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transformational function, through complicated working through process. Because the most emotionally intense unconsciously transmitted and encoded messages inevitably involve elements of primitive death anxiety and projections of death images, increased attention to the analytic frame is necessary to contain them. Of note is Theo Dorpat’s (1999) addition of the ‘Type D’ inauthentic affective communication of the ‘false self’, a mode of relatedness as well as an interactional defense on part of the patient, generating analyst’s countertransferential conflict between inattention and ‘a professional duty to listen’. The subsequent identification of the ‘D communication’ of both parties facilitates the analysis of the ‘false self’. (See also entry TRANSFORMATION) II. Ebb. Concept of the Field in Interpersonal and Relational Theories In the United States, the concept of the field in interpersonal theory began in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan , Erich Fromm , Frieda Fromm-Reichmann , and Clara Thompson . In Sullivan’s “Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry”, the ‘interpersonal field of action’ was considered the matrix of all psychiatry. Through his theory of development focused on mother- infant relatedness, and his work on dissociation, among others, Sullivan’s was the most important conceptual influence. Another early progenitor, Sandor Ferenczi’s (1928/1955, 1932/1988) portrayal of psychoanalysis as the interaction of two real personalities, his recognition of centrality of countertransference as a mutually shaping complement to transference, analyst’s active participation, flexibility of psychoanalytic technique, his interests in unconscious communication alongside of trauma and re-traumatization, have continued to inspire later generations of interpersonal and relational field theorists (Aron & Harris 2010,; Bass, 2001, 2003, 2015; and many others). Interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis are both centered on the concept of the field, as a very broadly defined field theory . Implicit in most interpersonal and relational writings, is that the analytic situation is defined in terms of its relatednes s, referred to by Stephen Mitchell (1988) as relational matrix. Throughout the evolution of this perspective, the transition from the analyst as participant observer to an observing participant is one of the themes. Here it is emphasized that the analyst cannot not interact in the therapeutic process (Hirsch 2015). The foundation of this shift came in the work of Edgar Levenson (1972, 1983, 1991, 2017; Levenson, Hirsch & Iannuzzi, 2005), Benjamin Wolstein (Bonovitz, 2007; Wolstein,1953, 1959, 1983; Hirsch, 2015), and later, Merton Gill (1982, 1995). Levenson described the analyst’s unconscious ‘ transformation’ by the field , shaped by the unconscious interpersonal patterns of feeling, thought, and conduct originating in the patient’s family, which then became unconscious and enduring structuring influences in the
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