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Carolyn: Why won't you talk to the doctors?
Lisbeth: Because they don't listen to what I say.
—Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
I want to introduce my remarks about Antonino Ferro's latest book by using this quotation from his own preface, since this short dialogue from the second novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series refers to an essential theme running through all Ferro's books. Ferro is a “doctor,” an analyst, who does listen to his patients. He lays out a theory of psychoanalysis with the fellow travelers he converses with in these pages, who include his “best colleagues”—the patients. This psychoanalytic theory creatively seeks to “hear the soul's torments” and register when they are hidden and cannot be expressed. Bion (1963) recommends that when one gives an “interpretation it must be possible for the analyst and analysand to see that what he is talking about is something that is either audible, visible, palpable or odoriferous at the time” (12). Between the lines of Ferro's book we can breathe this conceptual atmosphere.
The title, as the author states at the outset, was inspired by G. W. Pabst's film Secrets of a Soul , produced in collaboration with Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs and aimed at giving an accurate picture of psychoanalysis—the title of which was translated into Italian as I tormenti di un'anima (Torments of a soul). In Souls in Torment, Ferro tells us what psychoanalysis is for him nowadays, where it is, and how it can be a point of departure for possible new openings.
The author, as is his custom, but perhaps more than usual, reveals himself to the reader both as an analyst and as a person in the confidence of being understood. Ferro takes up the main points of his technique and his work as an analyst, expanding them to give us fresh food for thought. The inquiry into dream thoughts in a waking state, reveries, transformation in dreams, the functioning of the mind in the analytic field created by the