literally talked about an Open Space held by the mother role along similar lines. He once came to a talk by Harrison.

Nozick reminds me of good old Werner Erhard saying we are a 'clearing' in which bodymind and the world show up. Influenced by Heidegger et al.

Which takes us to the Kabbalist notion of 'tzimtzum' as the ein sof gets lonely and contracts so that a space appears for a universe to emerge. Jewish people who follow torah are rereading the first chapters of genesis this week. But that's another story.

Jeff

-------- Original message --------
From: Harold Shinsato via OSList <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> 
Date:10/20/2014  1:40 PM  (GMT-08:00) 
To: World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> 
Subject: Re: [OSList] Earliest known reference to {holding the space} 

Hi Jennifer!

Thanks for referencing such a great research tool. I looked at all the books listed from 1900-1981. Check this out!

Nothing before '51, and over half of the 342 references were from 1951-54. There was a dark age of holding space from '55-'70, with no references. And of the 342, over 96% treated "holding space" as a noun, rather than a process. They are about physical containers for stuff, livestock, or prisoners.

Below I list the exceptions - some of which seem to hint at the way "holding space" as an element of facilitation, though none do so directly. The Leibniz and Kant papers were interesting in that they peered into the concept of space itself, holding the concept if not actual space. Very interesting is that the military concept of "holding space" related to the Vietnam war starts to come close to the facilitation sense, but the last one by Robert Nozick seems to come the closest.

1953 - Princeton Alumni Magazine - "holding space" for slots in a talent show at Princeton.

1971 - The New Yorker Volume 46, Part 7 - page 85 - "Farther toward Green, a young woman named Vaughan Kaprow, shivering in the evening cold, began holding space for another organization that had a special greeting for Billy Graham — the Pasadena Women's Liberation Group."

1973 - A Paper about Leibniz's Philosophy which looks at space differently, "holding space to be relational."

1973 - the Michigan Library talked about "holding space" for sign ups for tickets (flights to New York), similar to the holding space for slots in a talent show in 1953.

1976 - Ecology - Volume 57, Issues 1-3 - Page 286: "Porter (1974) speculated that the high degree of coexistance on Caribbean reefs is due to a "balance of abilities" divided among the Caribbean corals, such that no one species is competitively superior in acquiring and holding space."

1976 - The Philosophy of Kant Explained - Page 89 - "It is thus obvious that we can only explain how we can have legitimate a priori synthetic judgments in geometry by holding space as..."

1977 - Object Relations Family Therapy - Page 72 - " the family therapist gets transference information from the interactions in the shared holding space of the family." Still a noun.

1977 - All quiet on the Eastern front: the death of South Vietnam: "Time was a secondary dependent variable, a function of our success in winning and holding space."

1978 - BBC transcript - Many reasons why: the American involvement in Vietnam - "it's because you're holding this space in the territory of the rural areas. Also you're holding space in another sense altogether"

1979 - Arts Magazine - Volume 53, Issues 6-8: "Moss now opens wide gaps in the grid, erasing large segments of the retaining wall that had been holding space 'back'. A new spontaneity and elasticity develops between color and field: an energy."

1981 - Kant and the Transcendental Object - "And to all these impressive reasons for holding space and time to be phenomenal, Kant adds the further reason that there are a great many axiomatic principles which govern things in space and time, which are not logically necessary, since ...

1981 - Robert Nozick: Philosophical Explanations Page 83 - " The word "I" might be the marker for the blank, holding space in which the self can appear."

    Regards,
    Harold

On 10/20/14 7:41 AM, JenniferHurley-HFA via OSList wrote:
If Google Scholar is any indication, the usage, at least in print, seems fairly recent:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Holding+space&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CHolding%20space%3B%2Cc0

Jennifer Hurley
Hurley-Franks & Associates
267-971-4598
Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 20, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Daniel Mezick <dan at newtechusa.net> wrote:

This is extremely helpful, Jennifer! Thank you

On 10/20/14 9:14 AM, JenniferHurley-HFA wrote:
I have no idea about the earliest usage, but it's a phrase often used by Quakers.

Jennifer Hurley
Hurley-Franks & Associates
267-971-4598
Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 19, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Daniel Mezick via OSList <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> wrote:

Since July 2011, I continue to wander, searching for the earliest known reference to the term "holding the space." Anybody know?

http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/2011-July/334185.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSn2Y-b6wI
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