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The title of this book1 by Antonino Ferro, the fifth to be translated into English and published by Routledge, seems to me to encapsulate neatly the essence of what the author believes is going on in the analyst's consulting room: the working of the mind, or the mind at work.
The mind in question, in this model, is first of all that of the analyst, engaged (if we are lucky, or rather, if the patient is lucky) in an ongoing baseline activity of reverie through which he grasps, metabolizes, and transforms the verbal, paraverbal, or nonverbal contents conveyed by the patient. This activity, that is, the capacity to exercise the imagination and tap into images thanks to the “narrative derivatives” of waking dreamthought, is the cornerstone of the patient's mental life2 as well, with which he responds to each of the analyst's more or less interpretative prompts. According to Ferro, mental health and mental illness or suffering pivot on the function/dysfunction of this activity of reverie.
The mental model Ferro is here proposing, one which he has already described in previous writings (Ferro 1992, 1996, 1999, 2002) and to which he now gives greater creative thrust, elaborates on the thinking of Wilfred Bion, among whose legacies to psychoanalysis is the crucial idea that dreams are not only the “royal road” (via regia) to the unconscious, but also a mode of waking thought. Alongside Thomas Ogden and James S. Grotstein, Ferro is among the contemporary authors who have fostered the most creative reformulations of Bion's thinking.
It is this method of functioning by means of a constant activity of reverie that enables Ferro to introduce alongside the classically Bionian oscillations of ♂↔♀, PS↔D, NC↔SF (negative capability↔selected fact), another one within which