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psychoanalytic thinking is approaching a point where one can no longer simply speak of the analyst and the analysand as separate subjects who take one another as objects” (Ogden, 1994a, p 3). According to Ogden (1994a, 1995), the intra-psychic views of transference and countertransference should not only be complemented by the inter-subjective picture of a transference-countertransference matrix , but these perspectives are to be seen as constituting a dialectic leading to an ‘(inter-subjective) analytic third ’, a new evolving subjectivity , comprising (analogically to the field), something more than the sum of its parts. James Grotstein’s view (Grotstein and Franey 2008) of a field as a union of the two, giving rise to novel tertiary formation, is applicable to the analytic dyad as well as to the dynamic processes within a group. Synthesizing and extending both Bion and the Barangers, and referencing Ogden (1994b, 2005), Grotstein writes: “…the bi-personal field …is more than intersubjectivity…Think of the analyst and analysand not only as intersubjective – back and forth – but see them as one. My model has always been the Siamese twins: where they are separate as one, and apart as two, a binary oppositional structure. The whole field controls the analyst and analysand…People have narcissistic and socialistic dimensions. When in a group something comes out of them that wouldn’t come out otherwise…The influence is the point. I call it the dramaturge and Ogden calls it the intersubjective third” (ibid, p. 110). For Grotstein (2011), ‘The Third’ emerges also in relation to the setting. Here, the setting, as distinguished from the frame, becomes a “sacred” agreement. In establishing the rules of the frame and in the analysand’s acceptance of them, analyst and analysand are establishing “a covenant that binds each participant to the task of protecting the third – the analytic procedure itself” (Grotstein, 2011, p. 59). (See also separate entries INTERSUBJECTIVIVITY, SETTING, OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES) Ii. Ebf. Field Conceptualizations Influential in French Canada The French psychoanalytic tradition, influential in Francophone psychoanalytic communities in Canada, espouses the intersubjectively relevant ‘Third Topography’ (Brusset 2006). This is a retrospective assembly of post-Freudian thinkers who have subscribed to the notion that, in development, the two-person psychology predates the one-person psychology of the internally conflicted subject of Freud’s Topographical or Structural models (First and Second Topographies in French nomenclature). The psychoanalytic situation and process is then variably theorized with this in mind. Influential in French Canada, Jean-Luc Donnet (2001) differentiates the analytic site from the analyzing situation, “The analytic site contains the ensemble of what the offer of an analysis constitutes. It includes the work of the analyst… the analysing situation results haphazardly from the sufficiently adequate encounter between the patient and the site” (p.138). Here, it is possible to view the concept of the psychoanalytic field deriving from emphasis on
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