Field Theory: Commentary on Paper by Donnel B. Stern

Abstract

Stern offers a compelling introduction to a comparative theory of the field in his examination of its origins in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan and of Madeleine and Willy Baranger. Although he notes that Sullivan and the Barangers developed their field concepts separately, I suggest that there is a common context, and I detail this in regard to the early history of the concept, particularly in regard to Merleau-Ponty. Stern describes well the points of common use of the field concept and highlights differences that are the defining line between relational thinking and other orientations. In his view, the Barangers do not adequately take into account the analyst's inevitable participation and do not in the end step out of framing the unconscious as an internal process. I question this reading and ask how we might benefit from an “epistemological pluralism” that would invite working from diverse perspectives.

Notes

¹This distinction has roots in a differentiation between causal and teleological explanations as discussed in ancient Greek philosophy but was taken up by 19th- and 20th-century thinkers to differentiate positivist and descriptive orientations in the physical and social sciences. See Dilthey (1883/1967), Lewin (1935), and Wright (1971) for expositions on these traditions of thought.

²Although beyond the scope of this discussion, Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963) suggested three types or orders of field as a way of countering the dualistic division of material or body (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans). The physical/vital/human orders, elsewhere noted as umwelt/mitwelt/eigenwelt, are interdependent fields interpenetrating and mediating between interiority/connectedness/exteriority.

³ Merleau-Ponty (1960/1982) noted, “The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology's saying clearly what psychoanalysis said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology implies or unveils as its limits—by its latent content or its unconscious—that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. … Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are aiming toward the same latency” (p. 71).

⁴See Brown (2011) for an engaging description of the River Plate Group, as well as a sophisticated history of the development of intersubjective themes in Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian perspectives.