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II. E. THE HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS OF THE FIELD CONCEPT IN NORTH AMERICA The phenomenological project was brought to New York by Husserl’s student, Aron Gurwitsch, and along with American Pragmatism, contributed to shaping the Interpersonal Psychoanalytic sensibility founded by Sullivan. Significant contributions were made by Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Clara Thompson, and Benjamin Wolstein, with a later generation of theorists who more directly elaborated a field sensibility, Edgar Levenson, Philip Bromberg and Donnel Stern. This in turn can find influence among Relational thinkers, where the field concept is not emphasized as a discrete concept, but where a field sensibility is imbricated in their foundational orientation (Mitchell, Stern, Benjamin, Bass, Aron). The phenomenological focus on the field can be also later found in the Intersubjective work of North American Stolorow, Brandshaft, Atwood and Orange (Stolorow, Brandshaft and Atwood 1987; Atwood, Stolorow and Orange 2011). A further influence is found through Bion’s sojourn in Los Angeles, influencing his patient James Grotstein and then shaping his student Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third. II. Ea. Points of Entry and Lines of Development One point of entry of the concept of the analytic field into North American psychoanalytic thinking and practice was through writing on the subject of “the psychoanalytic situation,” as comprehensively addressed in Leo Stone’s 1961 monograph of that same title, in which he delineated a basic metapsychology of the clinical situation in psychoanalytic practice. In that work, along with later papers, in particular “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Transference: Postscript to an Earlier Communication”, published in 1967, Stone described the analytic situation as consisting of a “central communicative field” consisting of free association that, along with the rule of abstinence, created a “dynamic effect” that promotes a regressive transference neurosis. Stone emphasized that the analytic situation features a “specific, dynamic effect” that lends a special quality and quantitative depth to the transference and the psychoanalytic process, one that is crucially shaped by both the analyst and the analysand. Still later, Stone (1975) defined psychoanalytic situation as a “gestalt ensemble” and a “synergistic organization” with a “dynamic power” (p. 334). A direct line of development can be drawn from the work on the part of Stone and others to contemporary ideas pertaining to the analytic field. A second line of development expands outward from Klein’s notion of the internal object, which Meltzer reported that she came to feel might be more properly conceived in terms of a “field” of forces and objects, the nature of which was expressed by Meltzer in his description of the analytic process as involving the internal objects of the analysand and analyst talking to one another and the implications for analytic listening such an image implies. Similar indications can be found in the evolution of Klein’s (1935, 1940) internal world and technical focus on the here and now in the analytic session (Steiner, 2017), through Betty Joseph’s (1985)
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