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This book is a collection of some of the most interesting writings by M. and W. Baranger, a pair of Argentinian psychoanalysts of French origin, who over the last three decades have produced some interesting work, which is the fruit of various experiences: a sophisticated European cultural background, a long Kleinian period, and finally membership of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, which has been a veritable hive of ideas.
With the exception of the first and the fourth, the papers included in this collection (there are seven of them which cover a time-span ranging from 1959 to 1987) deal with a fairly uniform theme. The central idea running through them is the conception of the analytic situation as a “bipersonal field”: a notion that the editors (S. Manfredi and A. Ferro, who have also written a comprehensive introduction) have adopted as the title of the collection. The concept is thoroughly discussed in the second chapter (“The Analytic Situation as Dynamic Field”, 1961). The analytic situation is not a condition in which the analyst observes and intervenes objectively. Far from it. It is, rather, a Gestalt, of which he himself, with his own personal history and internal world, is an integral part. It is a “dynamic field” which, starting from a basic functional configuration contained in the agreement and contract between analyst and patient, is formed