Publication details
Being Present to Absence : Field Theory in Psychopathology and Clinical Practice
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | In this chapter we conceptualize the therapist’s and client’s experience in the session as emerging from the field forces in play. These forces are the intrinsic tensions (in-tentionalities) of the emerging field. In order to orient the reader among the different definitions of ‘field’, we distinguish three theoretical concepts: phenomenal field, phenomenological field and psychopathological field. We propose an understanding of the therapeutic process as a field phenomenon: in this perspective the change is not produced by an intervention of the therapist on the client, neither by a process of collaboration between therapist and client in order to co-create the change. The process of change is rather made by the forces already active in the field and the therapist has just to let them move on without interfering with them, or sometime to support them. The essential part of the therapeutical work is to embody and feel the field forces and to let them work. In this process there are moments when the therapists can feel something out of place, the stranger knocking on the door: in that moment they are lending their flesh to dissociated feelings of the field. In other moments the therapists may discover some forces that are part of the wider social field, acting in both the client and the therapist, the one who is always there: in that moment they can make a step of differentiation from that pressure. The implications on personal and social psychopathology will be discussed, and the consequences on clinical practice will be addressed. In this perspective psychopathology is the emerging absence, and therapy becomes the art of presence. |