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Willy and Madeleine Baranger were French academics, professors of philosophy and classical literature, respectively, who received their
analytic training in Buenos Aires just after World War II, founded the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association in 1955, and became leading figures in Latin American psychoanalysis. Their concept of the psychoanalytic field, which derived from their clinical experience and ideas drawn from the group work of Bion (1961), the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and the Gestalt therapy of Kurt Lewin, anticipated by more than twenty-five years the anglophone North American interest in intersubjectivity, co-construction, and the analytic third. Their collaboration with Jorge Mom produced “The Infantile Psychic Trauma from Us to Freud” (chapter 6), a classic study of Freud's evolving ideas about infantile trauma and the role of posttraumatic experience in the resignification and construction of meaning (Nachträglichkeit or après-coup). While that paper, along with two other classics reprinted in this book, “Process and Non-Process in Analytic Work” (chapter 4, also with Mom as coauthor) and “The Mind of the Analyst: From Listening to Interpretation” (chapter 5, written solely by Madeleine Baranger), have been available to English-speaking readers by virtue of their publication in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the majority of their work, including the other seven chapters of this book, has not been. It is therefore with great pleasure and expectation that readers may approach this volume.
The starting point of the Barangers' theory is their observation that Freud's recommendations in his papers on technique, while valid some of the time, are not sufficient to deal with the full range of complexities encountered in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In pursuit of a more comprehensive clinical theory, they approached the analytic situation as an object of study in its own right, independent of the individual dynamics and contribu