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Psychoanalytic theories like those of Bion and his followers also embedded their ideas about mind and affect in a relational context. Knowing (K) arises always in an interpersonal affective and cognitive matrix (xKy). Additionally, Intersubjectivity is inherent in the work of political theorists like Louis Althusser or Theodor W. Adorno, and postmodern scholars like Slavoj Žižek and Christopher Butler. Interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis are both centered on the concept of the field, as a very broadly defined field theory . Implicit in most interpersonal and relational writings, is that the analytic situation is defined in terms of its relatedness . Analyst and patient are continuously and inevitably, and consciously and unconsciously, in interaction with one another. This interaction has to do with what they experience in one another’s presence, and how they behave. The field also determines what each participant can experience in the presence of the other, especially in terms of the affective aspects of experience. The field is, on one hand, the sum total of all those influences, conscious and unconscious, that each of the analytic participants exerts on the other. On the other hand, the field is the outcome of all those influences, the relatedness and experience that is created between the two people as a result of the way they deal with one another. As soon as there is an outcome in the field – as soon as the field changes to accommodate the influences supplied by its participants – that outcome becomes part of the influence on the next moment of relatedness. Like the influences that pass back and forth, outcomes in the field are not necessarily conscious. And so the sequence continues: each moment of influence in the field interacts with the personalities of those who are influenced to create the next moments of relatedness; and those moments of relatedness, in turn, are part of the conscious and unconscious influences on each participant’s experience of the moment after that. For most theorists of the interpersonal field, even when the process of formulating conscious experience unfolds without undue defensive inhibition, disruption, or detour, the course of that formulation is charted in the same moment that it takes place, and its final shape therefore comes into being only as it arrives in our minds. Prior to that moment, for many interpersonal and relational analysts, what will become formulated experience is only possibility. Conscious experience, that is, does not pre-exist its formulation; it is not predetermined, but emergent; it is not the revelation of something that is already “there” in the mind, but a process, an activity. Here, the interpersonal, relational, or intersubjective dimension of the experience can be reached: the experience that can be formulated within the analytic dyad is a function of the nature of the relatedness between the two people. The possibilities for the changing contents of consciousness are determined by the equally mercurial nature of the interpersonal field. The field is a jointly created configuration of relatedness , a social medium that is the result of the conscious and unconscious involvement and intersection of two subjectivities, including the interaction of what are referred to in other traditions as internal objects. The
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