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In another development, pertaining to the field concepts and transference, in the joint report at the 2002 French Speaking Congress in Brussels, Jacqueline Godfrind, Maurice Haber, Marie-France Dispaux and Nicole Carels highlighted the psychic transformations associated with the analytic process, taking into consideration transferential- countertransferential movements in the inter-psychic field. The psychic change they refer to as ‘psychic transformation’ is seen as the result of the analytical process built on the encounter between two psyches, creating inter-psychic functioning in an analytical space or field. By exploring the impact of transferential-countertransferential movements on transformations and their intrapsychic effect, they identified indicators of psychic transformation as qualitative changes of increasing mental complexity. In North America , the conceptual heterodoxy of various field theories reflects different lines of their theoretical development. The first analytic theorists who brought Barangers concept into the North American psychoanalytic discourse was Robert Langs (1979), in his conceptualization of the ‘bipersonal field’, adding to it the description of subtypes of ‘communicative fields’ in psychoanalytic treatment along the dimension of the capacity of the analytic couple for containment and symbolic processing and the implications of the different subtypes for the depth of analytic process possible. Another point of entry of the concept of the analytic field was through the subject of ‘the psychoanalytic situation’ as comprehensively addressed in Leo Stone ’s 1961 monograph of that same title, in which he delineated a basic metapsychology of the clinical situation in psychoanalytic practice. In that work, along with later papers, in particular “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Transference: Postscript to an Earlier Communication”, published in 1967, Stone described the analytic situation as consisting of a “central communicative field” consisting of free association that, along with the rule of abstinence, created a “dynamic effect” that promotes a regressive transference neurosis. Stone emphasized that the analytic situation features a “specific, dynamic effect” that lends a special quality and quantitative depth to the transference and the psychoanalytic process, one that is crucially shaped by both the analyst and the analysand. Still later, Stone (1975) defined psychoanalytic situation as a “gestalt ensemble” and a “synergistic organization” with a “dynamic power” (p. 334). The influence of both Gestalt theorists Kurt Lewin (1935) and Kurt Koffka (1935) is discernible. The phenomenological project was brought to New York by Husserl’s student, Aron Gurwitsch, who contributed to shaping the Interpersonal Psychoanalytic sensibility founded by Sullivan, who in turn influenced generation of Interpersonal field theorists Philip Bromberg and Donnel Stern, and Relational Steven Mitchell for whom a field sensibility is imbricated in the relational foundational orientation. The phenomenological focus on the field can be also later found in the intersubjective work of North American Stolorow, Brandchaft, Atwood & Orange (Stolorow, Brandchaft & Atwood 1987; Atwood, Stolorow & Orange, 2011).
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