Psychoanalytic field theorising, jeux sans frontières

This response to Carla Penna’s 2026 Foulkes lecture (Penna, 2026) contrasts her account of the group, derived from Pichon-Rivière and Foulkes, as moving in a dialectical spiral though the tripartite matrix, with post-Bionian field theory, the metaphor of the intersubjective field developed in Italy by Antonino Ferro and colleagues. After pointing to some historical links between Latin American and Italian group and individual analysis, the paper notes congruences and divergences between the two approaches: with their respective emphases on dialectical movement leading to insight, and on the birth of a new unconscious in the intersubjective space, one is fundamentally epistemological and the other fundamentally ontological in spirit. Goya’s print ‘The Sleep of Reason’ (1799) is introduced, to suggest the elements of surprise and pleasurable surplus offered by a non-dialectical field awareness, and to underline the vital importance of our human capacity to embrace and tolerate apparently incompatible points of view.