Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘gap’ operates across several distinct but interrelated registers. Romanyshyn deploys it most systematically as a structural feature of psychological knowing itself: the gap between soul and the language psychology uses to name it, between what is said and what remains perpetually unsaid, between conscious articulation and unconscious residue. For Romanyshyn, this gap is not a deficiency to be remedied but the very site where genuinely imaginal research takes place — the researcher as border figure standing within it, the Orpheus myth supplying its archetypal grammar. Thompson, approaching from phenomenology and philosophy of mind, employs ‘gap’ in the tradition of Levine’s ‘explanatory gap’: the apparently unbridgeable chasm between third-person physical description and first-person subjective experience. Thompson’s project is to reframe this as a ‘body-body problem’ and move ‘beyond the gap’ through integrated biology and phenomenology. Welwood, drawing on Tibetan Dzogchen, treats the gap between thoughts as a contemplative aperture — the site of pure awareness and potential enlightenment. Cooper locates the gap in the psychoanalytic space between subject and object, self-states, and the oscillation between wholeness and fragmentation. Harris, from an ACT framework, employs the term pragmatically as the ‘reality gap’ between desired and actual circumstances. The term thus marks an aporia that is simultaneously epistemological, ontological, contemplative, and clinical.
Such a poetics focuses on the ‘gap’ between soul and the words we use to say it. In Part One, this issue of the gap is explored in three chapters, which form the theoretical core of an imaginal approach to research.
Romanyshyn establishes the gap between soul and language as the central problematic of his entire methodology, making it the structural spine of the book’s theoretical architecture.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
He or she stands in the gap between the conscious and the unconscious… this gap plays itself out in the tension between what one says and what is always left unsaid… In that gap, we find the difference between soul and the complex of psychology.
Romanyshyn defines the researcher’s liminal position as standing within the gap between conscious and unconscious, and identifies this gap as co-extensive with the difference between soul and psychology’s conceptual apparatus.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
a researcher is attuned to the gap between what is said and what is always left unsaid, the gap between conscious and unconscious, which is bridged by the symbol as the expression of the transcendent function.
Romanyshyn argues that the symbol functioning as transcendent function is the only means by which the constitutive gap between spoken and unspoken, conscious and unconscious, can be bridged in research.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
In the hard problem, the explanatory gap is absolute because there is no common factor between the mental and the physical… An important philosophical task is to show how there can be an account of the lived body that integrates biology and phenomenology, and so goes ‘beyond the gap’.
Thompson characterizes the classical explanatory gap as absolute within Cartesian dualism and proposes that integrating phenomenology with biology enables a move beyond it through the concept of the lived body.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Drawing on this richness can help us to refine the terms of the explanatory gap. Phenomenologists distinguish between two wa
Thompson argues that substituting the phenomenological term ‘body’ for ‘physical’ enriches the framing of the explanatory gap and opens it to phenomenological treatment.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
‘The gap between two thoughts is essence. But if in that gap there is a lack of presence, it becomes ignorance… If there is presence in the gap, then we experience the dharmakaya [the ultimate].’
Welwood, drawing on Dzogchen teaching, identifies the gap between thoughts as the site of pure awareness and ultimate reality, transformable from ignorance into enlightenment through contemplative presence.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
in the gap between what one says and what remains unsaid, between the work that is finished and the work that is still not done, the feeling quality of mourning takes root.
Romanyshyn identifies mourning as the affective signature of the gap in research, the emotional residue of what cannot be fully articulated or completed in scholarly work.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
the gap finds expression in many traditions and, from the psychoanalytic perspective, may include subject and object and what connects (separates) them, pointing to the separation between different aspects of self and the oscillation between experiences of wholeness and fragmentation.
Cooper situates the gap as a cross-traditional concept linking Zen and psychoanalysis, understanding it as the structural separation between subject and object and between self-states.
, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting
What we’re dealing with here is a big ‘reality gap’: a large gap between current reality and desired reality. And the bigger that gap, the more painful the feelings that will arise.
Harris employs the gap as a clinical-pragmatic concept within ACT, defining it as the painful discrepancy between present circumstances and desired outcomes, requiring acceptance rather than elimination.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
There is, as in Priam’s case, a gap between
Nussbaum invokes the gap in the context of ethical luck — the distance between a person’s good intentions and the morally pertinent description of their action as shaped by forces beyond their control.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside