The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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The Work of Confluence: Listening and

Interpreting in the Psychoanalytic Field

Antonino Ferro

To cite this article: Antonino Ferro (2010) The Work of Confluence: Listening and Interpreting
in the Psychoanalytic Field, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91:2, 415-429, DOI:
10.1111/j.1745-8315.2010.00303.x

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 The International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:415–429 415

Book Reviews Essay1

The Work of Confluence: Listening and Interpreting in the Psychoanalytic

Field
by Madeleine and Willy Baranger (Edited by Leticia Glocer Fiorini).
London: Karnac Books, 2009. 254 pp; £24.99.

This is a valuable collection in the English language of several of the many

articles written by Willy and Madeleine Baranger. It was a clever editorial
decision to add to those papers which I would describe as psychoanalytic
classics (those concerning the field) also other essays which demonstrate
those authors’ depth of thinking well beyond their main interest (the biper-
sonal field). It is inevitable, however, that I shall mostly focus in this review
on those articles about the field which in my opinion have represented a sort
of historical turning point, or even revolution or catastrophic change, in
psychoanalysis, the consequences of which we have not yet been able fully
to appreciate. It is almost as if the community of physicists had been kept
deprived for a long time of Einstein’s relativity equation or of Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle. It is for this reason that I could only begin from an
article which is not included in this book, as it is the starting point of the
Barangers’ work and contains within itself the seeds of all their later theo-
retical developments.
It may perhaps be useful in the first place to make a reference to the cul-
tural climate within which the concept of field emerged. Precursors to such
a concept for the study of psychic phenomena were already present in
Gestalt psychology and in Kurt Lewin’s work, where the field had acquired
a wider epistemological autonomy by being disconnected from its physicalis-
tic origins. Perhaps less well-known is the revision of this concept operated
by Merleau-Ponty, an author who occupies an important position in the
Barangers’ philosophical background. He refers to the notion of field, from
a similar perspective to that used by Koffka and Lewin, in so far as it is
useful as a foundation for a psychology of man in situation, allowing us to
observe and understand psychic facts in terms of their meaning in the con-
text of intersubjective relationships. This would be a way to overcome the
historical conflict between naturalistic objectivization and solipsistic intro-
spection (Bezoari and Ferro 1992).
This ‘‘core’’ of the Barangers’ work can be found in their celebrated arti-
cle, cited in numerous bibliographies especially in Latin America and Italy,
and originally published in Spanish in Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanalisis as:
Baranger M and Baranger W (1961–62): ‘La situacion analitica como
campo dinamico’. This article has only very recently been published in Eng-
lish, in the IJP, as ‘The analytic situation as a dynamic field’ (Baranger M
and Baranger W, 2008).

1
Translated from Italian by Andrea Sabbadini.

ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the Institute of Psychoanalysis
416 Book Review Essay

Even if it is already mentioned by both Claudio Eizirik in his beautiful

Foreword to the book and by its editor Leticia Glocer Fiorini in her Final
Comments, it is still worth going back to it. The article begins in an under-
tone fashion (‘‘There is nothing new in...’’) before causing the earthquake
which has shaken the then current psychoanalytic landscape – an earthquake
whose long waves have been reaching Europe and North America only in
recent and very recent years. The analytic situation is described there as that
of two individuals inextricably bound and complementary to each other
throughout the process; neither of them can be understood without the other.
The analytic field is a spatial and a temporal situation, defined by the setting.
The field is structured along the initial agreements: the patient should respect
the fundamental rule and the analyst, among other things, should abstain
from any interventions concerning his ‘‘real’’ life. (For a detailed discussion
about ‘‘reality’’ in psychoanalysis, I refer you to Ferro 2005a.) The biperson-
al situation of the field soon gets concealed by the presence of three- and
multi-dimensional situations. The analytic work could only continue on con-
dition that it is understood in terms of ‘‘as if’’: were such an ambiguity to be
removed, the analytic work would soon become impossible.
Another key point concerns the unconscious fantasy, which in field theory
does not just concern the analysand, but is instead created between two peo-
ple within the common gestalt they have established in the session. It is this
unconscious fantasy of the couple that becomes the object of interpretations.
Much of the paper is then about the formation of such an unconscious
fantasy of the couple, and here the authors also introduce the concept of
bastion, which is of central interest to the analyst. The bastion as a place for
the couple’s resistance will be interpreted and resolved through the analyst’s
second look. He will be caught and be included in the field it contributes to
co-construct, but he will also manage to make that sudden twist which will
allow him to observe the field and its functioning, in particular its disfunc-
tioning, and to interpret it.

Claudio Eizirik writes:

The main focus of the Barangers’ interest, however, was the study of the uncon-
scious dynamic of the psychoanalytic field. Their central hypothesis was that the
regressive situation of the analysis gives rise to a new gestalt, a bipersonal or basic
unconscious fantasy of the couple that is different from the fantasies of the patient
or those of the analyst considered individually. This fantasy underlies the dynamics
of the analytic field – whether it is in motion or in stasis
(p. XII).
And, referring now to the key point of the article, he continues:
This structure cannot in any way be considered to be determined by the patient’s
(or the analyst’s) instinctual impulses, although the impulses of both are involved in
its structuring. More importantly, neither can it be considered to be the sum of the
two internal situations. It is something created between the two, within the unit that
they form in the moment of the session, something radically different from what
each of them is separately.

[M Baranger & W Baranger 1961–1962, p. 806]

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 Book Review Essay 417

Leticia Glocer Fiorini sums up well these points:

The concept of the analytic field as a third is therefore inseparable from the notion
of the bipersonal basic fantasy. In other words, something new in the relation is
generated that is neither one nor the other but includes both.
(p. 231).
And then she adds:
Psychic reality becomes more complex: ‘a different reality’ is structured that is not
static but is created from session to session and from moment to moment. This real-
ity is inseparable from the intersubjective field.
(p. 232).
Here we already find ourselves facing many seeds of future developments
and many questions concerning analogies to, and differences from, Ameri-
can intersubjectivity and Ogden’s (1994) ‘‘analytic third’’ (using a metaphor,
we could suggest that this last concept is a sort of ‘‘stock cube’’ to be dis-
solved in field theory in order to make it more easily digestible, as well as
more suitable to the transformative interrelation among different charac-
ters), not to mention here also much ‘‘harder’’ relational theories.
I think that it will only be possible to provide some at least partially sensi-
ble answers by aprs-coup (by observing the different developmental lines
followed by these various theorizations and models). I would also like to
mention here that, as Glocer Fiorini points out,
analysis does not consist essentially in re-discovering (although this re-discovering is
an integral part of it), but in re-structuring, creating, and inventing. It points
towards the new, to what is invented in the analytic process: an invention of the
patient’s own; by us and perhaps ours.
(p. 235).
But let’s now come back to the book. In the first paper, ‘‘Insight in the ana-
lytic situation’’ (1964), the main points presented in the already mentioned
article of 1961–62 are reviewed, reconsidered, and further elaborated and clar-
ified. In particular, the authors now point out that the bastion, when it is not
anything else and there is no complicity on the part of the analyst, is nothing
but the patient’s resistance, while communication gets split when such a
complicity exists: one section of the field coalesces around the patient’s resis-
tance and the analyst’s counter-resistance, while an apparently more-or-less
normal form of communication takes place independently on a different
plane. But an analytic field that does not work is a field where the analytic
process is paralysed and interrupted, and where transference and counter-
transference have become part of that structure which we call the bastion. But
let’s go back to its beginning, to Freud’s uncanny proposition: ‘‘What do they
do? They talk to each other’’. It would be hard to believe that we could fail to
think that the natural development of field theorizations, if not yet made
explicit or even conceived, would lead to Ogden’s (2007) ‘‘On talking as
dreaming’’. .
Coming back to that article, we immediately find the following
strong statement: ‘‘This implies, then, that the analyst acts through his

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418 Book Review Essay

interpretation and not through being’’(p. 2). The point of urgency of the
unconscious fantasy is defined as:
an unconscious fantasy of the couple (which is created within the couple as such).
This fantasy can be defined as the dynamic structure (of the couple) that at any
moment confers meaning to the bipersonal field’’ (p. 3). And soon after: ‘‘The
dynamics of the analytic situation depend on the analyst, on his personality, his
technical modality, his tools, his framework, as well as on the patient and his con-
flicts and resistances, his whole personality’’(p. 4). The specific analytic insight is
the process of understanding, ‘‘of joint understanding by analyst and patient of the
unconscious aspect of the field, which permits it its pathological present content to
be overcome and the respective involved parts to be rescued.
(p. 5)
Of crucial importance is the Barangers’ description of the pathology of
the field in terms which nowadays could also be expressed as inverted or
negative reverie (Ferro 2008). At the same time, such a description illustrates
the fundamental point that the field must get ill with the patient’s own ill-
ness in order to be then cured of it.
A paper deserving our attention is ‘‘Spiral process and the dynamic field’’
(1979). Not only does it provide us with some invaluable information about
the history of the psychoanalytic movement, but it also focuses on the con-
cept of spiral process as originally used by Pichon-Rivire, for whom it did
not rest on the depressive position as the sole aim of analysis (in this sense
it was entirely different from Meltzer’s view of it).
Spiral process designates a specific dialectic of the analytic approach to temporality.
‘Hic et nunc’ (‘Here and now’), Ezriel says, translating wrongly Melanie Klein’s ten-
dency to maintain the validity of the subject’s historical dimension, although she
does not differentiate it from the acquired knowledge about his psychogenetic evolu-
tion. ‘Hic et nunc et mecum’, Pichon-Rivire says - here, now, with me – but he adds
‘as far away and long ago’ and also ‘as in the future and somewhere else’. The dia-
lectic of the spiral process comprises all temporal dimensions, both the past, which
is repeated in the present analytic situation, and the future, which opens in a pro-
spective way [...] This movement of deepening into the past and construction of the
future defines the analytic process.
(p. 49)
The difference between Pichon-Rivire’s and Melanie Klein’s understand-
ing of the point of urgency is significant:
For Klein the point of urgency depends on what it is necessary to interpret for the
movement of the analysis to proceed, and it is signalled by anxiety, manifest in the
session or latent, hidden behind an inhibition or a lack of associations, or of play
when dealing with children. By point of urgency Pichon-Rivire understood the
emergence of something, a situation, rooted in the past, which often invades the
present.
(p. 50)
The article then describes how the theory of ‘‘spiral process’’ and that of
the field can be considered to be complementary:
Spiral process aims essentially at addressing the temporal development of the ana-
lytic process, its coming and going, repetitions, elaboration, alternation between

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 Book Review Essay 419
regression and progression, the dialectic of history and temporality. The ‘bipersonal
field’ attempts to describe more accurately the structure and dynamic of the analytic
situation, focusing not on the whole of its development throughout an analytic
treatment, but on smaller temporal entities: one session, or a part of it, or a group
of sessions
(p. 52)
Another important point is Baranger’s focus on the extremely topical
theme of the asymmetries between analyst and patient within the field. To
the different forms of asymmetry described here by Willy Baranger, I would
add the one due to the analyst’s responsibility towards the analysis and its
working through, in so far as the analyst is ultimately always the ship’s cap-
tain. In the last part of this paper, the author re-describes the bastion and
the second-degree look with reference to the evolution of these concepts
since their original formulation. This chapter ends by predicting that the
basic concept will be reformulated as ‘‘intersubjective field’’, and by refer-
ring to a lecture delivered in Rome in 1953 by Lacan.
‘‘Process and non-process in analytic work’’ (1993) was originally pre-
sented at the Madrid IPA Congress and signed by Madeleine Baranger,
Willy Baranger and Jorge M. Mom (co-author with them of several other
papers). In the first part we find a useful exposition on the origins of the
concept of second look:
At these times we use a second look in which we see the analytic situation as a
field that involves us in so far as we fail to know ourselves. [...] These counter-
transferential indicators, which provide the second look, lead us to realize that
within the field there is an immobilized structure that is slowing down or paraly-
sing the process. We have named this structure the bastion. This structure never
appears directly in the consciousness of either participants, showing up only
through its direct effects: it arises, in unconsciousness and in silence, out of a com-
plicity between the two protagonists to protect an attachment that must not be
uncovered. This leads to a partial crystallization of the field, to a neo-formation
set up around a shared fantasy assembly that implicates important areas of the
personal history of both participants and attributes a stereotyped imaginary role to
each.
(pp. 65–66)
The authors resist the temptation to provide a unified theory of transfer-
ence, countertransference and projective identification on the grounds that
such a theory would cancel out not just what is structurally determined by
the analytic contract, but also all those transferential and countertransferen-
tial qualities which indicate the priorities and forms of interpretation. In this
spirit, characterized by distinguishing and differentiating, they describe four
categories of transferential phenomena which perform, in our view, an impor-
tant orientating function for our psychoanalytic listening. The authors also
explain how Melanie Klein’s momentous new approach to transference con-
sisted in her understanding, outside Freud’s dualistic model, that the positive
transference does not occur in parallel with the negative one: they do not
function in the same way, by simply opposing each other; they are not the
two sides of the same coin, but two coins with entirely different values. In the
same way, countertransference is structurally different from transference and

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420 Book Review Essay

not simply its opposite. To conclude, not all transferential and countertrans-
ferential phenomena correspond to the same model, or use the same mecha-
nisms, nor should they be treated in the same way. We could say that the
authors use extreme care in their attempt to disrupt all parallels: from the
one between the indicators of a process and those of a non-process (usually
conceived as the head and tail of the same coin), to the one between patho-
genic processes and analytical ones (a fundamental confusion). They are
indeed convinced that the danger implicit in all analytic treatment is a stereo-
typical approach to narrative, feelings, mutual roles, and interpretations.
We can also find in this work some observations about the tendency to
think of the analytic process along a naturalistic model – a tendency which
has led many analysts to the bias of founding the development of their treat-
ment of patients upon their own referential framework (Manfredi and Ferro,
1990). All our authors’ most insightful reflexions are centered around one
idea: that the session is a special experience, allowing us to observe the gene-
sis of temporality and history. The analytic process rewrites the subject’s his-
tory and changes its meaning. The moment when we can observe this
change is the moment of insight when we simultaneously reappropriate a
piece of the past and open up to the future. Analytic work looks at the here
and now, and at the past, through a dialectic movement between the closed
and repetitive temporality of neurosis and the open temporality of insight.
‘‘The mind of the analyst: from listening to interpretation’’ is an article
written in 1992 and presented that year at the 38th IPA Congress in Amster-
dam. It is a work showing a mature stage of its authors (it is signed by
Madeleine alone, but in practical terms it is impossible to differentiate what
belongs to one and what to the other – just like in the field!). The paper
looks at the same time backwards and forwards, and reformulates many
concepts clearly and definitively, thus opening the way to further develop-
ments of the concept of field (Ferro and Basile 2009).
The field is a structure different from the sum of its components, just as a melody
is different from a sum of its notes. The advantage of being able to think in terms
of a field is that the dynamics of the analytic situation inevitably encounter many
stumbling blocks that are not due to the patient’s or the analyst’s resistance but
reveal the existence of a pathology specific to this structure. The work of the analyst
in this case, whether or not he uses the field concept, undergoes a change of centre:
a second look … is directed at one and the same time to the patient and to oneself
functioning as an analyst. It is not simply a matter of allowing for the analyst’s
countertransference experiences but of acknowledging that both the transference
manifestations of the patient and the analyst’s countertransference spring from one
and the same source: a basic unconscious fantasy that, as a creation of the field, is
rooted in the unconscious of each of the participants. The concept of basic uncon-
scious fantasy is derived from the Kleinian concept of unconscious fantasy, but also
from the description given by Bion in his work on groups (1952).

For instance, in discussing the basic hypothesis of ‘fight and flight’ in a group, Bion
is in our view referring to an unconscious fantasy that does not exist in any of the
participants outside this group situation. This is what we mean by the basic uncon-
scious fantasy in the field of the analytic situation.
(pp. 92–93)

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 Book Review Essay 421

Not only do we notice here a good re-definition of the two key concepts,
but we also find a clear explanation of the connections and indebtedness to
Bion, more specifically to his theory of groups from which Ogden (2009)
derives the concept of the psychoanalytic dyad as a small group: ‘‘the
psycho-analytical situation is not ‘individual psychology’ but ‘pair’’’ (Bion
1952, p. 131), adding that in order to think the most disturbing thoughts a
person needs two minds. I will consider later on how a more explicit impact
between Baranger’s and Bion’s conceptualizations (including those following
Bion’s theory of groups) will produce new theories. Returning to our article,
we will find there also a recovery and clarification of the specificity of the
field’s point of urgency:
Taking Pichon-Rivire as our basis, we consider the point of urgency to be a
moment in the functioning of the field when the structure of the dialogue and the
underlying structure (the basic unconscious fantasy of the field) can come together
and give rise to an insight. The analyst feels and thinks that he can and must inter-
pret (formulate an interpretation to the analysand).

The point of urgency is not generally known at the beginning of the session,
although the course of the process itself may have given the analyst a hypothetical
idea of what is about to emerge. The current events in the life of the analysand also
guide us towards the probable activation of specific fantasy nuclei (e.g. the death of
someone close to the analysand, a birthday, etc.). The analyst’s first interventions,
which are most often not interpretive, are aimed at probing the possible directions
for the search.

The search for the point of urgency may succeed or fail. Freud (1937) taught us that
the analysand’s verbal acceptance of the interpretation is not enough to validate it,
just as its rejection does not mean than it is necessarily false. That true indicators of
its correctness are the opening of the field and the dynamicization of the process.
(p. 95)
Here we would inevitably find ourselves faced with the huge problem of
how to validate interpretations. The two points I would like to stress in this
respect are the following: Bion’s statement about the patient as our best col-
league, and therefore as the one who always knows what is in our minds (Bion
1983; 2005); and the idea of the patient as a satellite navigator who, without
being aware of it, ‘‘dreams’’ the answer to our interpretations, thus continu-
ously giving us the ship’s positional coordinates of the analytic situation.
We could also explore here the topic of the quality of analytic listening.
This would be open to all the possible options I have described in terms of
the oscillations between ‘‘grasping and casting’’ (Ferro 2009), and implicitly
of those between ‘‘negative capability’’ and ‘‘selected fact’’ (see Bion 1963,
1970), between introjection of models, and being without memory and
desire (Bion 1970; Faimberg 1989).
‘‘What does the analyst listen to?’’ The answer is a simple one: the analyst
must ‘‘listen to the unconscious’’. But how should we conceive of the uncon-
scious? The one described by Freud, or by Klein, or by Lacan? Of course,
this could be the starting point of a long digression about Bion’s (1962;
1992 - and others in his footsteps, from Grotstein 2007; 2009 to Ogden

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2009) understanding of the unconscious, and about the ways in which this
new conceptualization of it may revolutionize our conception of the field, as
I shall explain later.
Another important discussion would then concern our view of interpreta-
tions. Of special significance, I think, is the concept of interpretation per via
di porre for certain patients (such as those with psychosomatic conditions)
rather than per via di levare (Freud, 1905, p. 303). However, I will not
indulge here in any of those debates and instead refer the readers to Tuckett
et al (2009) and, for what concerns the oscillation Interpretation ⁄ Transfor-
mation, to Ferro (2006). The language of interpretation should take into
account each patient’s qualities at any given moment, as well as having a
certain degree of saturation. Excessively precise and detailed interpretations
could often be an obstacle to the process.
We then come to ‘‘The infantile psychic trauma from us to Freud: pure
trauma, retroactivity and reconstruction’’ (1987), where its authors (Made-
leine Baranger, Willy Baranger and Jorge Mario Mom) carefully reconstruct
the evolution of the concept of trauma in Freud’s work, and then link its
growing complexity to our understanding of temporality based on deferred
action (aprs-coup). This idea is used in the analytic process of reconstruc-
tion and historicization of the present in relation to the past. The authors
distinguish between the extreme form of ‘‘pure’’ trauma and its other vari-
ous forms, retroactively historicized and reintegrated into a continuity that
gets ‘‘invented’’ in the course of analytic work. The possibility offered by
psychoanalysis to bring about change is based on this retroactive quality in
the establishment of trauma. This is a brilliant and profound article which
may be compared to Birksted Breen’s (2003). It would also be useful to look
at those theories which treat trauma as an absence of the functions of rev-
erie and dream, when faced with real traumas, or with traumas caused by
an excess of unmetabolized contents, which shift their focus to the functions
of reverie, and the capacity or incapacity for dreaming and therefore for
metabolising on the part of the care-givers and later of the field. We could
state that what is involved in these situations is the efficacy of the ‘‘dream-
ing ensemble’’ (Grotstein 2007) of the field itself as a place of functioning
and development of the a functions.
I shall not discuss here all of the remaining articles, interesting as they
are, because they deal with different, if always rigorously and profoundly
treated, topics. On the one hand they show the wide range of the Barangers’
interests, while on the other they shift the focus of what remains their most
important theme: the field. Some of these articles, furthermore, have already
been published in English.
However, Madeleine Baranger’s ‘‘Bad faith identity and onnipotence’’
(written in 1959 but not published until 1963) deserves our comments. All
patients, in their own ways and in certain stages of their analysis, are drawn
to avoid the ‘‘fundamental rule’’, and this is part of the game. The author’s
attention here is directed toward those situations where the failure to com-
ply with the fundamental rule and the means used to avoid it are of a more
serious nature. In these cases, we are faced with bad faith, in the sense that
a deliberate and systematic behaviour affects the authenticity and interest

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itself of the analytic process, even if this happens with different degrees of
awareness. A good example would be that of those patients who, when
offered an interpretation, claim that they have already known what we said
for a long time. But for the author, explaining the patient’s bad faith as a
dissociative phenomenon (in those years, splitting mechanisms were already
a main focus of psychoanalytic investigation) is not good enough. The most
obvious aspects of challenging and making a mockery ofhe fundamental
rule allow Baranger to consider the ambiguous situation expressed by the
inauthenticity of the material as the patient’s wish radically to pervert the
analytic situation and reduce the analyst to a state of impotence. This old
paper contains some vital insights, such as the observation that the level of
awareness of deception does not constitute the main distinctive feature of
bad faith, as if the patient were exercising his right to dissociate, but would
not really do so. In Madeleine Baranger’s text, the patient’s bad faith, which
is so unpleasant for the analyst, becomes a fascinating object of research - a
structure continuously vanishing and bringing with it the patient’s goal to
deceive both the analyst and himself, an ongoing oscillation between good
faith and lying in search of omnipotent triumph over the analyst. In the
process the patient, not unlike Proteus, flees from one to the other, mostly
in order to avoid having to define himself.
In bad faith, the essential point seems to be an inner ego situation: a multiplicity of
contemporary and contradictory identifications that have not settled down, which
makes the analysand feel and stand in for various characters without knowing who
he really is.
(pp. 186–7)
The central link is the one between bad faith and omnipotence:
Bad faith has already proved to be a defence against anxiety. To renounce giving
and receiving gratification from one’s relations with others, the artificiality of object
relations, means paying a very high price for something that consequently must be
important.

Simple observation allows us to grasp something of the nature of the situations in

which bad faith appears. In the course of an argument, for example, the person has
run out of valid reasons for defending his opinion. He has been refuted adequately,
and it looks as if he has no other choice but to give in – or, rather, to accept being
beaten by the other’s arguments. However, he appeals to arguments he knows are
untrue or irrelevant. He refuses to accept what at this point seems to be reality (the
evidence set forth by the other). He might fly into rage, to deny magically his oppo-
nent’s reasons, and in this way destroy the other. Instead, grounded on bad faith,
he maintains the appearance of his arguments. Bad faith allows him to stick to his
omnipotence.

We encounter the same process in our patients’ bad faith. They need to win over
the analysis in the analytic dialogue, and this precludes communication. Triumph
serves to deny castration when an interpretation confronts them with this anxiety.
On a deeper level, they attempt to grab the interpretation (‘I’ve known this for a
long time’) in order to elude a situation of oral dependence on the analyst, and they
hold on to their omnipotence by reducing the analyst to the mere role of an echo
or a mirror. What upsets them is admitting not so much that the analyst has

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424 Book Review Essay
something positive, but that they are lacking in it and therefore they envy the ana-
lyst for having it. They have the fantasy that they are absolutely self-sufficient, and
this omnipotent feeling finds an obstacle in the fact of being in analysis. So they
resort to bad faith and act as if they were analysing themselves. The analyst
becomes a tool (the ideal being a cybernetic interpreting machine). The analyst is
the technique, they are the thought.

Bad faith and its corollary, omnipotence, produce the dehumanization of both ana-
lyst and patient: the analyst is turned into an inanimate object, and the analysand
is only omnipotent thought. Omnipotence engenders a lack of communication.

Projective identification leads to an unstable state in which the projected and re-
introjected elements are sometimes placed on the analyst and at other times on the
analysand, giving rise to fantasies and dreams in which the analyst appears as an
omnipotent persecutor and the patient as a poor thing. This ambiguity in the place-
ment of the elements that are intended to be projected in projective identification is
a defence against a terrifying fear of contact with the other and even more of trans-
ference contact. In the latter there is the risk of a massive re-introjection of destruc-
tion. The particular technique of bad faith consists in delivering outdated material
and in drawing the analyst’s attention towards secondary movements. The analy-
sand misleads the interpretation towards an inessential aspect of the situation and,
remaining in constant flight, wears diverse masks, always trying to present empty
masks to the persecuting analyst. Bad faith, then, appears basically as a Proteus-like
play between divided internal characters intended to sustain omnipotence.
(pp. 194–196)
But why did I choose to explore this topic in more depth? It is because it is
central to the dichotomy of truth and lies – a theme which we know was dear
to Bion when he distinguished K from O, and later to Grotstein, who studied
the oscillations between Truth and various degrees of its distortion and made
the creatively transgressive step to place dreams in the second column of the
grid (Grotstein 2007). But is there an antidote? I think one could be the con-
cept of ‘‘tolerable truth’’ (Ferro et al. 2007). I believe that an extraordinary
example of it is the one proposed by Ogden (2007) in his ‘On talking as
dreaming’, where patients unable to tolerate the more classical communica-
tive style are led, almost without their realizing it, towards a situation where
they find themselves dreaming for the first time (or almost) with another.
Having now completed my review of the main articles contained in the
book, I would like to touch on the most significant developments of the
concept of field.
At the final round-table of the last congress on Bion, which took place in
Boston in 2009, it was agreed that, after a long period of engagement, it
was time to announce the marriage between Bion (or, better, many of his
concepts) and the concept of Field. The field, to which Bion has made a
seminal contribution, involves:

• The explicit move from a bipersonal to a multipersonal field, where

internal groupings of patient and analyst become engaged in complex
interactions.

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 Book Review Essay 425

• The introduction of the concept of character of the field as an ongoing

hologram ⁄ manifestation of the pairing between internal groupings of
analyst and patient; and, from a different perspective, understood as
narrative derivatives of the ‘‘oneiric thought in a state of awakeness’’
within the field (Ferro 2002; 2006).
• The identification within the field of structures and forms of function-
ing belonging to the field. We come to think then in terms of a function
of the field, b turbulences in the field, and containing qualities of spe-
cific sites in the field ($) and hypercontents (#) in other sites.
• At the same time the field, by now clearly three-dimensional, becomes
the site of all possible histories. Little by little, all the tools for thinking
introduced by Bion will be considered as belonging to the field, of
which the current relationship is one of the loci, as is the History which
continuously presses to be deconstructed, deconcretized, and redreamed.
The same applies to the b elements waiting to be dreamed.
What have not been described in clear terms are the technical implications
of the concept of field (understood in its radical meaning), even though sev-
eral works about them have recently been published. It is worth mentioning
in this respect Luis Kancyper (1999) who has applied many theories derived
from the concept of field to the analysis of children and adolescents in an
original way. In extremely synthetic fashion, transformations prevail over
interpretations, narratives take on a transformative significance, and we can
find here many points of contact with the concepts of ‘‘dreaming ensemble’’
(Grotstein 2007) and of a movement towards dreaming as yet undreamed
dreams (Ogden 2009).
The goal of psychoanalysis and what allows recovery are the development
of the a function (of the field) and of the containing qualities (of the field),
which would then get continuously introjected by the patient through micro
and macro forms of aprs-coup. I could say that the analytic session looks
like a dream shared by two minds, where different stories, coming from a
field’s different places and times, converge, diffract, and overlap. The shared
experience is to let emotional states, affects, thoughts and characters move
about between the patient and the analyst, who is also part of the field and
guarantees and safeguards the setting, thus promoting a dream-like activity
in the analytic couple. Each session is like a pearl, a bead in the necklace-
rosary which through all its ‘‘mysteries’’ leads not to specific contents, but
rather to being able to move forwards and backwards, like in certain sci-fi
movies where one can travel both in space and in time. The engine of analy-
sis and of the narrative-mythopoeic activity is the need to find for the
un-thinkable and the un-sayable a space-time and a function, enabling one
to think and speak. Working together on the emotions which are present in
the field, to weave them again and again, is what allows the developments
of container ⁄ contained ($#) through reverie and unison. The result of all
transformative transitions achieved with each session allows us to weave
proto-emotions into images, into stories of memories hitherto unavailable,
or even into memories of events never actually occurred, but constructed in
the field and then post-dated with ongoing movements of aprs-coup. The
analysis is then directed by every analytic couple’s functioning modalities

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426 Book Review Essay

and thus the very concept of natural process loses its meaning. Each couple
will have its own way of performing the analytic work, and all analytic
events, the negative therapeutic reactions, psychotic or negative transferences
and countertransferences will belong to that couple, or better to that field.
The session takes place in a sort of mutually oneiric state, both when the
patient ‘‘dreams’’ (when he can) the analyst’s intervention or his mental
state, and when the analyst ‘‘dreams’’ how to respond to the patient. The
more this reply is ‘‘dreamed’’, the more it will play a part in repairing any
damage the patient may present in his alpha functioning. The analyst during
the session may be compared to a pilot who must learn to operate all the
instruments of an extremely complex machine, only in order that the jour-
ney should take place in relative safety. Otherwise, we would face the risk of
either a loss of direction (or major accidents) or, on the contrary, an analy-
sis that goes round and round without getting anywhere - even when we are
referring to a paradoxical journey, the aim of which is to learn to travel in
constantly expanding territories, or to learn the method.
The basic activity of reverie is continuously ongoing: this is how the field
continuously welcomes, metabolizes and transforms in one of its areas what
reaches it as verbal, para-verbal and non verbal stimulation from the turbu-
lent parts of the patient’s field itself. Such a basic reverie activity is at the
centre of our mental life. On its functioning or disfunctioning depend sanity,
illness and the degree of psychic pain.
When listening, the analyst in turn forms other pictograms derived from
his listening to the patient’s own narrative derivatives, adding to them the
alphabetization of a certain amount of the b elements which the patient had
not been able to transform. At this point we either have a kind of a dance
from a distance, where this functioning is alternatively repeated, or else ana-
lyst and patient find themeselves on the same wavelength, to such an extent
that the a function, the sequence of pictograms, and their narrative deriva-
tives lose the specificty of their origins and it is then the couple itself which
generates meanings and transformations with a minimum of caesurae. We
have thus moved from a regime of parallel functioning to one moving in an
endless spiral. This is the functioning which occurs in the analytic field and
which gives rise to it.
From a certain perspective the analytic field is then that ‘‘unsaturated
waiting room’’, where we can find emotions, proto-emotions and characters
before they can be led back to their saturated course, through the relation-
ship or a construction. From a different perspective, though, it consists of
all the lines of force, of all the proto-aggregates of proto-emotions, proto-
characters and characters floating in the field’s virtual space, gradually
acquiring substance, color and three-dimensionality. It is as if we stretched
many rubber bands between patient and analyst, many possible narrative
lines on which gradually to hang some pegs representing the field’s casting
of what was hitherto indeterminate. What matters at this point are not the
contents but the way in which such functioning can help develop the tools
for thinking.
Obviously, not all instances of sensoriality or all proto-emotions can be
transformed into pictograms, as some of them will at any rate be evacuated

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 Book Review Essay 427

in the form of symptoms, acting out, rows, phobias, paranoia, generated by

the inadequacies of the a function. In this last model of the field, which has
a tendency to manifest itself as an oneiric field, what matters is the develop-
ment of the field’s dreaming capacity, through which the functions could
eventually be transformed and introjected. We have here a leap from a
psychoanalysis concerned with contents to one concerned with the possibility
of developing the instruments needed to generate, contain and transform
those contents, while we cannot assume the existence of a space outside the
field. Inside it, rather, we have an unconscious (or, better, non-mentalized)
part which, through casting and transformation into dream, is constantly
changed into something thinkable.
It is not easy to accept that the focus of analysis is the development of
the capacity to dream instead of the work on repression and splitting. Origi-
nating from a strong concept (where the focus was on the explicit interpreta-
tive activity of the analyst on the blind spots and resistance caused by
mutual projective identifications between analyst and patient), this has
become a constantly expanding potential field, where all possible worlds
activated by the analytic encounter can manifest themselves. What hitherto
belonged to one or the other subject now belongs to the field. We can
therefore think in terms of alpha function of the field, beta elements or
proto-emotive turbulences of the field, affective characters-holograms of the
field, transformative and interpretative activity of the field (Ferro 2009).

Roberto Basile and I have written in a recent publication (2009):

The analytic field is inhabited by innumerable real and virtual presences in the pro-
cess of aggregation, and a valid comparison might be with the universe as it is
understood today. For the analytic field coincides with the unrepeatable ‘universe’
that is born at the beginning of each session, only to be temporarily suspended
when each session comes to an end. The field is inhabited by certain principal char-
acters, who could be called the protagonists, as well as by supporting actors and,
finally, by extras; moreover, all these presences can constantly change their roles.
However, human characters (or even non-anthropomorphic ones) represent the most
mature part of the field. They could be likened to the constellations discernible in a
starry sky. The field is the locus of an infinite number of other phenomena, most of
them unknown. An axiom of the field might be that the ‘Big Bang’ occurs at the
beginning of each session – and the ‘Big Crunch’ at the end.

Characters constitute the outcome of operations carried out further upstream. Their
status is always complex and they do not correspond to the persons to whom they
bear a superficial resemblance. The characters of the session are the fruit of mental
operations performed by analyst and patient and reflect the mental functioning of
both, as well as their proto-emotions, emotions and unknown aspects. In other
words, they are holograms of the mental functioning of the analytic couple; but
they also include kinds of functioning that would, in other languages, be said to be
split off, or not yet accessible to thinkability. Characters enter and leave the session
tangentially; others, having entered tangentially, become protagonists; while yet oth-
ers immediately take essential parts. From this point of view, whatever the patient
talks about, he or she is describing a form of functioning of the field.
(pp. 5–6)

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428 Book Review Essay

As already suggested, interpretations will occur between the various char-

acters of the field, or also between those two special places called ‘‘analyst’’
and ‘‘patient’’. The field will be in a constant state of development and
transformation. Furthermore, the concept of field has the effect of downsiz-
ing many other strong ideas, such as those of Truth and History. We must
consider truth and history within the field, as after all the truth of the field
conveys more certainty than the truth of the external world. As Umberto
Eco has written, we are certain that Anna Karenina didn’t reside in Baker
Street because that was Sherlock Holmes’ address, but we cannot be equally
certain about what happens in the real external world.
With this essay of mine, I hope not only to have offered my readers a fur-
ther encouragement to ‘‘rediscover’’ these articles, which in any case now
belong to our psychoanalytic canon, but also to stimulate and hasten an
interest in all further developments that may stem from them and to make
it possible for us dare to think new thoughts.
References
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de Psicoanalisis 4:3–54
Baranger M, Baranger W (2008). The analytic situation as a dynamic field. Int J Psychoanal 89:795–
826
Bion WR (1959). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. New York: Basic Books
Bion WR (1963). Elements of Psycho-analysis. London: Karnac Books
Bion WR (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Karnac Books
Bion WR (1983). The Italian Seminars (F. Bion editor). London: Karnac Books, 2005
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Ogden T (1994). The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts. Int J Psychoanal
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Antonino Ferro
Via Cardano 77, Pavia 27100, Italy
E-mail: antonino.ferro3@tin.it

ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91