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narration of the worlds that emerge in each analytic session. They distinguish a series of countertransference levels . “Distinctions are based on the modalities that the field shows and makes use of to modulate its own tensions” (Ferro and Basile 2008, p. 3). Transformations of the characters in the session’s narratives are seen as representing “ the transformations in the analytic field . Explorations of such links elucidate the opening and closing of a ‘channel’ between (the patient’s) projective identifications and (the analyst’s) reverie” (ibid., p. 3). Ferro (2009) and Civitarese (Civitarese 2008; Ferro and Civitarese 2013) stress the use of the analyst’s mind and body, held in reverie, as a guide to the unconscious processes in the patient and between analyst and analysand. This perspective also has much in common with the British trained North American analyst Thomas Ogden’s (1994a,b; 1995) notion of co-created interactions , where Kleinian influences are also discernible. According to Ogden, the intra-psychic views of transference and countertransference should not only be complemented by the inter-subjective picture of a transference-countertransference matrix , but these perspectives are to be seen as constituting a dialectic leading to an ‘(inter-subjective) analytic third ’, a new evolving subjectivity , comprising (analogically to the field), something more than the sum of its parts. Also combining the intrapsychic and inter-subjective within the French psychoanalytic framework, Green (1973/1999; 2002), in line with Winnicott’s works on potential space, defines another formation in the area of tertiary processes. His version is the ‘analytic object’ (object of analysis and in analysis) as the ‘third object’: belonging neither to the analyst nor to the analysand, it has characteristics of transitionality, being formed in the analytic encounter . In Green’s thinking, the intersubjective relationship connects two intrapsychic subjects, and “It is in the intertwining of the internal worlds of the two partners of the analytic couple that intersubjectivity takes on substance” (2000, p. 2). III. C. Two-Person, Interpsychic and Inter-subjective Focus; Countertransference as ‘Common Ground’ Coming originally out of Europe (specifically Italy), in the last decade, the conceptualization of the ‘interpsychic’ (besides ‘inter-subjective’) has been seen worldwide as more and more relevant (Bolognini 2004, 2010, 2016). This recent interest echoes Freud´s comments on how two systems of Unconscious may be in direct and influential contact with each other, without the involvement of higher forms of consciousness or subjectivity (Freud 1915, 1937a,b.). In formulating the conceptualization of the interpsychic, the transformational ‘modulation of the field’ of the field theory (Ferro, 2001), the Winnicottian concept of ‘transitionality’, and the work on empathy as a complex phenomenon (Bolognini 2009) have been especially relevant. In the recent work of Stefano Bolognini (2016), the ‘interpsychic’ may be seen as a “ functional pre-subjective level where two persons can exchange internal contents, through the utilization of ‘normal’ communicative projective identifications ” (Bolognini 2016, p.110). As an extended psychic dimension, it reflects the reciprocal influence of two minds, which is experienced from inside. In its technical use, when the analytic dialogue is experienced as interpsychic, it gains a “new, more specific effectiveness, first in containing
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