The Fluidity of Emotions and Clinical Vulnerability: A Field of Rhythmic Tensions

With this paper the author offers a renovation of field theory in psychoanalysis as a way to recognize and work with, what the author describes as, fluid registrations in addition to categorical and structural re-presentations of interaction conceptually and in clinical practice. A review of how Racker and Reis read Freud, augmented by previously unexamined aspects of Daniel Stern’s conceptions of attunement and repeated interactions generalized, builds toward a reformulation of how affect regulation might be better envisioned through the term affect navigation and its various meanings and uses. Clinical examples from clinician/theorists (including this author) representing relational and Bionion thought, illustrate how embodied registrations of rhythmic patterning, which because of their fluidity cannot be re-presented symbolically/categorically, augment recognition of self states and self state shifts, providing an expanded attention to the clinician for the unfolding and layering of her own emotional experience in addition to that of her patient.