Introduction

This issue of Modern Psychoanalysis contains several talks delivered at the CMPS 2021 conference on “Dreaming the Session,” all focusing on the topic through the lens of psychoanalytic field theory. Lawrence Brown discusses what can occur spontaneously in the immediacy of a session with the psychotherapist, and what symbols can form and connect in that space; Barbara D'Amato takes a look at those symbols deep within a dream-scape of the artistic matter we consume; and Civaterese, the conference's keynote speaker, explores the space between and around: How the dream is no longer perceived as solely a creation of the analysand: the dream as merely one encapsulating many, a joint dream of the analytic couple, in the moment to moment of time, and in the space of a field.

Civitarese has regarded “Merleau-Ponty as a precursor of the analytic field”. He writes that few psychoanalysts cite the writings of Merleau-Ponty due to an apparent lack of familiarity with his work, not knowing, therefore, the significance and utility his thought could have for psychoanalysis (Civitarese 2015, 151-169). Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the unconscious, of the lived body, of operative intentionality (Husserl's fungierende Intentionalität), of the “anonymous subject of perception”, and of course of the perceptual field, could all help to clarify and refine psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

Merleau-Ponty sometimes spoke of being “haunted” by others (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, 161). In looking at the concrete act of speaking, in what he called its “live and creative stage”

(Merleau-Ponty, 1973, 17), he noticed an interlacing, or mutual inherence, in which the origin of what was coming to expression is not locatable in either participant in the dialogue (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, 145). In his major work, The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty described the originary perceptual experience of lived space. He said that this philosophical inquiry reveals an experience not unlike the schizophrenic e