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This important book is a collection of essays from many of the leading post-Kleinian/Bionian psychoanalysts as they work to describe, define and expand the concepts of the analytic field. From their perspective, the concept of the field in psychoanalysis originated from the writings of Wiley and Madeleine Baranger (1961-62) and Baranger, Baranger and Mom (1983). With no apparent awareness of the earlier work of Jung in this area, the Barangers arrived at many of the same recognitions of the analytic field, its characteristics and possibilities as did Jung in the alchemical process, the transference in psychotherapy, the transcendent function and the ‘third’.
These essays are a rich expansion and explication of the field and its manifestations and uses by eleven writers in nine chapters. No attempt is made to come to any single definitive consensus of opinion—in fact a strength rather than a weakness of the work. With well-developed presentations of clinical material, each writer considers and puts forward a range of differing variables that contribute to the formation of the field and the activities therein. They look at how one experiences, deciphers, and makes use of the images and emotions generated by the field. Common threads throughout support the importance of the analytic frame in the emergence of a new and distinct ‘third’ from the inter-subjective, transference/countertransference relational setting.
The first chapter, written by the book's editors, Antonino Ferro and Roberto Basile, effectively utilizes clinical examples in conjunction with their theoretical model thereby providing a more precise picture of the transformative processes of field concepts in action.
They, as well as other contributors, ground their current, evolving work on foundational concepts from Klein (unconscious phantasy, projective identification), Bion (container-contained, reverie, alpha function), as well as that of the Barangers. They specifically note that their contributions to a