The Analytic Field and its Transformations

Giuseppe Civitarese, Antonino Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782201823
• eBook ISBN: 9780429920042
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Analytic Field and its Transformations presents a collection of articles, written jointly by the authors in recent years, all revolving around the post-Bionian model of the analytic field - Bionian Field Theory (BFT). Going hand-in-hand with the ever-growing interest in Bion in general, analytic field theory is emerging as a new paradigm in psychoanalysis. Bion mounted a systematic deconstruction of the principles of classical psychoanalysis. His aim, however, was not to destroy it, but rather to bring out its untapped potential and to develop ideas that have remained on its margins. BFT is a field of inquiry that refuses a priori, at least from its own specific perspective, to immobilize the facts of the analysis within a rigid historical or intrapsychic framework. Its intention is rather to bring out the historicity of the present, the way in which the relationship is formed instant-by-instant from a subtle interplay of identity and differentiation, proximity and distance, embracing both Bion's rigorous, and his radical, spirit.

Chapter One
The meaning and use of metaphor in analytic field theory

As I lay in bed, with my eyes shut, I said to myself that everything is capable of transposition.

—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner

Each of the principal psychoanalytic models is underlain by certain key metaphors. For example, the archaeological and surgical metaphors, as well as that of the analyst-as-screen, all throw light on some of Freud’s basic concepts. In classical psychoanalysis, however, metaphor still tends to be an illegitimate or secondary element. Analytic field theory, on the other hand, reserves a completely different place for it, both as an instrument of technique in clinical work and as a conceptual device in theoretical activity.

Metaphor and the field are linked in a chiasm: The field metaphor transforms Kleinian relational theory into a radically intersubjective theory, which in turn places metaphor at a point along the spectrum of dreaming—to paraphrase Bion, it is the stuff of analysis.

For the sake of illustration, we examine first the origins and meaning of the field metaphor in analytic field theory; we then consider the mutual implications of this particular development of post-Bion psychoanalysis and the modern linguistic theory of metaphor; and, finally, we put the theoretical hypotheses discussed in the first part of this contribution to work in the clinical situation.

Origins of the analytic field metaphor

Madeleine and Willy Baranger developed the notion of the analytic field on the basis of Gestalt theory, the ontology of Merleau-Ponty (1945; in turn influenced by the dialectic of Hegel and by Kojève’s reading of it), Klein’s concepts of projective and introjective identification, Isaacs’s (1948) concept of unconscious fantasy, and Grinberg’s (1957)¹ notion of projective counteridentification (Etchegoyen, 1991). The Barangers’ basic idea was that patient and analyst generate unconscious field fantasies, or couple fantasies, which may even become actual obstacles (bastions or bulwarks) to the psychoanalytic process. These are bipersonal fantasies “which cannot be reduced to [their] habitual formulation—as, for example, in Isaacs—that is, as an expression of the individual’s instinctual life” (Bezoari & Ferro, 1991, p. 48).

Among the non-psychoanalytic sources, let us briefly consider Merleau-Ponty, because he furnished a philosophical foundation for the field concept, which he emphasised to such an extent as to make it the cornerstone of his own theory, and because his conception of corporeality is extraordinarily modern. By the metaphor of the field, Merleau-Ponty (1945) conceptualised the rigorously interdependent relationship that comes into being between subject and context, the reciprocal and constant influence of self and other, and the dynamic continuity arising between consciousness and the spatiotemporal parameters of experience of the world (time and space not being containers within which the individual moves, but instead being born together with him²)—the intersubjective determinants of identity.³ The subject is formed on the basis of a substrate of anonymous, pre-reflective, and pre-personal intersensoriality/intercorporeality even before any actual self-reflective capacity exists. An albeit still obscure pre-categorial background which, however, does not lack meaning, paves the way for the entry of the transcendental ego on to the world stage.

In this phase (which then remains, as it were, one of the constant dimensions of experience, given that the ego will never be able to free itself from the environmental context and from the contingency of a certain life situation), subject and object are not distinguished from each other—that is to say, they are dialectically correlated. Rather than existing as positive entities, pure presences-in-themselves, except in an abstract sense, they mold each other in an incessant, fluid to-and-fro traffic of sensations regulated by the “porosity of the flesh”. Subject and object co-originate in a primordial medium to which both belong. Touching something is, at the same time, being touched. Our sense of the world is not only an intellectual content, and cannot dispense with our experience of our bodies; it stems from our fleshly existence and is present even before a consciousness of self forms. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s assertion: “I am a field, an experience” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 473)—that is, a system of relationships.

The Barangers’ essay in which the French philosopher’s vision is subsumed, “The analytic situation as a dynamic field”, dates from 1961–1962. Significantly, in the same years Winnicott and Bion were laying the foundations of a radically intersubjective psychoanalytic theory of the birth of the psyche. The dialectic that underlies subjectivity—which could in Bion’s sense be formulated in terms of the binary couple narcissism/socialism—seen as an ongoing process, is the same as that which Winnicott sought to apprehend by his famous gerunds, such as coming-into-being, a going concern, holding, handling, object-presenting or indwelling. In this way, as Ogden explained:

Winnicott captures something of the experience of the paradoxical simultaneity of at-one-ment and separateness. (A related conception of intersubjectivity was suggested by Bion’s [1962a] notion of the container-contained dialectic. However, Winnicott was the first to place the psychological state of the mother on an equal footing with that of infant in the constitution of the mother–infant [relationship]. This is fully articulated in Winnicott’s statement that “There is no such thing as an infant [apart from the maternal provision]”) [Winnicott, 1960]. (Ogden, 1992, p. 620)

For an ideal genealogy of the field metaphor in psychoanalysis, Bion is an unavoidable reference. Although the Barangers did not quote him in their now classical paper, Madeleine Baranger⁴ (2005; Churcher, 2008) acknowledged his influence on her from the early 1950s on. At that time, Bion was already developing a highly original theory of the analytic field, although he did not use that metaphor.⁵ In his contributions on the “basic assumptions” (Bion, 1948, p. 65), which date precisely from those years (Ferro & Basile, 2009), he developed the concept of unconscious fantasy within the group. The analytic couple is, in fact, already a group. In Bion’s view, individuals are endowed with valences—the term, borrowed from chemistry, denotes the propensity of atoms to bind together into molecules—that is, the spontaneous and instinctive (unconscious, automatic, and inevitable) capacity to establish mutual emotional bonds, “for sharing and acting on a basic assumption” (Bion, 1948, p. 153), “behaviour in the human being that is more analogous to tropism in plants than to purposive behaviour” (ibid, p. 116f). The basic assumption, whether pair, fight–flight, or dependent, gives rise to “other mental activities that have in common the attribute of powerful emotional drives” (ibid, p. 146). It is “the ‘cement’ that keeps the group assembled” (López-Corvo, 2002, p. 39).

Valences and basic assumptions express the psychological function of an individual as dictated by the “proto-mental system”. The proto-mental system is one of Bion’s more speculative concepts, in that it “transcends experience” (Bion, 1948, p. 101). He coined it to explain the tenacity of the emotional bonds that keep the group together, linking its members in a common psychological situation, and to denote a dimension of the psyche in which the basic assumptions that are for the time being inactive can be accommodated. The proto-mental system is “one in which physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated. It is a matrix from which spring the phenomena which at first appear—on a psychological level and in the light of psychological investigation—to be discrete feelings only loosely associated with one another. It is from this matrix that emotions proper to the basic assumption flow to reinforce, pervade, and, on occasion, to dominate the mental life of the group. Since it is a level in which physical and mental are undifferentiated, it stands to reason that, when distress from this source manifests itself, it can manifest itself just as well in physical forms as in psychological” (ibid, pp. 101–102, our emphasis).

The absence of a distinction between the physical and the mental in the proto-mental system is, of course, reminiscent of the ambiguous status of the drives in Freud, as a “concept on the frontier between the somatic and the mental”, just as the valences call to mind the concept of libido (Fornaro, 1990, p. 55); the point here, however, is that “proto-mental phenomena are a function of the group” (Bion, 1948, p. 103). The individual’s proto-mental system is merely a part of a larger whole, namely the proto-mental matrix of the group, and cannot therefore be studied in isolation from it.

It will be seen that, already for Bion—who was here absolutely in unison with Merleau-Ponty—the subject cannot be thought of except on the basis of the intrinsic intersubjective dimension of the proto-mental system, of the area of “initial biopsychic emergence” (Fornaro, 1990, p. 20, translated). Mental life extends beyond the physical boundaries of the individual; it is “transindividual” (ibid, p. 20, translated). Hence the (relative) absence of a distinction between mind and soma in the individual is in some way correlated with the background of a substantial (relative) absence of distinction between individuals.

With regard to Merleau-Ponty’s postulate of the ego-as-field and Bion’s of the proto-mental area, the concept of projective identification now assumes powerful explanatory force, because it, so to speak, confers tangibility on the communication channels through which this common, unconscious psychological area can establish itself, as well as on the way in which it can do so. It imparts visibility—in Greek, theorein means to see or contemplate—to the concrete and indispensable points of contiguity whereby the processes of inter-individual mental influencing take place.

These theoretical foundations show that, already with Bion, and even more with the developments that came after him and the transition to an analytic field theory, psychoanalysis underwent a change of paradigm of the kind described by Kuhn (1962). For example, it may be misleading to define the characteristics of the analytic field in terms of the use of the classical concepts of transference and countertransference, because these presuppose a configuration in which analysand and analyst “face each other” as two positive, pure, complete, and separate subjectivities, each somehow totally “external” to the other. Ogden commented:

I believe the use of the term countertransference to refer to everything the analyst thinks and feels and experiences sensorially obscures the simultaneity of the dialectic of oneness and twoness, of individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity that is the foundation of the psychoanalytic relationship. (Ogden, 1994a, p. 8, n.).

In a theoretical framework inspired by a one-person psychoanalysis, the concept of projective identification, too, would assume an a-dialectic and substantially solipsistic meaning. If, however, subject and object are thought of as places in an intersubjective field, it will be realised, as Ogden (2008) wrote, that when a patient goes into analysis, he, so to speak, loses his own mind. He reconnects with the re-established proto-mental area. He initiates a communication that involves him in depth and can be channeled in such a way as to repair dysfunctional places in his internal group configuration, to restart the conversation that the various parts of the mind incessantly carry on among themselves, while always seeking better ways of thinking about his current emotional problem (however, terms such as unconscious thought, dreaming, thinking, and the like must be seen as virtually equivalent).

Elements of the analytic field theory

Analytic field theory fruitfully combines the contribution of the Barangers with the developments of post-Bion thought and certain ideas derived from modern narrativity known in the English-speaking world by the labels of critical theory and reader-response criticism, and developed in Italy by, in particular, Umberto Eco (Ferro, 1999). Another important component, on the other hand, stems, via Luciana Nissim Momigliano (2001), from Robert Langs and his original conception of the spiralling progression of the unconscious dialogue between patient and analyst. Other significant notions are the emphasis by Ogden (1979) on the concept of projective identification in a strongly relational sense, and that author’s more recent idea, avowedly inspired by Kojève’s⁶ lectures on Hegel, of the “intersubjective analytic third” (Ogden, 1994b). Nor must one disregard the fundamental contribution of Bleger (1967) on the “institutional” nature of the setting and on everything involved in the formation of the individual’s so-called meta-ego (Civitarese, 2008a).

These initial remarks already point to the reason for the central position of the metaphor—and with it the philosophy—of the field, perhaps because no other lends itself better to the construction of a radically intersubjective psychoanalytic model, which we consider to be most suited to a psychoanalysis for our time. By virtue of a whole set of theoretical increments, the metaphor of the field has succeeded in expressing all its theoretical and clinical potentialities, such as grasping/casting, characters of the session, narrative derivatives of waking dream thought, transformations in dream, weak or unsaturated interpretation, and the like (Ferro, 1992).

The field metaphor is, of course, borrowed from electromagnetic or gravitational field theory. Its essential properties are that it represents a dynamic totality, and that it is inclusive, invisible (but deducible from its effects on its constitutive elements), and delimited (even if constantly in the throes of contraction or expansion).

The field is intrinsically unstable and subjected to continuous displacements of energy. The forces concentrated at a given point in the field can have effects on other forces in locations remote from that point. Hence, all the elements in a field are structured as a differential system in which each term is defined in relation to the others in a process of constant, mutual cross-reference. This is not very different from de Saussure’s conception of the structure of language, Lacan’s (1947) of the system of signifiers in the unconscious, or Derrida’s of the text. Perhaps only chaos theory could offer an effective representation of the dynamism of the field, because it can model the complex vectorial manifestations that give rise to turbulence, catastrophic points, and ultimately changes of state.

Furthermore, the field is delimited. It is a container. This does not, of course, mean that it is a closed system; instead, by causing itself to be contained, it is, itself, in a dialectical relationship with what is outside it—that is, with other, broader containers (social groups, institutions, ideologies, etc.). However, the fact that the field is relatively closed permits account to be taken of what may be defined as inclusiveness. This is an aspect given an original interpretation by Antonino Ferro, who radicalised the model of the field already outlined by the authors mentioned previously, and invites one to see any element within the fictional frame of the setting as (virtually) a function of the analytic field.

In clinical psychoanalytic work, the field concept effectively supports the extension of the dream paradigm of the session, to which it imparts rigour, because it puts to work in the couple Klein’s concept of projective identification (albeit as revised and corrected by Bion and Ogden) and Bion’s (1992) of “waking dream thought” (we dream not only at night but also during the day). There is no point in the field (whether an event, a memory, a dream, an enactment, a reverie, an association, an emotion, a sensation, or whatever) that is not touched by the “electromagnetic waves” of the intersecting projective identifications of patient and analyst, and that does not correspond to the recordings made of it by their respective alpha functions; it might, in fact, be better to invoke the alpha function of the field (or its gamma function, as Francesco Corrao called it). This function represents the capacity of the couple, outside the rigid framework of a subject/object dichotomy, to narrate, dream, think, and construct metaphors or myths to attribute a specific meaning to their joint experience. The field takes the form of:

a system dedicated to the transformation of sensory and emotional experiences into thoughts and meanings, [and confers life on a] theory of treatment centered on the transformations and developments of the psychoanalytic field (which includes the analyst, the patient, and theories) rather than on individuals and contents. (Neri & Selvaggi, 2006, p. 182, translated)

A limitation of the field metaphor is that it might suggest a two-dimensional situation. This may, indeed, be the case when a quasi-autistic type of mental functioning arises. Instead of actual characters, there are only flat, emotionless picture cards. The patient draws the analyst into an exclusively concrete world. Play is impossible. There are no metaphors, no dreams, and no reveries. If, however, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE The meaning and use of metaphor in analytic field theory
• CHAPTER TWO Stone got eyes: on Bion's seminar in Paris
• CHAPTER THREE Mourning and the empty couch: a conversation between analysts
• CHAPTER FOUR The secret of faces
• CHAPTER FIVE Spacings
• CHAPTER SIX Analysts in search of an author: Voltaire or Artemisia Gentileschi?
• CHAPTER SEVEN Confrontation in the Bionian model of the analytic field
• CHAPTER EIGHT A Beam of Intense Darkness: a discussion of the book by James Grotstein
• CHAPTER NINE Between "other" and "other": Merleau-Ponty as a precursor of the analytic field
• CHAPTER TEN Carla's panic attacks: insight and transformation
• REFERENCES
• INDEX