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as clinical relational threads there was the concept of enactment (see separate entry ENACTMENT) spreading on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, in U.S. as well as in Europe (Bohleber et al. 2013). What progressively gave the term of intersubjectivity a more specific meaning was the growing value given to the notion of subject in the clinical encounter: the role of the analyst begun to be considered to a lesser degree as a neutral and objective observer of analytic events and a neutral object of transference phenomena and to a greater extent as a person participating to interactional events with his/her own characteristics, making use of his/her own subjective stance for understanding patient’s unconscious dynamics (Ponsi 1997). The classical one-sided view of a neutral analyst only occasionally affected by unwanted countertransferential reactions was replaced with a multifaceted view of the analyst’s experience, including his/her countertransferential understandings as well as the originating and shaping force of his/her subjectivity. Terms like subjectivity or intersubjectivity highlight the novelty and uniqueness of the analytic encounter: by leaving in the background what is predetermined by transference- countertransference patterns what is emphasized is the creative potentiality of the analytic experience (Turillazzi Manfredi & Ponsi 1999). III. Bb. Intersubjectivity and Infant Research Studies developed in the fields of infant research and attachment theory, supporting the view of personality organized in terms of an intersubjective matrix of ‘self-with-other’ that incorporates both the internal and the external world (Ammaniti & Trentini 2009, Cortina & Liotti 2010, Fonagy & Target 2007, Stern 1985) contributed to buttress a conceptual framework in which interaction between two subjects is the necessary requirement for psychic development as well as for psychological cure: an other person, a caregiver as well as an analyst, is needed to experience and develop oneself, or – to say it in other words – to become a subject. III. Bc. Intersubjectivity – Field Theory One of the field theory’s major representatives in Europe is Antonino Ferro who has blended the field theory with a Bionian conceptual framework . In Ferro’s work with Roberto Basile (Ferro and Basile, 2008) the field today is understood as a meeting point of the multiple characters of patient and analyst with a life of their own, as if on stage. Transformations of the characters in the session’s narratives are seen as representing the transformations in the analytic field . Ferro (2009) and Giuseppe 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. Ferro’s concept of ‘bi-personal field’ (Ferro, 1999), a structure resulting from a convergence of the analyst’s and patient’s subjective fields, represents a radical way to conceive intersubjectivity. The entity engendered by the interaction of the two subjectivities is something new, more than the sum of the two individual fields, which are somehow taken over
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