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First published 46 years ago in Spanish, this paper is here published in English for the first time. These notes are intended as an aid to reading the paper, and as a commentary on some of the concepts elaborated in it: ‘field’, ‘essential ambiguity’, ‘bipersonal unconscious phantasy’, ‘point of urgency’, and ‘bastion’.
The paper has been widely cited by analysts who work in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French, and its contents discussed in detail by Bezoari and Ferro (1992), de León de Bernardi (2000, 2008), and Tubert-Oklander (2007). Having been unavailable in English, it appears to have remained largely unread in the English-speaking world, and is rarely cited by Anglo-Saxon authors. A brief report in English was published contemporaneously (de la Vega, 1962), but this failed to summarize its contents and gave only a superficial impression of its scope.
From reviews of developments in Latin America, such as those by Etchegoyen and Zysman (2005a, 2005b), Beceiro (2005), Rocha Barros (1995), and Arbiser (2003), it is evident that a considerable quantity of the work published there has remained untranslated for several decades. Among Argentinian analysts active in 1950s and 1960s, for example, although Grinberg has published extensively in English, and some of the work of Racker, Liberman, Langer, and Resnik is available, there are only isolated pieces by Bleger, Rascovsky, Alvarez de Toledo, and virtually nothing yet by Pichon Rivière. In the case of the Barangers, it would be wrong to assume that what has been translated can adequately substitute for what has not; even the retrospective review by Madeleine Baranger (2005) does not fully convey the richness of this early work.
The Spanish text exists in two versions: originally published in the Uruguayan Review of Psychoanalysis (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-1962), it was reprinted seven years later in the collection Problems of the Psychoanalytic Field (Baranger M and Bara