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In this original approach to the theory of psychotherapy, the London analytical psychologist Nathan Field explores his thesis that through key points of breakdown in the psychotherapeutic relationship come astonishing breakthroughs in the work that can lead to a better functional level for the patient and may even redefine his existence. He suggests that there are perhaps two different patterns of psychological movement in psychotherapy: a continuous, linear progression; and a discontinuous process following a pattern of alternating progression-regression-progression. In this work, Field's focus is primarily upon this second pattern in which regressive states of arrest or impasse in the therapeutic process are followed almost mysteriously by a startling new awareness and a renewal of forward movement at a healthier level.
In a series of chapters embracing both theoretical exegesis and personal revelation in the examination of fascinating case material, Field takes us into a new vision of the dimensions of the psychotherapeutic/analytic encounter. While he firmly situates his understanding within the familiar tenets of object relations theory - especially in the ideas of Balint, Klein, Meltzer, Winnicott, Bion, and Jung's elaboration of the move from the symbolic to the transpersonal level of experience - his addition of insights from quantum physics, holography, chaos theory, Eastern and Western philosophy, and brain research radically revisions consciousness as existing as an absolute (Plato, Govinda), independent of the brain. As a unitary reality prior to the Cartesian split into mind and body, ‘consciousness’, Field writes, ‘is not waiting for the development of the physical brain but it is prior to it; the brain is itself an expression of it’ (p. 49). The three-dimensional everyday world is but an illusion, a dream from which we have yet