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transference must develop unhampered. Seen from the Relational-Intersubjectve perspective, it was as though Freud prophetically incorporated into his telephonic metaphor a mute button. Presented as such, this was not fundamentally an intersubjective theory. While the analyst used his unconscious as a listening instrument, the patient’s unconscious was not understood to have the same capacity. The patient’s subjectivity concerning the analyst was not given its due. Freud came closer to the reciprocal mode of listening in his 1915 paper on “The Unconscious”, where he states “It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs of one human being can react upon that of another…” (Freud, 1915, p. 194). However, this point remained undertheorized throughout his oeuvre. Ferenczi had reported encountering personally transformative experiences with his patients that had impelled him to forge a widened scope of psychoanalytic understanding and enabled him to take seriously for the first time bipersonal and reciprocal, and therefore intersubjective l dimensions of psychic experience and transformation. As Ferenczi (in: Dupont, 1988, p. 84) wrote, “When two people meet for the first time, an exchange takes place not only of conscious but also of unconscious stirring.” He coined the term “dialogue of unconscious” to describe that an unconscious dialogue is always taking place between patient and analyst, and takes place on a two way street. This dimension of Ferenczi’s work found especially fertile ground for growth in the United States. Relational ideas and their applications support technical options organized in part around a theory that emphasizes the intersubjective process as a ‘dialogue of unconsciouses’. This has the effect of directing the analyst’s attention to the effects and the reflections of his own participation, as well as that of the patient. This listening orientation tends to be paradigmatic to Relational analysts, with intersubjectivity and its uses in analytic engagement at its core. III. Abb. Intersubjectivity and Field Theory in Relational Thinking and Clinical Work Overall, the field theories, relevant to intersubjectivity, are rooted in the mid-20 th century interpersonal theory of psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan , social psychology’s field theory of Kurt Lewin, and the Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualizations leading to Latin American psychoanalytic field theories of the Madeleine and Willy Barangers (2008), Enrique Pichon Riviere (2017) and José Bleger (1967). In the United States, the concept of the field in interpersonal theory began in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm- Reichmann, and Clara Thompson. Sullivan’s work was the most important conceptual influence. For him the field was the arena of what he called “interpersonal relations,” and it was, in turn, interpersonal relations that formed the core of his entire system of thought, as well as his understanding of the difference between his thought and the psychoanalysis of his time. The field concept has since been developed by many interpersonal and relational writers, including Stephen Mitchell (1988), who referred to the relational matrix .
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