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participants in the field may or may not be aware of the field’s influences on them, depending at least partly on the consequences that would ensue from that awareness. The field is more like concepts of the analytic or intersubjective third (Ogden, 1994; Benjamin, 2004), or what Samuel Gerson (2004) calls the relational unconscious , than a mere context or surround. The field is that configuration of influences that continuously gives clinical process its particular, changing shape and nature. The fact that the field links two subjectivities, however, does not mean that it is a simple additive combination of influences. Instead, it is a unique creation, a new and ceaselessly changing gestalt that expresses and represents the present, shifting states of relatedness between patient and analyst. The field is not synonymous with transference- countertransference. If the idea of transference-countertransference remains meaningful (if, that is, it has not become so diluted that it refers to the entire analytic relationship), it must refer to patterns of relatedness modeled on the nature of experience with significant people from the past. The interpersonal field is broader than that. It includes the influences on each participant of the entire nexus of affects, motives and intentions, thoughts, proto-thoughts, meaningful behaviors, metaphors, and fantasies that come into being when two people are involved with one another. How the field is composed in any particular moment encourages some unbidden articulations of experience and discourages others. In turn, we can say that the composition of the field is created by the interaction of the self-states of its participants, and is therefore in continuous flux. As self-states shift in the minds of each participant, as they routinely do, in responsive reciprocity with the self-states of the other participant (Bromberg, 1998, 2006, 2011), the field changes. The interpersonal field remains a concept, not an experience . In more experience-near terms, changes in the field are changes in the possibilities for relatedness – i.e., changes in the kinds of relatedness that are facilitated and inhibited. We rarely “know” the field. For the most part, the field comes to our attention only through what we sense or feel of its influences. To explicitly reflect on the field usually requires a conscious effort, one that few people besides psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, with their professional interests, have a reason to expend; and there are many circumstances, or aspects of the field, that do not even allow the possibility of such reflection. On the phenomenological level, as the nature of the field shifts, but generally without attracting our conscious attention, different kinds of relatedness feel most obvious or natural to the participants. Patient and analyst fall most easily into, and out of, certain relational patterns. These events are unnoticed, unremarkable – in a word, “natural.” As one kind of relatedness becomes natural (to take a simple example, friendliness), other kinds of relatedness (irritability) fall into the background and feel less comfortable, easy, or natural to create in this environment, or are even actively avoided, sometimes with unconscious dynamic purpose (i.e., unconscious defensive purpose). From this perspective follow two further points: First, if we take in consideration the facilitating and inhibiting influences of the field on the contents of individual minds, we also must take the position that the freedom to allow the greatest range of unbidden experience rests
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