ABSTRACT
The title of this book, A Disturbance in the Field, evokes for me the breadth of experience for patient and analyst in relation to transition, disruption, repair, and growth.
This is a book about transitions in clinical work. Some of the transitions are subtle, such as when a patient is able to usefully open new parts of himself in both an old and a new context. Other types of transition relate to points of impasse. Often, the transitions described relate to periods when either or both patient and analyst begin to look at a constellation of experiences or even what are traditionally termed symptoms in a different way. Needs begin to be seen as demands; self-criticism begins to be seen as related to unrealistic or perhaps even grandiose fantasies about the self; patient or analyst begins to see the ways that the analysis itself has been assaulted by unconsciously destructive trends.
