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In its twentieth-century crisis of unknowing, modern physics has gravitated to the image of ‘field’ to account for sub-atomic events that can no longer be understood on the Newtonian analogy of ricocheting billiard balls. Thus, there is a magnetic field, a gravity field, an electron/positron field, and so on, each understood as a polarity of forces describing a ‘cloud of probabilities’. This vague region only becomes ‘specified’ as a ‘particle’ with a definite location or velocity when an experiment is performed which forces the ‘cloud’ to ‘collapse’ into a specific event. Rupert Sheldrake has extended the metaphor to include the processes of biology and consciousness. His ‘morphic fields’ determine, for example, the embryological process whereby a cell of a general type becomes ‘specified’ as a neuron or a liver cell for the future chick or child. In the realm of consciousness, these ‘morphic fields’ act exactly like Jung's archetypes, determining our reactions and behaviours.
Psychotherapy, too, has been enlivened by the field metaphor. Citing Winnicott, Ogden, von Franz, and Jung, Nathan Schwartz-Salant articulates the meeting of analyst and analysand as taking place within a field of polarized emotional forces displaying an archetypal character. On the model of the Axiom of Maria Prophetissa (Out of the One, Two; out of the Two, Three; and out of the Three comes the One as the Fourth), he specifies the stages we go through in experiencing our therapeutic interaction as occurring within a field.
The ‘One’ is the emotional conundrum the analysand brings to analysis - her stuckness within a limiting complex, possibly a state of unspecified anxiety. We have arrived at the experience of the ‘Two’ when, as analysts, we find ourselves ‘infected’ with the analysand's anxiety and have to ask ourselves, ‘Is this my anxiety or is it hers?’ Without field theory, we are forced to collapse the uncertainty with an intuitive leap and conclude, for instance, that this is the analy