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II. Ebdc. Intersubjective Ego Psychology Nancy Chodorow ’s (2004) Intersubjective Ego Psychology remains firmly committed to ego psychological theory and technique while also theorizing the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and analytic transference- countertransference fields. It is a North American fusion of Ego psychology and Relational psychoanalysis, rooted in both Sullivan’s Interpersonal Field Theory and Hartmann’s Ego Psychology, drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Erik H. Erikson. Intersubjective Ego Psychology incorporates b–th - a focus on intrapsychic conflict, compromise formation, an internal world and intrapsychic fantasy, yet the psyche (of both the patient and the analyst) is also interpersonally and culturally created. Transference is a history-driven repetition, where the analyst interprets to the patient, yet not everything that goes on between the patient and the analyst comes from the patient. The patient may also be the interpreter of the ana’yst’s experience or affect the ana’yst’s countertransference, and both participants can co-create analytic field , which is, in some sense, more than the sum of the two-person parts. Intersubjective ego psychologists hold both perspectives at the same time and thereby modify each. The contemporary Intersubjective Ego psychologist Warren Poland (1996) expresses such hybrid integration in the following words: “No single person exists outside a human, object-connected field ; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private universe of inner experience” [Poland, 1996, p. 33]. (See also entry INTERSUBJECTIVITY, EGO PSYCHOLOGY) II. Ebe. Field-Related Tertiary Formations in Post-Bionian Thought: ‘The Third’ of Thomas Ogden and James Grotstein In its most general form, the concepts of ‘the third’ can be viewed as an extension of the field’s transitional creative constructive properties. Specific formation of ‘the analytic third’ is considered to be generated by the dialectic of the subjectivities of the analysand and the analyst (Katz 2013). This third is both created by and creates the subjective experience of the analysand and the analyst (Ogden, 2009). The necessarily unique matrix that evolves from the interplay and creation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity within the analytic process becomes an aspect of the object of psychoanalytic study. British trained North American Thomas Ogden uses the Winnicottian notion of potential space as the precursor of his view of intersubjective space. “[T]he analyst attempts to recognize, understand and verbally symbolize for himself and the analysand the specific nature of the moment-to-moment interplay of the analyst´s subjective experience, the subjective experience of the analysand and the intersubjectively generated experience of the analytic pair (the experience of the analytic third)… it is fair to say that contemporary
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