The analytic field: the Barangers, Ogden, Ferro

What they observed

In a paper first published in Spanish in 1961, Madeleine and Willy Baranger, working in Buenos Aires, proposed that the analytic situation is not two people interacting but a single bipersonal field. Patient and analyst together produce a shared unconscious phantasy that neither brings and neither controls. Its clearest sign is the bastion: an impasse built from a piece of each person's inner life, interlocked, which both protect without knowing it. It can be dismantled only by a second look at what the two have built together.

In 1994 Thomas Ogden, by a different route, named the analytic third: a subject created jointly by analyst and patient, experienced by each from their own position. He treated the analyst's apparently private reverie, the drifting thoughts and small preoccupations of the hour, as the third speaking.

Antonino Ferro drew the line to its end. Everything said in the session, the patient's narrative and the analyst's reverie alike, is the field describing itself, through whichever of the two is speaking.

What it shows

Three analysts in two hemispheres concluded that the unit of the session is larger than either participant, and that it has a logic of its own: it resists, protects itself and thinks, through two people neither of whom decided to do so. They found this under the conditions most favourable to keeping two people separate.

In the model

The analytic dyad is a nested field assembled on purpose. The bipersonal field is a two-person field whose joint expression includes forms neither member expresses alone, and its phantasy is the joint configuration of the two valves' exclusions. The rule of abstinence becomes a refusal to complete the form locally, which leaves its completion visible instead of enacted.