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Evolution, exposition and utility of the concept Brazilian psychoanalyst Fabio Herrmann’s Multiple Fields Theory developed in São Paulo from the end of the 1960s as a critique of a clinical psychoanalysis that had become widespread, which did not advance beyond repetitions and detailing of the same themes enshrined by the dominant psychoanalytic schools (Freudian and Kleinian-Bionian). In this context, it can be viewed as an attempt to confront a crisis of a theoretical nature characterized by the incommensurability of psychoanalytic schools, especially those that began to dominate the psychoanalytic world in the second half of the 20th century. This crisis arose because each of the major figures spearheading the different schools held to certain aspects in the Freudian project that she or he understood to contain all of Psychoanalysis. To Herrmann, this meant that the history of psychoanalysis has been functioning as a resistance to Psychoanalysis (Herrmann, 2002). He states, for instance: “In Freud, Psychoanalysis occupied itself with a much larger area than therapy in the consulting room; after, within the psychoanalytic movement, it did not expand, it shrank. Psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, was adapted to individual practice, transformed into an individual psychology and training, dividing itself into doctrinaire, scholastic systems. (...) The same political agreements that determined the centers of psychoanalytic power conventionalized the permissible extent of clinical work and, by default, the level of its theorization, defining a standard clinic and standard theory. (...) Today, a crisis of clinical practice forces even the more recalcitrant groups to practice an extende scope of psychoanalytic practice, which builds upon, wrongly, however, the standard theories of the existing schools or, a simplified version with lesser frequency; whereas, on the contrary, the extended clinic requires a more elevated degree of theorization: [Hermann speaks of so called] ‘high theory’— the region of metapsychology that fosters additional more refined tools of psychoanalytic methodology.” (Herrmann, 2003a, p.168) Without constituting itself as a new psychoanalytic school, this system of thought has proposed to rescue the heuristic value of clinical work towards the formulation of psychoanalytic knowledge. It is an attempt to recover what Herrmann called the psychoanalytic idea— the Freudian achievement of incorporating into the science of its time the exploration of human meaning. The Multiple Fields Theory resulted from Herrmann’s reflections upon two themes that are closely related: the unconscious and the psychoanalytic method . It is, therefore, an interpretation of Psychoanalysis based on a critical discussion of its foundations. According to Herrmann, the essential property of psychoanalytic method is to reveal the unconscious wherever it is applied. All systems of human relations —relations meaning any human product, from a singular idea or emotion, to intersubjective relations, to human reality as such, the attempt at representing the real — when interpreted by the method of Psychoanalysis, open themselves , so to speak, revealing their unconscious. This unconscious consists of a set of rules that determine, limit and shape relations, although its operation is hidden to those who participate’ in it. The surface of human relations — that is, all we think of,
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