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The field links two subjectivities, however, it is not a simple additive combination of influences. Instead, it is a unique creation, a new and ceaselessly changing gestalt that expresses and represents the present, shifting states of relatedness between patient and analyst. Broader than transference-countertransference, the field includes the influences on each participant of the entire nexus of affects, motives and intentions, thoughts, proto-thoughts, meaningful behaviors, metaphors, and fantasies that come into being when two people are involved with one another. How the field is composed in any particular moment encourages some unbidden articulations of experience and discourages others. The composition of the field is created by the interaction of the self-states of its participants, and is therefore in continuous flux. As self- states shift in the minds of each participant in responsive reciprocity with the self-states of the other participant (Bromberg, 1998, 2006), the field changes. “The interpersonal field remains a concept, not an experience” (Stern 2013c, p.233). In more experience-near terms, changes in the field are changes in the possibilities for relatedness—i.e., changes in the kinds of relatedness that are facilitated and inhibited. We rarely “know” the field. For the most part, the field comes to our attention only through what we sense or feel of its influences. To explicitly reflect on the field usually requires a conscious effort, one that few people besides psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, with their professional interests, have a reason to expend; and there are many circumstances, or aspects of the field, that do not even allow the possibility of such reflection. On the phenomenological level, as the nature of the field shifts, as different kinds of relatedness feel most obvious or natural to the participants, patient and analyst ‘fall into, and out of’, certain relational patterns. As one kind of relatedness becomes natural (friendliness), other kinds of relatedness (irritability) fall into the background and feel less comfortable, easy, or natural to create in this environment, or are even actively avoided, sometimes with unconscious dynamic purpose (i.e., unconscious defensive purpose). Stern (2013c) summarily underscores two points: First, taking in consideration the facilitating and inhibiting influences of the field on the contents of individual minds, with the consequent importance of the allowance of the greatest possible range of unbidden experiences, which rests on the degree of flexibility and freedom of the field. Second, the degree of the field’s flexibility is defined by the range of relatedness available to the both participants. Extreme examples of inhibiting influences in the field are dissociative enactments . Here, Stern’s (1990, 1997, 2004) theory of enactments is an extension and elaboration of his work on unformulated experience (1997), a dissociation-based perspective of the unconscious. Acknowledging imprints of Philip Bromberg’s (1998) thinking of enactments as the result of dissociation, when conflict does not exist, Stern (2004) writes: “1. Enacted experience, and thus dissociated states as well, cannot be symbolized and therefore do not exist in any other explicit form than enactment itself. Enacted experience is unformulated experience. 2. Dissociated states, because they are unsymbolized, do not and cannot bear a conflictual relationship to the states of mind safe enough for us to identify as “me” and inhabit in a consciously appreciable way. 3. Enactment is the interpersonalization of dissociation:
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