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Near the end of his life, Husserl, Heidegger's teacher, saw the tragic irony: that the sciences our vision produced … have turned against us … separating our vision from its rootedness in our dreams, our needs and hopes; concealing from our view the depth of the field in which visible and invisible intersect and interpenetrate. (Levin, 1988, p. 99)
THIS PAPER PLAYS OUT A NOTION of the depth of the field as it applies to the psychoanalytic situation. The field, accordingly, is the interpersonal field, all that obtains between analyst and analysand, and including the intrapersonal constellation of self each brings to the dyad. The field might be conceived of as incubator of the transference (e.g. Freud, 1940), or as transferential-countertransferential matrix (e.g. Racker, 1968), as narrative domain (e.g. Spence, 1982), or as empathic arena (e.g. Kohut, 1984). But conceptual ways of understanding, it is argued, themselves tend to obscure an uncanny and central feature of the field: its inconceivable depth. A revisionist consideration of the history of psychoanalysis suggests that what Freud discovered, thereupon inadvertently to cover with formidably opaque theorizing, was this yawning depth of the field. As the theory becomes more powerfully and comprehensively explanatory, the inexplicable depth becomes more and more obscured.
What is this depth of the field? While the field is all that unfolds in the space, the time, the felt experience which is present, unfolding moment by moment, between analyst and analysand, its depth is not so much the content of what is said, nor the emotions aroused, nor the formulations of intellect and interpretation, nor even the globally altered sense of who one is to which a whole