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Some time ago I suggested to JAPA's book review editors, Rosemary Balsam and Paul Schwaber, that they consider publishing a second review of this book, first published in English in 2013, not at all because the
earlier review, by Rogelio Sosnik (2011), was lacking. Indeed, having reread his review before writing this—thinking that a second review might not add anything—I was impressed with his excellent summary of the book and his apt plea for anglophone readers to familiarize themselves with the work of José Bleger. I share the hope that analysts lacking access to the South American literature available only in Spanish will seek out and be edified by this English translation of Bleger's work. But Sosnik's review was published two years before the book appeared at long last in English, after an earlier translation, never completed and never published, had been in the works for over twenty years. While Sosnik rightly celebrated the “fact” that it was finally here, alas, it languished those two years before seeing the light of day, only, to my knowledge, to promptly sink without a trace.
So here is another plea for this book to be more widely known. And in the process of stating a case for more of us English-speaking psychoanalysts and analytic therapists to come to know it, I want to widen the context in which we might see it by substituting some of my own language for the language Bleger inherited from his sources, particularly two crucial terms that to my mind obscure his meaning, at least for anglophone readers. I will get to those terms later.
The one paper of note that Bleger published in English appeared in 1967, the same year this book saw its original publication in Spanish. The paper is a fairly well-known contribution on the analytic frame. The book's translators have used “setting” instead of “frame,” a better rendering of Bleger's Spanish word encuadre. Bleger holds that the setting should always be analyzed, as it is there that psychotic aspects of the p