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pillars for understanding the underlying unconscious dynamics within a conception that featured reciprocal co-determination of field phenomena: “Therefore, the analytic situation must be formulated…as a situation between two persons, who are unavoidably connected and complementary as long as the situation lasts and are involved in the same dynamic process… The analyst ‘intervenes in spite of his or her necessary neutrality and passivity—as a complete participant’” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 8). The focus of the study of the bi-personal relationship is on its unconscious aspects, with the background of their deep elaboration of the analyst’s countertransferential participation, as conceptualized by Racker, Heimann and Money Kyrle (de Leon de Bernardi 2008). The Barangers followed Heimann in part when they considered countertransference a global phenomenon and a valuable technical instrument, developments that had already been proposed in Buenos Aires by Racker. But whereas Klein and even Heimann thought of transference and countertransference from the intrapsychic viewpoint of patient and analyst, the Barangers placed the accent on the analyst’s contribution from the very beginning. This is analogous to Racker (1948), considering not only the repetitive feature of the countertransference, but also its new aspects created by the analytic relationship. Their central hypothesis was that in the analytic encounter new structures (gestalts) and shared phantasies emerge that are products of the interplay of reciprocal identifications between patient and analyst. The transformation of these phantasies generates the dynamics of the analytic field. This view was a radical change from the uni-personal (one-person) approach at that time: “The basic phantasy of a session is not merely the analyst’s understanding of the patient’s phantasy, but something that is constructed in a couple relationship… This phantasy is gradually formed by the interplay of processes of projective and introjective identification and of the counteridentifications operating, with their limits, functions and different characteristics within patient and analyst” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 19). The concept of basic fantasy itself has different sources. The first is Susan Isaacs’s ‘structural conceptualisation of phantasy, as an expression of the different aspects of psychic life (impulses, sentiments and defenses). Others are Klein‘s notions of projective identification and Bion’s conceptualizations of the basic assumptions of group functioning (Baranger M, 1992), applicable to psychoanalytic group psychotherapy, practice of which further developed in both Argentina and Uruguay. The session is the scenario where primitive object relations are acted out, while the notion of phantasy provides the analytic field with an ‘as if’ dimension of its ‘essential ambiguity’ in the functional, spatial and temporal aspects. The manifest dimension of the analytic relationship is conceived as having a dialectic relation with the phantasied unconscious aspects. The focus of the analyst’s interpretation then aims at aspects of transference and countertransference in connection to the current relationship with the analyst. This view developed from a perspective that critically discussed the positions of Freud and Klein, while also taking essential aspects of their contributions. The Barangers disagreed with Freud’s ‘archaeological’ tendency, which might lead to exaggerate the historical–
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