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The Work of Confluence, a newly published collection of the writings of Madeleine and Willy Baranger, the most important of which date from the 1950s and 1960s, makes available, for the first time in English, a comprehensive
view of their contribution to analytic thinking, beginning with their concept of the field. The translation from the Spanish is clear and excellent. The book should be augmented by their original contribution from 1961-1962, published in 2008 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Although their writing is exclusively about the individual psychoanalytic situation, its originality in locating the action of analysis within a dynamic field as a bi-personal, and even a multi-personal situation, leads the analytic couple and family therapist to familiar and yet new ways of thinking. This compilation, augmented by the 1961-1962 article, provides a valuable new resource to us as we continue to strive to formulate the action of analytic development and change in couple and family therapy.
The Barangers were close students of analytic literature, schooled by, among others, Pichon-Rivière, and they were well read in Lacan, and the British School (but not, apparently, Fairbairn). They, in turn, have informed the contributions of Ferro, Eizirik, Bolognini, and Kaës, and others whose work is more familiar to English-speaking analysts. Indeed, Ferro's groundbreaking book, The Bi-Personal Field, takes its name directly from their writing. Writing in English, Searles' idea that the face of the analyst belongs to the patient is contemporary with the Barangers, and many of his ideas overlap with theirs, although they derive from different traditions.
The Barangers' concept of the field (el campo), and, more specifically, the bi-personal field, refers to the totality of the analytic situation, the structure of analysis, the associations of the patient, and the unconscious structure of both patient and analyst. The field is structured by the individual unc