Intersections of Field Theory With Other Psychoanalytic Theories

Psychotherapy has a scientific history of one hundred years. The therapies that have been prevalent through the history of psychotherapy have been focused on behavior, cognition, unconscious processes, or existential issues. We can further categorize them as one-person vs. two-person theories. One-person approaches view one’s inner world and mental structure as static, permanent, and stable, and attempt to correct the psychopathology involved. One-person therapies involve the positions of repairer-repaired, observer-observed, and knowing-unknowing. Two-person therapies, on the other hand, focus on mutual interaction. The subject and goal of this paper is to outline the progression of these schools of psychoanalytic psychotherapy from two-person therapies towards systems theory and field theory, centered around interactive systems, with a particular focus on their position vis-a-vis the contemporary field theory. This paper sets aside the behavioral-cognitive and existentialist therapies to primarily focus on the psychodynamic schools following Freud, including dynamic psychotherapy approaches of Adler and Jung; ego psychology of Anna Freud, Eric Ericson, David Rapaport, H. Loewald, and Heinz Hartmann; object relations of Melanie Klein and W. R. D. Fairbairn, and later representatives such as Otto Kernberg; developmental psychology emphasis of the so-called interim group of James Masterson’s abandonment depression theory; self psychology of Heinz Kohut as a break from classical psychoanalytic school; relational psychoanalysis of Stephen Mitchell ve Jay Greenberg; relational-cyclical psychotherapy of Paul Watchel; intersubjective field theory of Robert Stolorow, Bernard Brandchaft and George Atwood; and motivational systems theory of Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Frank M. Lachmann, and James L. Fosshage