Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory

Concept and Future Development

S. Montana Katz, Roosevelt Cassorla, Giuseppe Civitarese, S. Montana Katz, Roosevelt Cassorla, Giuseppe Civitarese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317505600
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Field Theory is a powerful and growing paradigm within psychoanalysis, but has previously been split between various schools of thought with little overlap. In this book, a distinguished group of contributors from across all perspectives on Field Theory examine its uniting factors and set out future developments and directions for the paradigm within psychoanalysis.

Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory represents the work developed for the first international meeting of the International Field Theory Association. Founded in 2015 to offer a community for those interested in psychoanalytic field theory and promote its understanding and further development, IFTA recognizes all models of psychoanalytic field theory and seeks to foster communication amongst psychoanalysts working in different models, languages and parts of the world.

At the first ever meeting of IFTA, an international group of psychoanalysts participated in a roundtable discussion of the different contemporary models of psychoanalytic field theory. Each participant wrote a paper in advance of the meeting, which were all shared among the group beforehand and then discussed together. These feature as the chapters in this volume, whilst a thirteenth member offers a unifying overview of all the papers. Each chapter provides new, contemporary ways of approaching field theory. Key excerpts from the discussion of the meeting are also featured throughout to give a flavour of the collaborative efforts of the participants. The emphasis of this book is on generating mutual understanding of the different models of field theory, their underlying concepts, and heuristic principles.

Drawing on insights from literature, critical theory and philosophy as well as psychoanalysis, this book sets out a program for the future of Field Theory. Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory will appeal to psychoanalysts and mental health care practitioners as well as academicians in philosophy, psychology and literature.

Chapter 1
Introduction

S. Montana Katz Roosevelt Cassorla and Giuseppe Civitarese

The International Field Theory Association (IFTA) was founded in 2015 to offer a community for those interested in psychoanalytic field theory and to promote the understanding and further development of psychoanalytic field theory. IFTA recognizes all models of psychoanalytic field theory and seeks to foster communication among psychoanalysts working in different models, in different languages, and in different parts of the world.

The first meeting of IFTA was held on July 21, 2015 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Bard College Longy School of Music. This meeting was designed to begin to achieve the goals of the association. An international group of psychoanalysts was asked to participate in a roundtable discussion of the different contemporary models of psychoanalytic field theory. The group participants were: Elsa Rappoport de Aisemberg, Roosevelt Cassorla, Giuseppe Civitarese, Marco Conci, Beatriz de León de Bernardi, Antonino Ferro, James L. Fosshage, S. Montana Katz, Joseph Lichtenberg, Claudio Neri, Martin Silverman, Donnell Stern, and Juan Tubert-Oklander. Twelve of the participants wrote papers in advance of the meeting. These papers were then shared among the group prior to the meeting. At the meeting itself all of the papers were discussed by the group. The thirteenth member offered a discussion of the papers.

The papers and discussion presented in this volume are the papers that were written for the meeting. The meeting occupied a full day and was structured into four sessions of three papers each. The papers are ordered in this book according to the order in which they were discussed at the meeting. Brief excerpts from the discussion are also presented throughout the book to give a flavor of the collaborative effort of the participants. The emphasis of the discussion was to generate mutual understanding of the different models of field theory, their underlying concepts, and their heuristic principles. The meeting was videotaped, and extensive footage has been posted on the IFTA website (www.internationalfieldtheoryassociation.com).

We would like to thank all of the participants for their efforts to make the meeting a highly stimulating and collegial exchange of ideas. In addition, the Academic Dean at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Anne O’Dwyer and the Bard College Longy School of Music staff were all helpful in the planning and operation of the meeting. Videographer Richard Lange devoted many hours of careful attention to producing an excellent videotaped documentation of the meeting. Our editor, Kate Hawes, at Routledge has been a source of encouragement throughout the process of creating this volume.

Freud compared the analytic interaction with the noble game of chess. That’s too rationalistic for my taste. Nino Ferro compared it to a fencing match. That’s better because it involves non-rational activity such as the body, reflexes, unthought reactions, but it is still ruled by strategical and purposive thinking. When things get moving in an analysis it’s like dancing. Two people are dancing in such a way that it makes no sense to ask who is leading. What is leading is the music and the music is something different from the two people. It is a process, what Don Stern would call emergence. The emergence of something new, unbidden, unexpected, and uncontrollable by both. What both can do is either accept it or reject it; but if you accept it, you let yourself be carried away by it. Suddenly both analyst and patient find themselves knowing things they didn’t know they knew and perhaps something they didn’t know before.

Juan Tubert-Oklander

Chapter 2
The field evolves

Antonino Ferro

The analytic field is also the site of all the patient’s and analyst’s potential identities, which does not mean that all the potential identities must come to life or be integrated: sometimes it is appropriate for them to remain split off or to be buried within the strata of the field itself for the whole of the time in which this will be useful for the development of mental life.

For a narrative to develop, as Diderot remembered àpropos Jacques the Fatalist, there are so many possible stories that must be “put to sleep” so that the main story, “fruit” of the two co-narrators, can come to life and develop.

I have spoken elsewhere of how there are two “loci” of mental creativity in a Bionian metapsychology: the place where beta elements, carriers of all the sensoriality, are transformed via alpha function into pictograms (the sub-units of dream-thought in the waking state) and the place where the derived narrative in all its infinite variety, on a longer or shorter leash, moves away from or stays close to waking dream-thought within the field (Ferro 2002, 2009).

In Simenon’s fine novel Les Clients d’Avrenos, the protagonist Nouchi tells how when she was a child on her way home from school, she would often observe from behind a fence her sister, only a few years older, giving herself to adult men in exchange for a few coins or chocolate. It was the poor Vienna of the early twentieth century. Then Nouchi becomes an entraîneuse—a hostess in a low-life bar—though she remains frigid.

I have purposely chosen the telling of a neutral episode so as to see the various models at work.

In a model based on historic reconstruction it is not hard to anticipate where it would take us: to the childhood traumatic experience, child sexuality, abuse, and then the acquaintance with pain.

A model centered on Nouchi’s internal world could take us towards eroticized destructiveness and an attack on linking.

An intermediate field model could lead us to a reading like this: an infantile part remains as an observer of what happens in the field; that is, the analyst is relating to a more adult part of the patient, who gains warmth and comfort from this but remains nevertheless “cold” because the interpretative coupling has been premature. But I would like to open up a field understood in a totally different way. That is to say, we do not know it at all: we must merely postulate a field in development, but in doing so surrender all its predictability, or at least accept that what we are given to know is F0 (Field-0) while we wait for F1, F2 … Fn.

We cannot therefore postulate that the field will be decipherable except in the moment in time (0) at which it occurs, but this moment also gives birth to infinite other possible fields that will come to life and be selected by the movement of the potential multitude that is the “couple,” and will be knowable only après-coup with the opening/closing of infinite possible fields, derivatives of infinite factors, many of which are unknown.

For a long time—too long a time—we thought interpretation was the engine of analysis, an oscillation between time and abstinence/presence and intervention.

The initial episode of which I spoke could in fact produce any number of possible stories.

This could be the starting point of an exercise using a range of writings with different outcomes. Or, equally, different directors could develop different films based on the same outline, the same plot. (Even if it is not clear what the role of “director” might be in the session or from what it might be constituted.)

From among all the hypotheticals I would prioritize the “atmospheric” factors of the session and the links formed by multiple and variable reveries with multiple and variable projective identifications.

There is more creativity in not hindering developments than there is in specifically initiating them.

In Sicilian dialect the term “chiacco” indicates a kind of noose made of rope suspended from wires, usually between opposite or adjacent balconies, for hanging out washing to dry. If something light—a sock or handkerchief—is hung from this it shows the strength of the wind. A patient in analysis tells me that his grandfather used to watch something hanging out to dry so he could see how windy the day was, though the wind was usually a gentle breeze rather than the Bora, the north-eastern gale which sometimes batters Palermo. From the “forecast” given by the movement of something hanging from the “chiacco” the grandfather would determine the day’s risk of catching a cold or cough from the “change of air”—that is, the wind if he was outside, or the dreaded draught if he was indoors.

This could be seen as an anecdote about childhood and as the source of eventual hypochondriac anxieties. Or it could be seen as a warning present in the internal world; or, if seen in time 0 of the field, as the description of an alarm-signal for some emotional current possibly about to come to life. The description of a field in which possible differences in potential, in temperature, in heat could be dangerous because they would activate currents that will be difficult to control. In that case the emotions would be winds that could cause illness.

But if we move from time 0 towards time 1—and on to time “n”—we have no way of foreseeing what type of field will develop or what narratives will give meaning to the emotional lines of force that will have come to life. One exercise could be, having set this field to time 0, to describe its possible developments.

In fencing, and even in the very different kind that is dependent on marking thrusts with electrified jackets and weapons, there is still a basic set of terms—parries, circular parries, hits, feints, double feints, arrests, a “counter,” “two counters,” and so on—but it is the sum total of these that makes every fencing match—for the knowledgeable spectator—a unique, unrepeatable, and above all completely unpredictable experience, because it is the fruit of a combination of variables tending to infinity.

All this could also apply to the development of psychoanalysis, where every change could be experienced as a turbulence to be avoided, even though we cannot evolve without disturbing what we know.

The “analyst at work” (“analyst” and “patient” will henceforth always mean “analyst and patient at work in an appropriate setting”) must dispense with, or rather mourn for, external reality, so as to enter into the deconcretized, deconstructed, and then, if possible, redreamed world, as suggested by Tom Ogden (2009) when he writes that the purpose of analysis is to help the patient to have the dreams he has been unable to have by himself, which have become symptoms that can be dissolved only if they are “dreamed.”

The same idea, although formulated differently, is expressed by Jim Grotstein (2007), who holds that the human mind is at one and the same time an entity that is constantly processing stimuli and a defense against “O” (truth, ultimate reality, facts, beta elements). The same author goes on to say that all we can do is transform our perception, our experience of the truth (“O”), into fiction—that is, mythicize it. This is achieved by allowing “O” to pass through Column 2 of the Grid, which is the column not only of lies but also of dreams—and where “O” is concerned a dream is also a lie.

In Wisława Szymborska’s fine poem “Conversation with a Stone,” a man asks a stone for permission to go inside it, but the stone says “no,” he will never be able to enter even if he is all seeing, because he lacks the sense outwardly of taking part. At the entrance to Column 2, the “fact,” the “event,” the “reality-based given,” or the “stone” of the symptoms or of reality must encounter the analyst’s sense of taking part, which, for me, is the capacity to share the patient’s manifest story or “thing.”

This will permit access to the interior of Row 2, where that “thing” will meet with the “lithotripter” represented by the analyst’s capacity for deconstruction, deconcretization, and redreaming. (For the sake of simplicity, I shall often say “analyst and patient,” but this will always imply the “analytic field” as something new and different from the sum of its component parts: what happens in Row 2 occurs substantially in a place in the field.)

After the sense of taking part (being in unison), a number of active instruments of subjective mythopoiesis come into play—namely, the alpha function and the various types of reverie (basic reverie, flash-type reverie, constructive reverie, transformation in dreaming, transformation in play, dreaming, and Ogden’s talking-as-dreaming; see Ferro, 2007, 2009).

Besides these active instruments, we need certain “basic atmospheres” if transformations are to be possible. These arise from the alternation between negative capability and the preselected fact, between the autistic-contiguous position (ACP) and PS↔D, and between container and contained.

The principal aim of analysis (apart from the familiar elements of removing the veil of repression, the work of integrating split-off parts, insight, putting ego where id was, and so on) is to develop these active instruments and the atmospheres that are conducive to transformation. An initial approach to this description is to consider, for example, how a “person” in Row 2 becomes a “character” of the analysis—that is to say, an affective hologram arising out of what the field needs to express and what is mediated by the ongoing casting of characters (Ferro, 2013).

The librarian and the rifle

Dreaming the symptom

Luigi is a severely obsessional librarian. At our very first interview, he says he has a father with an aortic aneurysm and a paralyzed uncle. (This suggests two different forms of functioning in the patient—one incontinent and the other that immobilizes him, as in his obsessive rituals.) He goes on to tell me how he spends ages “cleaning,” “sweeping,” and tidying up the garden lawn, where animals sometimes dig “holes.”

In this ritual-filled world (with the rituals practiced both at work and at bedtime) he seems to have one area of freedom: his hobby of hunting. He has to look after two dogs, clean his guns, and organize the various hunts. He goes on to describe his grandfather’s terrible experience during the war when he found that his house had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The field evolves
• 3 Not all field theories are the same: the impact of listening perspectives and models of transference
• 4 Dialectics of transferential interpretation and analytic field
• 5 About the theory of the analytic field
• 6 Notes on transformations in hallucinosis
• 7 Psychoanalytic field theory: good for all analysts
• 8 Dreams and non-dreams: a study on the field of dreaming
• 9 Analytic field theory: a dialogical approach, a pluralistic perspective, and the attempt at a new definition
• 10 The third model of contemporary psychoanalytic field theory
• 11 The analytic field as a resonator and instrument for revealing the presence of other fields
• 12 Emergent properties of the interpersonal field
• 13 Field theories and process theories
• 14 Commentary on field theory presentations
• Index