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also allow the psychoanalyst to feel his own emotion. The differentiation between both protagonists is preserved. In contrast, in Racker’s concept of complementary identification in which the analyst and the patient do reciprocal projective identifications, the psychoanalyst projects himself into the patient. The consequence is that the process culminates in an enactment. In 1962, Grinberg offered the concept of projective counteridentification to describe the impact of the analysand’s projective identification on the subjectivity of the analyst. When this effect is massive, the analyst’s reaction would be considered determined by the projective identification of the patient and independent from his own conflicts. Grinberg examined the nature of the internal relationship of the analyst with the internal objects of the patient projected into the former’s mind. These developments in the study of unconscious communication through transference and countertransference have led to the conceptualisation of the relationship analyst-patient as a bi-personal field, that is as fundamentally intersubjective. However, this term is used to denote very different understandings. Lawrence Brown in “Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious” (2011) wrote, “the term intersubjectivity is frequently associated with the American Relational School”, which Green (2008) called an epidemic in North America. However, Grotstein (1999) and Brown (2011) state that countertransference has thankfully been transformed into intersubjectivity, and Brown adds “Furthermore, intersubjectivity is a process of unconscious communication , receptivity, and meaning making within each member of the dyad to bring idiosyncratic signification to the shared emotional field that interacts with an analogous function in the partner” (Brown, 2011, p 7). The analytic field concept used here by Brown had its main source in the work of the couple Baranger: “The Analytic Situation as a Dynamic Field” (1961), republished in Spanish in 1968 and only translated into English in 2008. This fundamental theoretical innovation was thus unknown to most of the psychoanalytic community until recently. The Barangers described their project as follows: “This paper discusses the consequences of the importance that recent papers assign to the countertransference. When the latter acquires a theoretical and technical value equal to that of the transference, the analytic situation is configured as a dynamic bi-personal field, and the phenomena occurring in it need to be formulated in bi- personal terms” (2008, p 795). These authors describe the characteristics of this unconscious phantasy of the analytic couple and emphasize the contribution of phenomena of projective and introjective identification in its structure. About the concept of unconscious phantasy, they argued: “more importantly, neither can it be considered to be 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 . . . We define phantasy in analysis as the dynamic structure that at every moment gives meaning to the bi- personal field ” (ibid, p. 806-7). The idea of the analytic field as bi-personal has deeply influenced Antonino Ferro (1998, 2004, 2009). Referring to Bion, Mom, Pichon-Riviere and to the couple Baranger, Ferro stresses that right from the first contact on the phone and even before it, unconscious communication begins to be organized in the patient, in the analyst’s and in the couple´s
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