Howard B. Levine, MD is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society, on the faculty of the NYU post-doc Contemporary Freudian track, on the editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has authored many articles, book chapters, and reviews on psychoanalytic process and technique and the treatment of primitive personality disorders. His co-edited books include Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil. (Karnac 2017) and Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018). He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019).

David G. Power, PhD is a founding member of the The Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies. He is Past President, Supervisory and Teaching Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is the co-editor with Howard Levine, of Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self (2017). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and supervision in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Resting on the contributions of Bion, Winnicott and the Barangers, Nino Ferro’s Field Theory marks an important contribution to analytic technique applicable to the treatment of all patients across the diagnostic spectrum. It is part of a broad movement at the frontiers of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and practice that has helped move us from a predominant focus on uncovering unconscious contents to an additional focus on the creation and strengthening of psychic processes, such as waking dream thought and night time dreams, containment and affect tolerance and the production and containment of thought. 

Ferro’s Field Theory has sharpened analytic listening, allowed analysts a broader and more refined range of interventions, made some of what has been called the intuitive ‘art’ of psychoanalysis more describable and therefore more teachable to students as a matter of technique and helped more clearly define the intersubjective participation of the analyst in the analytic process. While applicable to the analysis of neurotic patients, Field theory has also proved useful in extending the reach of analytic treatment to primitive mind states, such as borderline and narcissistic disorders, addictions, perversions, psychosomatic disorders and the sequelae of early or massive trauma.

This panel will introduce and illustrate through clinical process material basic concepts relative to Ferro’s Field theory, focusing on their implications for analytic listening and  interpretive intervention (e.g., the Field as “emotional gps;” “casting of characters” and “signals from the field;” saturated and unsaturated interpretations; analytic discourse as the adult, verbal “Squiggle Game”). It will also touch on the relationship of Field Theory to certain undeveloped intimations in the work of Freud and some contemporary (non-Lacanian) French psychoanalysts, such as Andre Green.

• Participants will identify the oeneric qualities of the session - 'session as dream' - and the many possibilities for transformational co-construction of its evolution and development.
• Participants will demonstrate shifting their listening stance between levels of manifest content and psychic reality.
• Participants will identify how to read and apply ‘signals from the field’ to modify their listening stance and guide the level, degree and content focus of their interventions and interpretations.
• Participants will identify the difference between saturated and non-saturated interpretations and their relevance and use in the treatment of neurotic and non-neurotic patients.