The Shared Field Model: A Nested Architecture of Mental Fields

The Shared Field Model (SFM) proposes that psychological life is organized by a singlekind of entity, the mental field, which appears at several scales. The largest is the sharedfield, a structured space of mental forms such as capacities, bipolar dimensions ofresponse, and recurring relational and affective patterns. It holds forms, not records ofindividual lives. Cultures, families and persons are fields nested within it. Each is boundedby a reduction valve, a stable pattern of selection that limits which forms can beexpressed, and each boundary is maintained by a goal for as long as there is a purpose forthe pattern. At the individual level, a separate identity is the goal. Because each polarity isa single form with two poles, a person stabilized at one pole has to keep excluding theother, and this ongoing exclusion is felt from inside as charge. What a person excludestends to be expressed around them: evoked in partners, sought in environments, readinto situations, and distributed as roles among family members. Across generations,families may repeat the same exclusions. Between persons, synchrony, emotionalcontagion and co-regulation, along with the mechanisms usually proposed to bridgeseparate minds, such as mirroring, mentalization and projective identification, are takenas evidence of a shared space: nothing needs to be transmitted, because both personsdraw on the same field. The model is offered as a description. It holds that the field ismental and uses a spatial image of its structure, but leaves the ultimate nature of mindopen.