Psychoanalytic Field Theory

Organised by:

Tavistock Relationships

Description

Psychoanalytic Field Theory: From the individual to the shared unconscious

With Dr Giuseppe Civitarese

The post-Bionian theory of the analytic field is today one of the most fertile and innovative developments in contemporary psychoanalysis. It’s contribution lies in shifting the focus from the individual unconscious to the shared unconscious process generated within the analytic relationship. The analytic couple is no longer conceived as the sum of two separate minds, but as a dynamic intersubjective field within which affects, images, fantasies, impasses, and transformations emerge. From this perspective, concepts such as reverie, projective identification, alpha function, and dreaming are radically rethought: no longer as functions attributable exclusively to either patient or analyst, but as expressions of the functioning of the field itself.

This also leads to a different conception of interpretation. Interpretation no longer primarily coincides with the unveiling of a hidden content, but with an intervention capable of transforming the quality of the shared emotional experience, making it more thinkable, more dreamable, and more open to symbolisation. The more recent developments of field theory also emphasise the centrality of the bond, the constitutively relational nature of subjectivity, and the ethical dimension of the analytic process, understood as an opening towards more evolved forms of mutual recognition.

Field psychoanalysis thus presents itself not only as a theory of technique, but as a broader theory of the mind-in-relation, in which cure coincides with the transformation of the “unconscious we” that patient and analyst together, each time, come to embody. The lecture will include clinical material to illustrate the arguments presented.

For more information about this event, please visit https://trtogether.com/events/psychoanalytic-field-theory

For more information about Tavistock Relationships, please visit https://tavistockrelationships.org

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