The Interpersonal Field: Its Place in American Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Today the concept of the interpersonal field, while seldom credited to those who created it, is widely used in psychoanalysis. After reviewing how the concept of the field defines interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, I take up the rejection of the idea in American mainstream psychoanalysis in the decades just after it was proposed by Sullivan and Fromm, why that rejection took place, and how the entire discipline of psychoanalysis in North America might have fared if the idea had been widely recognized earlier than it was.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Other versions of this paper were delivered as the Roberta Held-Weiss Memorial Lecture at the William Alanson White Institute, New York City, April 18, 2014; at the S. Joseph Nemetz Memorial Lecture on the History and Development of American Psychoanalysis, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Boston, MA, September 20, 2014; and at part of the annual scientific program of the Houston-Austin Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, Houston, TX, February 27, 2015.

Notes

¹ Reference to the work of Sullivan, Fromm, and Thompson appears elsewhere in this paper. Most of Fromm-Reichmann’s work appears in two volumes (Fromm-Reichmann, 1955, 1959).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donnel B. Stern

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst, Faculty, William Alanson White Institute, New York City; Adjunct Clinical Professor and Clinical Consultant, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; author of Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (The Analytic Press, 1997), Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment (Routledge, 2010), and Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015), and founder and editor of a book series from Routledge, Psychoanalysis in a New Key.