ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author offers a renovation of field theory in psychoanalysis as a way to recognize and work, conceptually and in clinical practice, with what the author is now further elaborating as fluid registrations in addition to categorical and structural re-presentations of interaction. A review of how Racker and Reis read Freud, augmented by additional and previously unexamined aspects of Daniel Stern’s conception of attunement and repeated interactions generalized, builds toward a reformulation of how approaching the affective turbulence of emotional suffering might be better envisioned through the term affect navigation and its various meanings and uses in contrast with the term affect regulation. Clinical examples from clinician/theorists (including the author) representing relational and Bionic thought, illustrate how embodied registrations of rhythmic patterning, which because of their fluidity cannot be re-presented symbolically/categorically, augment recognition of self-states and self-stateself-state shifts. This augmentation provides an expanded attention to the clinician for the unfolding and layering of her own emotional experience in addition to that of her patient. The further complexifying of this experience in terms of the intersection of cultural lenses as introduced in the previous chapter, are noted as a bridge to the next chapter.
