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patient’s mind. For Levenson, treatment became a struggle for the analyst to grasp this transformation and use this understanding to the patient’s benefit. Here, the analyst began to be understood to be involved in the same way with the patient as the patient was with the analyst, both initially unaware of a substantial portion of this involvement. Donnel Stern (2013a, 2013b, 2013c) eloquently posits the main tenets of the analytic field theory, describing how analyst and patient are continuously and inevitably, and consciously and unconsciously, in interaction with one another. This interaction has to do with what they experience in one another’s presence, especially in terms of the affective aspects of experience, and how they behave. Here, the field is the sum total of all conscious and unconscious influences , that each of the analytic participants exerts on the other, as well as the outcome of all those influences, the relatedness and experience that is created between the two people as a result of the way they deal with one another. As soon as there is an outcome in the field—as soon as the field changes to accommodate the influences supplied by its participants—that outcome becomes part of the influence on the next moment of relatedness. Like the influences that pass back and forth, outcomes in the field are not necessarily conscious. In a continuous evolving sequence, each moment of influence in the field interacts with the personalities of those who are influenced to create the next moments of relatedness; and those moments of relatedness, in turn, are part of the conscious and unconscious influences on each participant’s experience of the moment after that. For most theorists of the interpersonal field, even when the process of formulating conscious experience unfolds without undue defensive inhibition, disruption, or detour, the course of that formulation is charted in the same moment that it takes place, and its final shape therefore comes into being only as it arrives in our minds. Prior to that moment, for many interpersonal and relational analysts, what will become formulated experience is only possibility. Conscious experience, that is, does not pre-exist its formulation; it is not predetermined, but emergent; it is not the revelation of something that is already “there” in the mind, but a process, an activity. Here, the interpersonal, relational, or intersubjective dimension of the experience can be reached: the experience that can be formulated within the analytic dyad is a function of the nature of the relatedness between the two people. The possibilities for the changing contents of consciousness are determined by the equally mercurial nature of the interpersonal field. Here, the field is a jointly created configuration of relatedness , a social medium that is the result of the conscious and unconscious involvement and intersection of two subjectivities, including the interaction of what are referred to in other traditions as internal objects. The participants in the field may or may not be aware of the field’s influences on them, depending at least partly on the consequences that would ensue from that awareness. Akin to the analytic or intersubjective third (Ogden, 1994; Benjamin, 2004), or to Samuel Gerson (2004)’s relational unconscious , field is a configuration of influences that continuously gives clinical process its particular, changing shape and nature.
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