The Fluidity of Emotions and Clinical Vulnerability: A Field of Rhythmic Tensions

Abstract

With this paper the author offers a renovation of field theory in psychoanalysis as a way to recognize and work with, what the author describes as, fluid registrations in addition to categorical and structural re-presentations of interaction conceptually and in clinical practice. A review of how Racker and Reis read Freud, augmented by previously unexamined aspects of Daniel Stern’s conceptions of attunement and repeated interactions generalized, builds toward a reformulation of how affect regulation might be better envisioned through the term affect navigation and its various meanings and uses. Clinical examples from clinician/theorists (including this author) representing relational and Bionion 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 state shifts, providing an expanded attention to the clinician for the unfolding and layering of her own emotional experience in addition to that of her patient.

Keywords:

• affect
• countertransference
• field
• fluidity
• navigation

Notes

¹ In recognition of this originary process of movement between embodied experience and its re-presentation, Bion has offered the theoretical concept of O and Bionians generally consider the re-presentation of O as a necessary re-presentational fiction. Lacan has used the distinctions Real for the originary space and Symbolic for re-presentations which are failed attempts to capture the Real with language. According to Lacan “the symbol manifests in itself first of all as the murder of the thing (which it represents)” (Lacan, 1977, p. 104; my words added in parentheses) or at least a diluting of the emotional impact of the lived/embodied experience of what is being re-presented.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven H. Knoblauch

Steven H. Knoblauch, PhD, is faculty/clinical consultant at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University and The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. He is author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue (2000) and coauthor with Beebe, Rustin, and Sorter of Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context and on the Board of Directors of The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.