You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Madeleine Baranger and her husband, Willy Baranger, both originally from France, settled in Buenos Aires immediately after the Second World War and did their psychoanalytic training with the group of analysts who originally founded the Argentine Psychoanalytic Society. In the mid-1950s, they moved to Montevideo, where they stayed for 10 years and founded the Psychoanalytic Association of Uruguay. They later returned to Buenos Aires, where they continued to teach and train different generations of Argentine psychoanalysts.
The most significant work by Madeleine and Willy Baranger focuses on the problems that emerge from the psychoanalytic field. Both studied the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic process when this is blocked by the convergence of obstacles that derive from the analyst and the patient, configuring a state of stagnation in the psychoanalytic process. This state of impasse was termed the “bastion” by the authors and is a concept that has similarities with the description that, many decades later, was given to what was termed “enactment”. However, the concept of “bastion” confers greater depth and understanding to what occurs in the analytical field in that it refers to the shared, unconscious phantasy which is configured by both analyst and analysand. A typical example of this takes place as a result of the distribution of alternating or fixed roles that are adopted by patient and analyst during states of sadomasochistic transference-countertransference. A summary of Madeleine’s ideas about the psychoanalytic process is contained in her paper that explores the workings of the analyst’s mind during the process of
listening and interpreting (M. Baranger, 1993). An article that predates this paper and that clearly describes the theory of the “dynamic psychoanalytic field” was written together with W. Baranger and J. Mom (M. Baranger et al., 1983).
One of the most significant contributions of Madeleine Baranger was her research into the clinical picture of