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James McLaughlin goes further in the direction of an interpersonal conception. For him, enactments are co-constituted as a consequence of shared regression in psychoanalytic situation. They are “events occurring in the dyad that both parties experience as being the consequence of behavior in the other … close scrutiny of the interpersonal behaviors shaped between the pair will provide clues and cues leading to latent intrapsychic conflicts and residues of prior object relations which one has helped to stir into resonance in the other, and between them actualized for both.” (McLaughlin, 1991, p. 600f.). Subsequently, field-related terminology within the context of psychoanalytic situation started to appear in contemporary complex Freudian thought, like “transference- countertransference field” (Blum 1998, p. 196); countertransferential enactments (Chused, Ellman, Renik, Rothstein 1999); “a human object-connected field” (Poland 1996, p. 33), and “trans-individual field…a container of multiple levels of reality” (Modell 1989, p. 9). (See also entries ENACTMENT, THE UNCONSCIOUS) II. Ebdb. Psychoanalytic Situation in Modern Conflict Theory Further elaborating on Leo Stone’s (1961, 1967) ideas of psychoanalytic situation as central “ communicative field ” consisting of free association that, along with the rule of abstinence, created a “dynamic effect”, Elliot Adler and Janet Bachant (1996) define psychoanalytic situation in terms of basic elements of psychoanalytic relatedness. The psychoanalytic situation was (re)cast as an “extraordinary interpersonal arrangement, anchored by two clearly differentiated yet complementary ways of relating: free association and analytic neutrality” (Adler and Bachant, 1996, p. 1021). Described as one pole of ‘reciprocal role requirements’, free association is viewed as a prerequisite of expressive freedom that allows the patient to have an introspective encounter with his or her deepest emotional stirrings “in the context of an interaction with another person ” (ibid, p. 1025; original italics) . As an interpretive tool, free association is regarded as outweighing even the resources of theoretical knowledge. The analyst’s role is viewed as complementary to that of the patient. It serves a function of protecting the patient’s expressive freedom. In this way, the psychoanalytic situation and technique is cast as a two-person process of analytic exploration of one-person neurosis: “ one-neurosis, not a one-person model of analytic treatment” (ibid., p. 1038, original italics). Among areas of interest to contemporary Freudian psychoanalysts relevant to field conceptualizations are: unconscious sharing of ‘states of consciousness’ (Libbey, 2011), bi- directional unconscious influences within the inter-psychic realm (McLaughlin, 2005), enactment (Ellman and Moskowitz 1998, 2008) and ‘enaction’ (Reis, 2009), and reconstruction process as a co-construction in the two-person field (Gottlieb 2017), and others. (See also entries CONFLICT, THE UNCONSCIOUS)
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