The Tradition

For more than a century, clinicians who attended closely to what happens between people kept finding that the person could not be understood alone.

The writers below worked in different countries and decades, in different schools, and for the most part did not read one another. None set out to prove that persons participate in one another. Each was trying to understand a patient, an infant, a family or a group, and each ran into a unit larger than the individual that was doing something no individual intended.

These pages present what each observed, in their own vocabulary. Where the Field pages arrange the evidence by scale, these follow the observers.

1. Freud: one unconscious acting on another, and the repetition compulsion.
2. Jung: forms that recur without causal history, and the return of the opposite.
3. The analytic field: the Barangers, Ogden and Ferro on the session as a field that belongs to neither participant.
4. The infant: Stern and Tronick on regulation and attunement before there is a self.
5. Bowen: the family as an emotional unit.
6. Abraham and Torok: the phantom, a theme that outlives everyone who lived it.
7. Bion: the basic assumptions of a group of strangers.