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Psychoanalytic concepts of an analytic field have been written about and used clinically for half a century. Yet until recently, outside the Spanish-and Italian-speaking psychoanalytic communities, analytic field concepts have been relatively little known and understood. Fortunately, in the last decade, more of the previous and contemporary work on the subject has been translated into other languages. In particular, The Analytic Field: A Clinical Concept brings to English-speaking analysts a rich collection of papers on the subject.
The concept of the analytic field as it is understood and used in this collection of essays is not to be confused with the fields of relational psychoanalysis. While the two field concepts overlap on some points, each leads to and is embedded in specific ways of working clinically that are distinct from each other as well as from other psychoanalytic perspectives. The concept of the analytic field was introduced by Madeleine and Willy Baranger, in print first in a paper published in 1960-1961 in Spanish, and not translated into English, for example, until 2008.1 The Barangers' work was influenced by the Gestalt theory of Kurt Lewin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Enrique Pichon-Rivière; it was steeped in Racker's work on countertransference and based on Kleinian and especially