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This is a valuable collection in the English language of several of the many articles written by Willy and Madeleine Baranger. It was a clever editorial decision to add to those papers which I would describe as psychoanalytic classics (those concerning the field) also other essays which demonstrate those authors' depth of thinking well beyond their main interest (the bipersonal field). It is inevitable, however, that I shall mostly focus in this review on those articles about the field which in my opinion have represented a sort of historical turning point, or even revolution or catastrophic change, in psychoanalysis, the consequences of which we have not yet been able fully to appreciate. It is almost as if the community of physicists had been kept deprived for a long time of Einstein's relativity equation or of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It is for this reason that I could only begin from an article which is not included in this book, as it is the starting point of the Barangers' work and contains within itself the seeds of all their later theoretical developments.
It may perhaps be useful in the first place to make a reference to the cultural climate within which the concept of field emerged. Precursors to such a concept for the study of psychic phenomena were already present in Gestalt psychology and in Kurt Lewin's work, where the field had acquired a wider epistemological autonomy by being disconnected from its physicalistic origins. Perhaps less well-known is the revision of this concept operated by Merleau-Ponty, an author who occupies an important position in the Barangers' philosophical background. He refers to the notion of field, from a similar perspective to that used by Koffka and Lewin, in so far as it is useful as a foundation for a psychology of man in situation, allowing us to observe and understand psychic facts in terms of their meaning in the context of intersubjective relationships. This would be a way to overcome the historical conflict