ABSTRACT
Nathan Field’s book Breakdown and Breakthrough is a clear exposition of his current thinking. He describes the roots of his thinking about the self, and the self in relation to an other. Field describes centrally two themes, the double journey of the master and the pupil, student, or trainee, and the parallel path of the therapist and the patient, the priest, and the supplicant. Field says, “D. W. Winnicott’s admission was an act of surrender to some unknown process that both he and his patient were engaged in, and was therefore essentially a spiritual action, which transformed a long impasse.” The therapeutic goal is to use that space to bring two minds together and to create from them something different, as paradoxical as Winnicott’s transitional object, which is both given and found, old and new, belonging to one and then another, and eventually is discarded by both without rancour.
