Routledge Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis (Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series)

Metaphor and Fields is an explanation and demonstration of the value of metaphoric processes and fields in psychoanalysis. In this book, Montana Katz articulates a future direction for psychoanalysis which is progressively explored, taking into account features essential to psychoanalysts of all persuasions, clinically and theoretically. In this way, psychoanalysis is brought into the postmodern future by fashioning an umbrella for the discipline. With this umbrella, the barriers to mutual understanding may be dismantled and a path permanently forged to the possibility of meaningful international, intercultural, interdisciplinary and poly-perspectival psychoanalytic exchange. Metaphor and Fields organically merges work on metaphoric processes with work on fields. The use of a framework with metaphoric processes and fields combined exhibits the uniqueness of psychoanalysis and shows how it explores and explains human experience. The relational fields of the North American school of relational theory, intersubjective matrices, self object matrices, and the ground breaking work of Madeleine and Willy Baranger are all examples of field concepts that have been successfully employed in theoretical frameworks and clinical technique. They show how other schools of thought can be understood as using an implicit field concept. The chapters in this book approach the subject from diverse vantage points. Taken together, they form an intricate web of psychoanalytic thought that moves the scope of psychoanalysis beyond dispute towards the open, inclusive discussion of core concepts and technique. Metaphor and Fields will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, mental health clinicians, psychologists, social workers, and a wide academic audience drawn from the fields of philosophy, linguistics, comparative literature, anthropology and sociology. Review "Montana Katz writes in a way that combines lovely intuitions and rigorous thinking. This book is a delight!" - Jerome Bruner, New York University, USA "Is it possible to formulate a unified theory of psychoanalysis that takes due account of differences? Montana Katz’s original in-depth response to this key question turns around the concepts of metaphor and field. Her selection of papers by leading contemporary analysts offers fruitful links to the ideas of Willy and Madeleine Baranger who were the first to develop field theory in psychoanalysis, thereby opening up problems that remain as relevant today as they were in their own time, particularly in the context of the psychoanalytic encounter... As a fascinating interplay between different but equally insightful and scholarly perspectives, this book is unique and I therefore recommend it most enthusiastically." - Haydee Faimberg, MD, Paris Psychoanalytical Society, author of The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic links between Generations "This outstanding collection of essays from a theoretically diverse, internationally acclaimed group of analytic authors represents an important contribution to our understanding of field theory and therapeutic action. In exploring the role of metaphor in the creation and transformation of the intersubjective analytic field, it reaffirms the central places that language and the creation of meaning hold in the analytic process and cure." - Howard Levine, Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, USA About the Author S. Montana Katz is a training and supervising analyst, and a member of faculty for the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. She is in private practice in New York City.