BARANGER, WILLY (1922-1994)

A psychoanalyst with a degree in philosophy, Willy Baranger was born on August 13, 1922, in Bône, Algeria, and died on October 29, 1994, in Buenos Aires.

He spent his childhood in Paris, where he continued his studies until he obtained his baccalaureate diploma in 1939. After moving to Toulouse because of the war, he completed his education with the PCB and received a degree in philosophy. He married Madeleine Coldefy and prepared for his doctorate in philosophy, which he received in 1945.

After teaching in France for a year, he left for Buenos Aires as a professor of philosophy at the Institut Français d'Études Supérieures. He began his psychoanalysis with Enrique Pichon-Rivière and soon completed his theoretical and practical training. In December 1954 a group of Uruguayan doctors and psychologists asked him to assume responsibility for training analysis and teaching in Montevideo. The Asociacíon Psicoanalítica del Uruguay was officially formed on September 27, 1955. It was recognized as a study group at the international congress held in Paris in 1957 and as an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association at the congress of Edinburgh in 1961.

The Revista uruguaya de psicoanálisis, which is still in print, published its first issue in May 1956. Willy Baranger was a constant presence at the Latin American congresses of psychoanalysis since their inception in Buenos Aires in 1956 and, in 1960, at the congress held in Santiago, Chile, he worked with his colleagues to create COPAL, the Coordinating Committee for Latin American Psychoanalytic Organizations, of which he was president in 1975-1976. In 1966 Baranger returned to Buenos Aires, where he resumed his teaching activities. He was part of the sponsorship committee of the Peruvian group that, once recognized as an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association, named him an honorary member. In December 1993 he received the Mary S. Sigourney prize.

Baranger published four books: Problemas del campo psicoanalitico, with Madeleine Baranger (1969), Posicíon y objeto en la obra de Melanie Klein (1971), Aportaciones al concepto de objeto en psicoanálisis (1980), and Artesanias psicoanaliticas (1994).

Some of his many articles touch upon literature and philosophy. His work on epistemology defends the idea that psychoanalysis must formulate its own criteria of validation, different from those used by the exact sciences. He also studied the problem of ideology and its relation to idealized objects. His emphasis on the object is expressed in his Posicíon y objeto en la obra de Melanie Klein. This "objectology" depends on the willingness to structure any theoretical elaboration of the psychoanalytic situation as a fundamental given. The concept of the psychoanalytic situation as a "dynamic field" leads to an unconscious bipersonal fantasy of the session, in which transference and countertransference are extracted from a situation that possesses its own dynamism and outcomes, aside from the specific contributions of the analyst and analysand. For example, a "bastion" is a resistance produced in the psychoanalytic field by the unconscious collusion of the analyst and the analysand, which immobilizes the process.

Willy Baranger's 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).

Madeleine Baranger

See also: Argentina; Federacíon psicoanalítica de América Latina; Uruguay.

Bibliography

Baranger, Madeleine, Baranger, Willy, and Mom, Jorge. (1983). Process and non-process in analytic work. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 64, 1-15. (Original work published 1982)

Baranger, Willy. (1971). Posición y objeto en la obra de Melanie Klein. Buenos Aires: Kargieman.

Baranger, Willy, and Baranger, Madeleine. (1969). Problemas del campo psicoanalític. Buenos Aires: Kargieman.