ABSTRACT
I remember feeling, even as a graduate student seeing my first patients in the early 1970s, that the clinical process took place between the patient and me, and that my experience and the patient’s were not only our own, but also parts of a larger whole. In my first book (Stern, 1997), I recently reread a description of the interpersonal field. It brought back to me those first experiences of that sense of the clinical situation and reminded me of how long the interpersonal field has been central in my mind-longer, even, than I have known it by its name. here is the passage:
A fully interpersonal conception of treatment is a field theory. The psychoanalytic relationship, like any relationship, takes place in a field that is defined and ceaselessly redefined by its participants. It is not only the intrapsychic dynamics patient and analyst bring to their relationship that determine their experience with one another. The field is a unique creation, not a simple additive combination of individual dynamics; it is ultimately the field that determines which experiences the people who are in the process of co-creating that field can have in one another’s presence. It is the field that determines what will be dissociated and what will be articulated, when imagination will be possible and when the participants will be locked into stereotypic descriptions of their mutual experience. Each time one participant changes the nature of his or her involvement in the field, the possibilities for the other person’s experience change as well . . . The field is the only relevant context.
