Balancing the General with the Particular in Psychoanalysis

I am aware, as I write, that I address the reader at a particular moment in time. And I have no doubt that by the time these words find themselves published, that moment may have vanished, transformed into another time with other bundles of concern and fusions of pressing magnitude. Clinically, this contextual issue is framed across today's psychoanalytic schools through the post-Lewinian lens of field theory (Stern, 2013a, b). Our psychoanalytic situation is not only individual and intra-psychic, but also interpersonally and relationally shaped by the social, political, and societal pressures and times under which each of us lives. How we integrate the fields in which we practice, how we construct our psychoanalytic situations, will, of course, vary subjectively both relative to the individual therapist and patient within the clinical dyad.

We all have witnessed how, over a year's rough course, a clinical field which once allocated decades to the problem of whether psychoanalysis might be conducted in a chair rather than upon the couch, or whether three weekly sessions were comparable to five, has uniformly shifted to different approaches in technologically-mediated psychotherapy. Some clinicians argue for the use of video-facilitation while some argue for telephonic therapies while others still rail that neither really approximates the feel and tang of the authentic clinical encounter. Yet, fitting what we know of therapeutic forms and activities within the constraints of global lockdowns under the press of coronavirus, differing in length and patterning from country tocountry, mobilizes us all. Colleagues’ informal Zoom meetings now often concern the challenges of treatments mixed between in-person and mediated contacts or