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This collection of six papers, plus a poem by Judith Hubback and book reviews, is a further volume in the Chiron Clinical series which brings together international Jungian writing on a single theme. This time the theme is the ‘interactive field’ in analysis - the concept of a third area between analyst and analysand. This, as Nathan Schwartz-Salant reminds us in the first paper, is connected with parallel concepts found in Winnicott's and Ogden's writing and centres on the ‘combined subjectivities of analyst and analysand’ (p. 1). Apart from providing an excellent introduction to the subject, Schwartz-Salant explains how, in his clinical work, he opens to the field ‘as to an object’. He finds that ‘Experiencing the field and being changed by its process is a way of transforming internal structures’ (p. 9). This paper covers a lot of ground, considering the coniunctio and its link with the nigredo, as well as the views of Bion and Meltzer and psychotic energies. Illustrating his ideas with several short clinical examples, Schwartz-Salant concludes, however, that the interactive field is ‘a space with its own processes not identical to the combined projections of analyst and analysand … (it is) beyond the three-dimensional notion of container-contained focused on the projective and introjective processes’ (p. 33). In other words, the field approach ‘is akin to a fourth dimension that complements the more usual three-dimensional model of analysis’ (ibid.).
Verena Kast approaches the topic using the concepts of participation and collusive transference and countertransference. She emphasizes how the entanglements of analysis are necessary to transformation in a process that is ultimately mysterious. Kast makes extensive use of the tale ‘The girl without hands’, stating how ‘In a way, myths and fairy tales can function like transitional objects’ (p. 58). Murray Stein uses a different tale, ‘The shoes that were danced to pieces’, to help himself, as the analyst, to underst