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This book consists of an introduction by Professor Eugenio Gaburri, an afterword by François Sacco that amounts to a journey through Italian psychoanalysis, and fifteen chapters each by a different author.
Italian psychoanalysis in the last twenty years has been marked by a powerful emphasis on relationship from a number of distinct theoretical viewpoints. The concept of the field is a part of this intellectual tradition and is an interesting and significant development of it—a ‘non-linear’ development according to the book's editor.
Professor Gaburri writes in his introduction: ‘The field model is not intended as a formulation of new metapsychological constructs and does not claim to replace other “strong” theoretical models, because both the theory of technique and clinical facts are very important elements in it …’ (p. 24). ‘Field theory is the most recent development of the post-Kleinian model and in particular of the work of Bion … The field model was first explicitly introduced into psychoanalysis by the Argentinian authors Willy and Madeleine Baranger in 1961 and its foundations lay in the observations of Pichon Rivière …’ The main object of the Barangers' research was ‘the unconscious fantasy of the couple’ (p. 19).
As presented in this book, the field model belongs to an area of theory that aims not to discover a truth but to offer interpretive hypotheses. The point is therefore not finally to reveal what the object of study is hiding, but to put forward new hypotheses that will be more useful than their predecessors for the representation of complex human realities. One objective of the field concept is to allow the formulation of wider and more comprehensive hypotheses than those stemming from either the purely intrapsychic level or the relational level.
In terms of psychoanalytic technique, the task of the analyst is not to discover the truth the patient is hiding but to take part in events that can transform the psychic experience of the two persons inv