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In North America , the fundamental interrelatedness, intersubjectivity and interdependency of human development have led many analysts to attend to variously conceptualized jointly created configuratio”s of the “dynamic b”-personal” field and/or meeting of multiple subjectivities, where new elaborations/extensions and not simple repetitions of the individual unconscious and/or preconscious fantasies, attitudes and behaviors for each partner of the dyad can emerge and to which the presence and mind of each significantly contribute. This thinking dovetails with the clinical experiences and conviction by many that there is a lifelong potential for inventive and creative expressions of previously excluded, dissociated or otherwise un-integrated psychic content. The heterogeneous assembly of North American field conceptualizations includes two comprehensive theories: The Bi-Personal Communicative Field Theory of Robert Langs and the Theory of the Interpersonal Field by Donnell Stern. In addition, cross-fertilized field-related conceptualizations spread across Contemporary Freudian thought, Modern Conflict Theory, Intersubjective Ego Psychology, and Post-Kleinian, Post-Bionian, as well as the French tradition. The emphasis on expansion, growth, expressive and/or relational freedom, (co)creativity and (mutual) transformation, transitional and tertiary formations and the immediacy, vitality and emergence of novel pre-psychic, intrapsychic, inter-psychic, intra- subjective and inter-subjective events, in development and in psychoanalytic situation, characterizes many of them. Differences and similarities amidst the complex proliferation and cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic field theories and concepts within and among all three regions come to life when the theory is translated into clinical practice, in terms of ‘directed’ and ‘diffuse’ attentional sets, with pertaining relations to various forms of transference. Standing controversies (asymmetry vs. mutuality, the analyst’s involvement on a level of fantasy and/or conduct) can be recognized and sustained within the complexity paradigm, applicable here not only to the psychoanalytic field but the field theories and concepts themselves. In the same vein, Pichon Rivière’s ‘ dialectic spiral’ linking contradictory movements of regression and progression, extended onto contradictory movements of any kind, can be also applicable to the wide context of the elaborations of the field conceptualizations in the different regions and among the diverse psychoanalytical orientations. Previously undertheorized, increasingly resonating with all contemporary psychoanalytic cultures, the multidimensional and multi-perspectival spectrum of field theories and conceptualizations with implications for sensitive attunement to the (however variously conceptualized) field dimension of the psychoanalytic process, addresses challenges of today’s psychoanalytic practice with the broad range of clinical conditions, including those with deficits of symbolization and diminished capacity for reflection. In the context of Herrmann’s Multiple Fields theory, analytic field theories and field-related conceptualizations can be also thought of as a particular theoretical extension began by Freud of unconscious processes traversing individual subjects, with the field as a provision for new emotional meanings to arise, which in turn provides a ‘built-in guard’ against dogmatism, reductionism and unmovable orthodoxies of any kind.
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