ABSTRACT
The Field is a concept that, with a few exceptions, is newly arrived in Anglophone psychoanalysis, mostly by way of Antonino Ferro’s application of the work of Wilfred R. Bion, Winnicott and the Barangers. There are major epistemological differences between psychic reality and consensually validatable social or ‘commonsense’ reality and these spill over into the psychoanalytic usage and understanding of what mean by the Field and ‘the unconscious’ and extend to related concepts such as ‘memory’, ‘thought’ and ‘perception’. The analytic situation offers a ‘thick slide’ of experience under the ‘analytic microscope’ and focuses the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, the object relational, the transferential, etc. perspective of each participant or the perspective of the Field. It should be noted that ‘characters’ in the Field may be individuals that appear in the discourse or in phantasy of either participant or may be emotional qualities or dispositions, such as ‘submission’ or ‘watchfulness’, ‘anger’ or ‘joy’.
