S. Montana Katz - Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis

Metaphor and Fields is an explanation and demonstration of the value of metaphoric processes and fields in psychoanalysis. In this book, S. 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.

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.

Like its counterpart, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, the psychoanalytic inquiry Book series presents a diversity of subjects within a diversity of approaches to those subjects. Under the editorship of Joseph lichtenberg, in collaboration with Melvin Bornstein and the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, the volumes in this series strike a balance between research, theory, and clinical application. We are honored to have published the works of various innovators in psychoanalysis, such as Frank lachmann, James Fosshage, Robert Stolorow, donna orange, Louis Sander, Lon Wurmser, James Grotstein, Joseph Jones, Doris Brothers, Fredric Busch, and Joseph Lichtenberg, among others.

The series includes books and monographs on mainline psychoanalytic topics, such as sexuality, narcissism, trauma, homosexuality, jealousy, envy, and varied aspects of analytic process and technique. In our efforts to broaden the field of analytic interest, the series has incorporated and embraced innovative discoveries in infant research, self psychology, intersubjectivity, motivational systems, affects as process, responses to cancer, borderline states, contextualism, postmodernism, attachment research and theory, medication, and mentalization. As further investigations in psychoanalysis come to fruition, we seek to present them in readable, easily comprehensible writing.

After 25 years, the core vision of this series remains the investigation, analysis and discussion of developments on the cutting edge of the psychoanalytic field, inspired by a boundless spirit of inquiry.