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In this complex and ambitious book, Jaime Lutenberg, an Argentinian psychiatrist and training analyst, elaborates a conceptual synthesis of his long
clinical experience, focusing specifically on psychoanalytic phone sessions. At the interface of Freudian and Bionian psychoanalysis, Boolean logic, Kurt Lewin's field theory, advanced digital technologies, and communication theory, he interweaves psychoanalysis, anthropology, philosophy, epistemology, physics, computer science, linguistics, and music. He manages to combine all of these disciplines with his own, adding to an immense culture a deep theoretical rigor and great technical flexibility. Throughout the book he presents his questions and deductions cautiously and with intellectual honesty. He stresses that telephone analysis is a therapeutic experience still at a stage of investigation and that any theory concerning it is a temporary, hypothetical construct open to revision and change. Since knowledge is a living thing, he insists on the necessity for psychoanalysts to stay informed about the continual metamorphosis of our field and its paradigms and to rearticulate them constantly and flexibly with new psychoanalytic knowledge.
Indebted mainly to Freud, Lutenberg also pays tribute to others who have inspired him, in particular Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, André Green, José Bleger, Horacio Etchegoyen, and Enrique Pichon-Riviere.
In the book he synthesizes and contrasts Freud's and Bion's theories of thinking. For Freud, the thinker comes first, then the thoughts. For Bion, thoughts are looking for a thinking apparatus. Lutenberg views the therapeutic ideal as rooted in transformation of the clinician's capacity to think and to become a container. The point is not so much to make the unconscious conscious as to enhance the “function that transforms” elements, allowing patient and analyst to co-construct what he calls “a relational tranfero-countertransferential truth.” This notion was developed in his book El