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elaboration of Klein’s conceptualization of the transference as a “total situation,” to the idea of the analytic field. These ideas were introduced in a more concentrated fashion with the arrival of Bion in Los Angeles in 1970, where he exerted a tremendous influence on certain American analytic writers and thinkers, most prominent among which was James Grotstein. Grotstein (2007) expanded on Bion’s (1965, 1970) ideas regarding transformations and invariant elements in the analytic process, as well as his expansion of the idea of maternal reverie and the conceptualization of the group as an “establishment” and, as such, a container, or ‘field’, that must be able to receive and metabolize new experience in order for growth to occur. II. Eb. North American Field Conceptualizations and Related Field Concepts II. Eba. Langs’ Bi-Personal Communicative Field(s) The psychoanalytic writer and theorist Robert Langs (1976, 1979) made use of both of these lines of development, in the process of which he attempted to integrate the work of Stone, Klein and Bion in explicit fashion. In addition, although Langs’s work never achieved a mainstream acceptance in North American psychoanalytic circles of influence, he was notable in being the first North American analyst to import the idea of the analytic field as first described by the Barangers (1961-1962) into North American psychoanalytic discourse in his conceptualization of the ‘bipersonal field’, adding to it the description of subtypes of ‘communicative fields’ in psychoanalytic treatment along the dimension of the capacity of the analytic couple for containment and symbolic processing and the implications of the different subtypes for the depth of analytic process possible. Drawing on contributions of Post-Kleinian Object Relations theories, especially Bion, Winnicott, Racker, Grinberg and Bleger, aided to by Freud, Stone, Greenson and Gill, Searles and Green, prominently inspired by Barangers (1961-62, 1966, 1969, 2008) conceptualization of Psychoanalytic Situation as a Dynamic Bi-Personal Field, Langs (1979, 1986) constructed an elaborate model of the Communicative Bi-Personal Field : Type A, where symbolic communication occurs and where the field itself becomes the realm of illusion; Type B, where projective identification and action predominate; and Type C, where all communication and meaning is destroyed. Modifying Freud’s Topographic Theory of the Unconscious, Preconscious and Conscious systems, in conjunction with Signal theory of anxiety, Langs stressed the unconscious perception rather than unconscious fantasies and conflicts. Triggering anxiety signals, emotionally laden perceptions are visually encoded and stored in the Deep Unconscious system, according to the laws of primary process. Elaborating specifically on transformative-communicative properties of the bi-personal fields, Langs (1986) posits “Transformation subsystems”, which operate between the Deep Unconscious and Conscious systems, effecting first the visual encoding of elements of emotionally intense and intolerable unconscious percepts and their storage (according to the laws of primary process mechanisms) in the Deep Unconscious. Their transformation and access to the conscious mind are facilitated by the analyst’s interpretative here-and-now interactively tuned affectively laden messages. Therapist’s transformative interpretive action is progressively introjected by the patient as a
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