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Psychoanalysis, while the progenitor of today's various talk therapies, retains for itself a singular, even numinous quality, focused as it is on the ever-evolving manifestations of the unconscious. Despite what some decry as its fragmentation and others laud as pluralism, it is this ineffable quality as well as a theoretical and clinical cohesion that marks psychoanalysis in all its various incarnations as a discipline apart.
S. Montana Katz, editor of Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language and the Future of Psychoanalysis and one of its contributors, seeks to plumb the essence of what unifies the schools of thought within psychoanalysis in order to create, one might say, an axiomatic language that will both contain the richness of each creative branch as well as facilitate communication within the field and perhaps, more importantly, within the larger intellectual and academic community where psychoanalysis is no longer the respected member of the humanities it once was. For this herculean task Katz turns to field theory, first conceptualized as such by psychoanalysts Madeleine and Willy Baranger (1961-1962) in their seminal paper, “The Analytic Situation as a Dynamic Field.”1
The development of field theory is situated within the framework of the ever-expanding awareness of the value of the countertransference in clinical work. As Baranger and Baranger (1961-1962) state, “When … [countertransference] acquires a theoretical and technical value equal to that of the transference, the analytic situation is configured as a dynamic bi-personal field” (p. 795). Transference and countertransference are no longer conceptualized in a causal linearity but have now become subsumed in something akin to a system of unconscious fantasy, functioning as any organic system or field might where the genesis of action and reaction is no longer visible or relevant within its confines and the system is relatively self-perpetuating.
The “field” is understood to be a metaphor a