Enactive Fields: An Approach to Interaction in the Kleinian-Bionian Model: Commentary on Paper by Lawrence J. Brown

Abstract

In taking up the matter of intersubjectivity in Kleinian-Bionian theories Brown creatively reimagines the clinical situation, transcending demarcations of analytic schools to arrive (though never fully arrive) at new understandings of interaction. I discuss Brown's engaging paper from my own emerging concept of enactivity, drawing distinctions between this approach and Bion's approach and extending the enactive to a consideration of enactive fields that, like Brown's paper, draws on the seminal reinterpretation of Kleinian theory by the Barangers. In writing of the field as an emergent process of becoming I rely on Merleau-Ponty's notion of “singing the world” to illustrate my developing understanding of the possibilities for interaction in the Kleinian-Bionian tradition. My comments on Brown's clinical case material focus on what appears to me to be the intersubjective aspects of his approach.

Notes

¹Consider by way of illustration the following passages from Locke and Kant, respectively: “Though the Qualities that affect our Senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended … yet 'tis plain, the Ideas they produce in the Mind, enter by the senses simple and unmixed. … The coldness and hardness which a Man feels in a piece of Ice, being as distinct Ideas in the Mind, as the smell and Whiteness of a Lily. … There is nothing can be plainer to a Man, than the clear and distinct Perception he has of those simple Ideas; which being each in it self uncompounded, contains in it nothing by one uniform Appearance, or Conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different Ideas” (Locke, 1975, p. 119). Or “While the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only[as sensation], its form must lie ready … a priori in the mind … apart from all sensation. Thus, if I take away from the representation of a body that which the understanding thinks in regard to it, substance, force, divisibility, etc., and likewise what belongs to sensation, impenetrability, hardness, colour, etc., something still remains over from this empirical intuition, extension and figure” (Kant, 1965, p. 66).

²It may help to think of the operation of mirror neuron assemblies when considering the action at a distance involved in the field, especially when such assemblies are regarded enactively, as perceptual rather than simulative (Reis, 2009b). Brown (this issue) states at the beginning of his paper that his view of intersubjectivity is “as an unconscious process between two communicating intrapsychic worlds, a process that is constantly at work in the analytic exchange of which, from time to time, the patient and analyst become aware” (p. 669). Conceptualizing the case of Ms. C from a position solidly within a perspective informed as much by Bion as the Barrangers, Brown describes field phenomena of an emerging shared unknown emotional truth, and of shared unconscious phantasies. The longings and recriminations that were produced in this analytic couple, the palpable sense of great halting intimacy in the context of benign limit, their chaste performance of a special kind of intercourse that penetrates the most intimate parts of the other, the drawing nearer and drawing back, and the giving over of each other's dream worlds to the other's unexpressed emotion all represent the deep dynamic engagement of two persons experiencing one another, singing each other.

³I would extend this link to dreaming as well.