A View from the Field: Clinical Process and The Work of Confluence

The publication of The Work of Confluence: Listening and Interpreting in the Psychoanalytic Field, by Madeleine and Willy Baranger, edited by Leticia Glocer Fiorini , marks an important moment in the development of clinical theory in psychoanalysis. It makes the bulk of the pioneering work of the Barangers (as well as that of Jorge Mario Mom, who coauthored two of the papers in the book) readily accessible to the English-speaking psychoanalytic community for the first time, in fluent English translation and collected into a single volume. (Many of the Barangers’ lesser works remain unavailable in English. Another major work, published originally in Spanish in 1961-1962, first appeared in English translation only recently [Baranger and Baranger 2008], and is not included in this volume.)

Taken together, the papers in this book constitute a reenvisioning of the nature of the psychoanalytic process, the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic technique, and the structure and workings of the unconscious. Ferro (2010) calls the concept of the analytic situation as a bipersonal field an “earthquake” in terms of its power to shake up and reconfigure our thinking about the psychoanalytic process. The Barangers draw on the work of Pichon-Riviere, Klein, Bion, Racker, Merleau-Ponty, and the Gestalt psychology of Kurt Lewin. The breadth and depth of their understanding of Freud's work, and their capacity to articulate nuances of the analytic process in a way that resonates with the clinical experience of all practicing psychoanalysts, draw the reader