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II. Da. Developments in Italy In her encyclopedic entry on Willy Baranger (in: de Mijolla, 2003/2005), Madeleine Baranger noted: “[Willy] Barangers’ work is generally well known and recognized in Latin America, but much less so in Europe, with the exception of Italy, where a selection of his work was published in 1990 as “La situazione psicoanalitica come campo bipersonale (The Psychoanalytic Situation as a Bipersonal Field)” (p. 150). Since then, the Baranger’s field theory has been further developed and expanded not only in Latin America but also in Europe, particularly in Italy. Antonino Ferro Ferro (1999, 2009) has greatly contributed to give the field concept its current standing in Italian and European psychoanalysis. In his many successive writings on the subject, Ferro identified at least two roots of the field concepts as it has been developed first in Italian psychoanalysis and then in other parts of Europe. Its first root, and the dominant influence, may of course be traced back to Latin America to the work of the Barangers whose original field concept proposes that the analyst and the patient jointly form blind spots, which they refer to as “bastions”, constituted by the projective identifications of both members of the analytical couple, patient and analyst. These pockets of resistance or real blind spots are formed continuously and need to be dissolved by the analyst’s “second glance” as “interpreter of the bastion”. Thus, it is immediately apparent that there is a field, albeit one that involves a high degree of asymmetry in as much as it is the analyst who occupies a position of strength and privilege in breaking down these areas of resistance. Linked with this resistance, it is important to introduce another of the Barangers’ contributions, in co- authorship with Mom (1988), in which they elaborate the concept of “pure trauma”, a universe where “dangers” are “nameless”, “placeless”, without an object (p.124). It is precisely to these experiences that the psychoanalytic process would seek to attach an object and ensure they were represented and included in a narrative. In this article the authors state that “psychoanalysis establishes itself against pure trauma”, but in considering “pure trauma”, they point out moments and impasses when the difficulties “may seem impossible to overcome in order to go farther in the psychoanalytic process” in that “no man´s land” (p.124). Ferro sees the other important root of European Field theorizing in the work of Francesco Corrao , an Italian psychoanalyst and physician who was interested in Greek thought and epistemology. He was trained in psychoanalysis by a disciple of Melanie Klein Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee who moved to Sicily. Corrao took over from her to develop psychoanalysis in Sicily. He became aware of Melanie Klein’s work and also became interested in Wilfred Bion’s thought and his theory on groups. Corrao (1985) defined the field as being generated by the encounter between the internal dynamics of both patient and analyst, or rather, by a ‘Big Bang ‘of sorts which occurs whenever the analytic couple meets, creating a single unit where once there were two distinct
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