Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: Advances in Psychoanalytic Field Theory: Changing psychoanalytic Models of the Mind and Technique in a Changing World

In this rich and well-conceptualized panel, the chair Montana Katz continued her recent integrative work by bringing together noted representatives of three contemporary field theories: one based on the work of Madeleine and Willy Baranger from South America, another based on the work of Wilfred R. Bion and Antonino Ferro, and a third model derived from the family of North American field theories.

Roosevelt Cassorla, from Campinas and São Paulo-Brazil, began by thanking Dr. Katz for putting together the newly established International Field Theory Association. He then brought the audience into his consulting room with a vivid analytic vignette.

A patient has not yet arrived at her usual starting time. The analyst leaves the door to the consulting room open, assuming she will enter upon her arrival. Yet the patient remains in the waiting room until the analyst discovers her later in the hour. She said she didn't know she should come in—she felt like a burden. On reflection, Cassorla recognized an aspect of the analytic field that was blocking the energy in the analytic process, and to which he hadn't paid attention. There had been a repetitive politeness, a “collusion of idealization” between “the Lady and the Gentleman Analyst,” which was not being ‘dreamt’, and thus was not available for symbolization. The theories of thinking (Bion), the ideas of the Baranger couple, and the ideas of the Italian field theory helped Cassorla's understanding of the transformation of symbolic thought - through “dreaming the emotional experience” which was the “vertex [from which] to observe the functions of the field”. Citing Bion's concepts of L (love), H (hate) and K (knowledge), Cassorla described the capacity of the analytic field to “link L and H and transform into K”. Just as knowledge of reality can never be attained, the analytic field, too, is inf