Introduction to developments in field theory

Abstract

I can remember when I first started as a therapist seeing a particular client and thinking ‘I must get some earlier nights!’. Then, the next client came in and I felt very much awake again (even though no words had yet been spoken). How might one explain this? For (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002) something emerges in the between. It is as if people or even objects communicate non-verbally with each other. For Merleau-Ponty this was mysterious, and sometimes if we try and take the mystery away we might take away the thing itself. I among others have considered the therapeutic relationship to be magical (Loewenthal, 2022, pp. 96–101). There again, there have been many attempts within the psychological therapies to consider such phenomena as paranormal with ‘. . . such concepts as the uncanny (Freud, 1919), synchronicity (Jung, 1960), the transpersonal (Daniels, 2005, Mintz & Schmeidler, 1983), telepathy (Totton, 2003), mindfulness (Clarke, 2014) and anomalous experiences (for example Sollod, 1992). . .. Abraham and Torok (1994). . . metaphorics bring to life beings like the crypt, ghosts, goblins, and phantoms.. . . the exploration by Frosh (2012) of hauntings. . . Fisher 2014 on hautology. . .’ (Loewenthal, 2022, p. 2). More generally, there have been attempts to name what appears not to be able to be spoken of with concepts such as ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polyani, 1966). But perhaps Ogden (1994) ‘analytic third’ and his ‘ontological psychoanalysis’ (Ogden, 2019) with Winnicott (1971) ‘playing rather than play’, and particularly Bion’s ‘the dreaming rather than dream’ (Bion, 1970), hold the promise of the client and therapist together becoming creatively more alive. Yet is it possible to go further in describing the indescribable? Could it be that the two book reviews in this Special Issue give a further indication of the kind of site of therapeutic knowledge that we are unknowingly working with? One of the editors of this special issue, Robert Snell, in his book Cézanne and the post-Bionian field: an exploration and meditation, fascinatingly explains how Cézanne through his paintings is able to communicate to us how objects influence each other – just as therapist and client do.