The Analytic Field

A Clinical Concept

Roberto Basile, Antonino Ferro, Roberto Basile, Antonino Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429920035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'Until now no book has ever attempted to compare and contrast contributions on analytic field theory and at the same time to explore its clinical and technical implications. This volume is intended for the first time to link together many of these writings and to provide an initial wide-ranging survey of the subject - for it is our contention that a theory of the field in various of its loci can also be inhabited by different theories. A particular aim of this book is to present not only theoretical discussions of field theory, but also contributions on clinical work and technique. For this reason we have given preference to articles with a substantial clinical component which exemplify specific underlying technical theory. In the Babel of psychoanalytic languages, clinical practice is in our view the most effective way of comparing psychoanalytic models.'

Chapter One
The universe of the field and its inhabitants

Antonino Ferro and Roberto Basile

The inhabitants of the field

The analytic field is inhabited by innumerable real and virtual presences in the process of aggregation, and a valid comparison might be with the universe as it is understood today. For the analytic field coincides with the unrepeatable “universe” that is born at the beginning of each session, only to be temporarily suspended when each session comes to an end. The field is inhabited by certain principal characters, who could be called the protagonists, as well as by supporting actors and, finally, by extras; moreover, all these presences can constantly change their roles. However, human characters (or even non-anthropomorphic ones) represent the most mature part of the field. They could be likened to the constellations discernible in a starry sky. The field is the locus of an infinite number of other phenomena, most of them unknown. An axiom of the field might be that the “Big Bang” occurs at the beginning of each session—and the “Big Crunch” at the end.

Characters constitute the outcome of operations carried out further upstream. Their status is always complex and they do not correspond to the persons to whom they bear a superficial resemblance. The characters of the session are the fruit of mental operations performed by analyst and patient and reflect the mental functioning of both, as well as their proto-emotions, emotions and unknown aspects. In other words, they are holograms of the mental functioning of the analytic couple; but they also include kinds of functioning that would, in other languages, be said to be split off, or not yet accessible to thinkability. Characters enter and leave the session tangentially; others, having entered tangentially, become protagonists; while others still immediately take essential parts. From this point of view, whatever the patient talks about, he or she is describing a form of functioning of the field.

Let us look at an actual session. It is taken from the fourth year of analysis of a patient called Salvatore. Because I am going to be away for a congress, followed by some public holidays, we are about to have two weeks with only two sessions each instead of the usual four.

Patient: I feel very excited today: I have finally bought the motor-bike. I had terrible trouble yesterday: a Turkish patient in jail had some pseudo-epileptic seizures in which he was banging his head, scratching himself in despair and rolling about on the floor. The guards then called a priest because they thought the devil might have got into him—that the demon himself was there—so the priest came along with his cross. Then he had another fit, so they thought an exorcist was needed.

Analyst: (thinking that the motorbike is telling us about having to go on two wheels instead of four and that the Turk represents an as yet indecipherable reaction of his in the form of rage and despair at the cancellation of the two plus two sessions, he confines himself however to the following comment). Well, analysts have always taken courses in exorcism, and maybe on the one hand you’re pleased at having to stand on two wheels [the motorbike] for the two weeks when we’ll be having only two sessions, but on the other, we have the crosses, like the crossing out of the two sessions, and perhaps these crossings out on your Turkish “orbital” part cause seizures.

Patient: (laughing). You know, when I was small I used to go and watch films with a friend of mine who lived in Corso Cavour [where my consulting room is located!] and once I saw The Exorcist: it really terrified me.

Analyst: (thinking that the patient was frightened by my getting too close to his potential “Turkish” side, I say only the following). What a coincidence about the address!

Patient: (laughing out loud). My mum and dad aren’t on speaking terms: mum would like him to take his work more seriously, and to do things more exactly and correctly; dad does what he can, but can’t manage to get everything working to perfection—sometimes there are “gaps” in the organization.

Analyst: (thinking that he is describing two different modes of functioning of mine, of the field and of his own). So, your mum is a Hapsburg and your dad’s a Bourbon—and then there’s me causing all these gaps!

Patient: I don’t think I’m seriously annoyed about the four sessions we’ll be missing. At home there’s rust on the gate, and it needs to be treated with Ferox [a product that removes rust from iron, iron being the meaning of my surname, Ferro, in Italian], and then the rust would go away.

Analyst: (thinking that he is angry with me, the man with the “iron” surname). In Latin it would be Ferox/ferocis—in other words, getting ferociously angry instead of secretly building up rust!

Patient: But I am angry; I can get angry now—maybe not with you, but where I work there were two members of staff who didn’t show up and I really am able to express the anger aroused in me.

Analyst: … and there’s someone else who isn’t going to show up soon, if I’m not mistaken!

Just as the universe is full of stars approaching the end of their lives and others just coming into being, these processes being underlain by a whole series of subatomic, electrical, magnetic and other phenomena, so the field has a generational matrix of its own, which draws on proto-emotional, archaic, fragmented states and works them up into “characters”. These wizards of the formation of “psychoanalytic matter” are the functions that inhabit the field and, by inhabiting it, constitute it.

This is what Grotstein (2007) calls the “dreaming ensemble”—i.e., all the functions that transform the proto-sensory and the proto-emotional into pictograms (Elias Mallet de Rocha Barros, 2000), oneiric (dream) thought and holograms. One could use terms such as the α-function of the field, the oneiric thought of the field or the contact barrier of the field, but I am less concerned with naming these functions than with describing the mental operations that are performed. These mental operations can proceed in two possible directions in seeking to create new constructions of sense. The first involves the transformation of ß-elements from obscure places in the field (ß-elements are Bion’s equivalent to proto-sensations) into α-elements (which are Bion’s equivalent to material for dream thoughts) (Bion, 1962), while the second concerns the achievement of possible new compositions, but only after a process of deconstruction—as in a town-planning situation where there is to be a change in function: the obsolete structures must be “deconstructed” first. All these “constructive” operations could be described as effecting the alphabetization of ß-elements.

However, there are not only constructive forces, for in the universe of the field, two different “dragons” confront each other—namely, the contrasting phenomena of “transformation into dreams” and “transformation in hallucinosis”. While the former seeks to produce images—provisional, dynamic meanings—the latter reverses oneiric functioning and gives rise to certainties and blockages of the field.

Another bipolarity that strongly characterizes the life of the field is the oscillation between unsaturated and saturated interpretation. Before an interpretation becomes a classical transference interpretation, it must often undertake a long journey, which we shall now attempt to follow through its various stages from unsaturation to saturation.

At the beginning of many patients’ analyses, fragments of proto-emotions are present:

These could be called proto-sememes.

The proto-sememes must be gathered in, organized and transformed to a higher level, thus eventually generating micro-sememes:

The micro-sememes must in turn be organized in such a way as to create basic sememes—for example, JEALOUSY.

This, either by itself or in combination with other basic sememes, must next be contextualized to fit the apparent situation:

“King Kong gets jealous of X when …”

A further stage in the work of the field is apparent contextualization together with an explicit personification:

“At school you are jealous of X when …”

In this way we arrive at contextualization and reversed explicit personification:

“You’re afraid I’m jealous when you …”

Finally, at journey’s end, we have contextualization with direct explicit personification:

“It seems to me that you are jealous when I …”

“School” or “King Kong” will of course be thought of as locations in the present field; in other words, an interpretation in effect travels from an unsaturated interpretation in the field to an unsaturated interpretation of the field, then to an unsaturated interpretation in the transference, and lastly to a saturated interpretation in the transference.

This suggests that patients are also always talking about the oneiric level of the functioning of the analytic couple, and, further, that what a patient says after an interpretation is also a dream about that interpretation: hence the characters who appear signify the way in which the patient heard the interpretation.

In this connection, let us see what happens, and how it is signalled by the field, when the analyst “goes offside”.

A competent analyst brings a clinical case to supervision, saying that she has failed to respect the setting: she has replied to an urgent text message from a patient and agreed to meet the surgeon who was to operate on her inner ear.

In the session the patient had mentioned the operation for hearing that she was shortly to undergo. After the surgery she had described how hearing had become something terrible for her, saying that sounds were devastating. The surgical team had included an engineer who modulated the receptivity of the complex implant she had had fitted in a difficult neurosurgical operation.

The patient had commenced her four-session-a-week analysis on a face-to-face basis because she was deaf and had to lip-read. She had a devastating history behind her. The emotional situation in which she had grown up was very low-grade: her mother was a high-class prostitute and the patient herself had been repeatedly abused from early adolescence by both family members and her mother’s clients. The father was a violent man who had spent many years in prison. The patient described herself as “lesbian”, attracted only to women. She had the appearance of an ugly, burly boy with a simian element—a “gorilla-like woman” according to her analyst. Yet below the surface a hidden, obscured kind of beauty could be glimpsed.

The patient’s emotional situation could be illustrated by the following diagram:

That is to say, her mind is subject to continuous abuse by proto-mental contents—represented by the symbol ♂—which re-emerge in uncontainable, unmetabolizable form because the containing parts of the mind (♀) lack the necessary capacity.

The analyst goes “offside” not by “venial” instances of acting-out but when she shifts her listening vertex onto an external reality which, owing to its brutish and degraded nature, imposes itself on her listening. This impedes the specificity of analytic listening in the session which should always come first, like a kind of magic philter applied to the patient’s material: “I had a dream.” By failing to use the analytic magic philter, the analyst loses the specificity of analytic communication: she overlooks the patient’s message that, through the work of analysis, through the im-pianto [impianto, the Italian for implant, contains the word pianto, which means crying], and through the painful introjection of a new function, she is becoming capable of hearing and feeling [the same word, sentire, means both in Italian] the emotions she had previously had to leave unheeded because they were too excruciating. The analysis is precisely the set of operations, surgical or otherwise, that enable her to be no longer deaf to her pain and to the intense emotions she has kept at bay in order to survive. Now there is a “new world of sound” with a surgeon-analyst and a “sound”-engineer-analyst that permits an increasingly modulated form of listening to emotional states.

This is not to say that the result of analytic listening should then be communicated to the patient explicitly and directly; instead, mediation might be necessary through the characters of the “surgeon”, the “engineer”, the “implant”, the “operation” and the “surgery”. However, what cannot be avoided is a dreaming kind of listening, the kind that we activate by preceding the patient’s narration with the “I had a dream” mentioned above, because that and that alone is specific to us. The aim of analysis is to develop the patient’s ability to “dream”—and hence to transform, metabolize and therefore forget—the excesses of sensoriality and proto-emotions which, unless digested and “dreamed”, lead to suffering and symptoms.

Our attention must be directed not towards homosexuality as real genital behaviour, but towards its metaphorical significance. For example, in this case I am thinking of the patient’s quest for a relationship with a receiving and available mind that is required to provide a model of receptivity. The “simian” side must find a place and be listened to; this will constitute a ♂♀ relationship, which is metaphorically heterosexual and can then be introjected by the patient.

The more “real”, “dramatic” or “objective” the situation narrated by the patient, the more the analyst is at risk of losing the magic philter.

The field, then, is permeated by turbulence, by whirlwinds and sometimes by tsunamis of ß-elements, which find, in the process of transformation into dreams, the transformational container that leads from disorganized potentialities to possible forms of representation.

The concept of the field is rendered even more complex by all the virtualities at work in it—as it were, parallel worlds or universes that subsequently coalesce into narrations which come to life in accordance with the receptive capacity of the dreaming ensemble. Breaking down the latter, we encounter “night dreams”, which become dreams of the field at the moment in which they are narra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• BIOGRAPHIES OF THE CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE The universe of the field and its inhabitants
• CHAPTER TWO On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER THREE The enlarged notion of field in psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER FOUR Adolescence as a dynamic field
• CHAPTER FIVE Las Meninas
• CHAPTER SIX The dynamic field of psychoanalysis: A turning point in the theories of the unconscious
• CHAPTER SEVEN Working with and in the basic layer of the interpersonal field: Opportunities and dangers
• CHAPTER EIGHT The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts
• CHAPTER NINE “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king!” Psychoanalysis as a passion play
• INDEX