The Field

At every scale at which human beings have been carefully observed together, what happens in one person turns out to be bound up with what happens in others.

Five literatures, written in different countries and decades, by clinicians and researchers who for the most part did not read one another, describe the same finding in five vocabularies: countertransference and the analytic field; mutual regulation and attunement; the emotional unit and the phantom; the basic assumption and the matrix; contagion. Each regarded what it found as a peculiarity of its own domain. Read together, they describe one structure.

The pages below present that evidence scale by scale, moving outward. Each scale answers an objection the previous one leaves open.

The Room: two adults, under conditions designed to keep them separate, turn out to be inside one process.
The Infant: the process precedes the person; regulation is joint before it is individual.
The Family: the process has a shape that persists through the replacement of every member.
The Group: strangers form the same organization within an hour, so no special tie produces it.
The Crowd: even where people share no tie or history, the same states arise among them, and none of them knows it.

These pages report what was observed. The account of why it happens is the author's, and is set out separately in the Paper.