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emotional communication as expressions of unconscious communication between patient and analyst; resistance phenomena that may express split off primary experiences; the process of verbal free association and factors of change or lack of change in the analytic process. The Barangers (Baranger W, 1959, 1979; Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961- 62; Baranger M, 1992) themselves also recognized broader influences that converged on their notion of the dynamic field. Among them, the theory of the Gestalt, particularly the work of Kurt Lewin, prioritized the individual’s life space and its dynamics as determinants of his or her behavior. Lewin, the official founder of social psychology, refuted associationism and emphasized the importance of perception of structures that permit the discovery of new dimensions of reality. The Gestalt theory in turn influenced Merleau-Ponty’s concept of perception (as discussed in detail above). According to Beatriz de Leon de Bernardi (2000), Hugo Vezzetti (1998) considered Enrique Pichon Rivière (1998) one of the psychoanalysts that introduced the ideas of the Gestalt theory into Argentina. In his study of human groups, this pioneer of social psychology and its greatest driving force on both sides of the River Plate incorporated both the Gestalt notion of field and Kleinian ideas on primitive object relations. However, his view of the internal world placed more importance on the internalized experience of early relationships than on instinctual factors. In his perspective, internal experience is organized as a group experience, an approach he developed in different social-psychological investigations, especially in the area of psychiatry. This model influenced Willy and Madeleine Baranger’s concept of the phantasy of the session as a phantasy created by the couple. According to Vezzetti (1998), Pichon Rivière probably had access to Gestalt theory through his study of the French thinkers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Daniel Lagache . Papers by Lagache were published by the Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis from its first issues in 1956 and were undoubtedly a part of the intellectual dialogue of the wider region. Lagache’s work integrating behaviorism, phenomenology and psychoanalytic clinical work (in his conception of the different areas of the mind, the body and the world) in turn influenced José Bleger (1963). In the 1950s and 1960s, these ideas began to resonate in Uruguay, where the phenomenological current influenced other psychoanalysts, including Gilberto Koolhaas and Rodolfo Agorio. Ideas of the ‘Psychoanalytic situation as a dynamic field’ were formulated gradually, as Willy and Madeleine Baranger and the founding group of the Psychoanalytic Association of Uruguay were in a continuous dialogue with leading Argentine analysts. Later, Willy Baranger (1979) referred to the creative atmosphere of Pichon Rivière’s seminars in Montevideo referring especially to his ideas on the analytic ‘spiral process’, and the shared love of poetry of the 19 th century French-Venezuelan poet Isidore Ducasse Count Lautréamont, whose “Ill Dawns” was held as a motto of increased freedom of psychoanalytic thinking over orthodoxy. While Freud’s works formed the basis of the training, there was an added enthusiasm for the new theories of early object relations of Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Wilfred Bion and others. While field theory allowed for a vision that explored the different manifest aspects of the analytic situation—spatial, temporal and functional—the Kleinian theory contributed
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