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a symbolic dream through a dream-for-two, he may also, implicitly, be dreaming areas of non- dreams, and vice-versa.
(3) Chronic and Acute Enactment Cassorla (2001, 2005, 2012) considered two categories of enactment, the chronic and the acute, in relation to the Barangers’ ‘bastion’. The military model, when associated with the concept of projective identification, is useful for the classic work of the Barangers (1961–1962), in which they describe the “bastion”, an obstacle to the progress of the battle which occurs in the analytic setting. The origin of the word “bastion” suggests fortifications sticking out at an angle from protective walls, making it possible to guard them and fire at enemies. The idea of a bastion, as a fortification from which analytical work is hindered, might suggest that the analyst is actively advancing while the patient remains withdrawn, defending himself. However, this impression would be inaccurate. To the contrary, the above model is to be understood within the concept of a “field”, containing the current ideas about intersubjectivity. For the Barangers, the analytic situation involved two people who were taking part in the same dynamic process, one in which neither member of the dyad is intelligible without reference to the other. And in turn the two people hide multipersonal structures. The “field” is made up of the conjunction of spatial and temporal structures and what is called “unconscious fantasy of the dyad”. This fantasy does not have its origins in the sum of the elements of the patient and the analyst, rather “It is something that is created between the two of them, within the unit they form during the session, something radically different from what each of them is separately” (1961-1962/2008, p.806. It is important to note that everything that happens in the bi-personal field will not simply be a repetition, insofar as it arises in a new context. The encounter with bastions brings paralysis back to the field, a feeling that nothing is happening, and that narratives are stereotyped. Even though at times the Barangers refer to the bastion as belonging to the patient, it remains clear that they mean to consider it as a product of the field. This contradiction is clarified better later on (Baranger et al., 1983), when they consider the bastion as a “precipitate” from the field, which can only occur between this analyst and this analysand, and “arises, in unconsciousness and in silence, out of a complicity between the two protagonists to protect an attachment which must not be uncovered” (p. 2). It is a neo- formation of the field, “around a shared fantasy assembly which implicates important areas of the personal history of both participants and attributes a stereotyped imaginary role to each” (p. 2). In this way parts of the patient and parts of the analyst become intertwined and engulfed in a defensive structure. The bastion may appear a static foreign body, while the analytic process seems to be continuing to run its course or it takes over the whole field, becoming pathological. The breaching of the bastion sets off the destruction of the status quo, making it possible for
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