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the conflict that cannot be experienced within one mind is experienced between or across two minds. The state dissociated by the patient is explicitly experienced by the analyst, and the state explicitly experienced by the patient is dissociated in the analyst’s mind. Each participant therefore has only a partial appreciation of what is transpiring. 4. Enactment, then, is not the expression of internal conflict. Enactment is the absence of internal conflict—though the external conflict, the conflict between the two people in the enactment, may be intense. 5. Enactment ends in the achievement of internal conflict, which occurs when the two dissociated states, one belonging to each participant in the enactment, can be formulated inside the consciousness of one or the other of the two psychoanalytic participants.” (Stern 2004, p. 213) Stern proposes further (2013c) that the goal in working with dissociative enactments and with milder constrictions of the field is to become aware of, and then loosen, constricted interaction. This unlocks the capacity of relatedness to serve as the crucible for the unbidden. But because as all events in the field embody an emergent quality of the relatedness itself, it is impossible to proscribe a technique to accomplish it and to describe exactly what needs to be done to expand relational freedom . Instead, Stern highlights openness to the unexpected, to court surprise by attending to ‘affective snags and chafing’, and allowance to feel deeply the clinical relatedness. The analysts’ affective involvement and thoughtful study of their own experience is all they can contribute. Many other Relational and Interpersonal analytic thinkers made notable contributions to the field theory and conceptualizations. This diverse group includes, among many others, Jody M. Davies (1996, 2003) writing on multiple selves, dissociation, enactments, but also integration of internal objects and contemporary interpersonal field; Lew Aron (1995, 2005), writing on the relational view of the primal scene and interpersonal perspective on interaction; Jill Gentile (1998, 2008, 2010), approaching the subject of the field as the product of the dialectic between the a priori and the intersubjective-relational, the private and the public, and the desire (to know) versus the destruction of the desire. Jessica Benjamin (1988, 1995, 2017) theorizes the relational field in terms of movement between projective-identificatory complementarity and intersubjective mutuality, the inner and the outer, and most recently focusing on the experiential structure of the Third which facilitates mutual recognition, shifting the field out of ‘doer-done -to’ relations. The nature of the ongoing field processes is defined then by back-and-forth movement between the intersubjectivity and doer-done-to relations. (See also entries THE UNCONSCIOUS, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SELF, CONFLICT)
II. Ebc. Intersubjective Field in Self Psychology Kohut, Lichtenberg, Stolorow and Collaborators
Self Psychology began by carrying over the ego psychological emphasis on an intrapsychic focus. To this focus Heinz Kohut (1971) added a conception of a special relationship between the self and the selfobject. In this field-related concept, a deficit in the self
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