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Psychoanalysis is nearly 100 years old in a wide world of revolutionary ideas that have been developed over the centuries in different cultures and that make up the distinct ways we can understand the human mind. In this paper, I will approach a clinical concept developed in Latin America, that of the analytic field, and relate it to the vital cycle of analysts and patients, surprises and movement in the analytic process.
In the psychoanalytical culture in which the concept was developed, there was a recognition of the analyst's participation in shaping the phenomena observed in the therapeutic relationship. The concept was developed from the works by Racker (1982) and Heimann (1950/1995) on the communicative value of countertransference, identification, and projective counter-identification.
Although all scientific undertakings aspire — or perhaps should aspire — to the possibility of generalization and replication of therapeutic experiences, in our field of action, psychoanalysis, a unique difficulty presents because we all know that ours is, essentially, a science of the particular, the unique, the unrepeatable. No two clinical cases are equal, in the same way that no two people are equal, in the same way that every working day we are faced with changing expressions of the human psyche and psychological suffering. Along the same line of thinking, we ourselves are not the same with each case, nor do we have the same listening ability over the course of our clinical career.
As a matter of fact, Heraclitus had already pointed out that a river never passes by the same place twice. Recently, Roger Pol-Droit (2010) pointed out that Heraclitus was known as the Obscure because he stressed that on the one hand, everything is one: there is only one world, where all elements live together despite their differences. On the other hand, everything