You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ferro opens his most recent contribution in his steadily expanding opus with the basic notion borrowed from Bion regarding “The integrity of the apparatus that allows them [emotions] to be assimilated, managed and contained” (p. 1). This expression of Ferro's primary concern is clear, cogent and repeated throughout the text that the emphasis in psychoanalysis is not the past and not specific content, “… but on the transformation of the patient's apparatus for thinking” (p. 19). In this context, content finds diminished importance because analysis should ultimately engender an expanding freedom to dream, to feel and to think creatively. For example, with reference to transference and countertransference he notes that: “… it is up to us … to see how the story and the stories can gradually be transformed, how they can be made more expressive and turned into an instrument for the development of the ability to think” (p. 141). This prioritizing of the capacity and functioning of the thinking apparatus finds expression, for example, in his critique of interpretations, which he argues can create “… the risk of neural Chernobyls” (p. 86) when the analyst triggers something that the analysand is not psychically equipped to handle because of limitations of α function, an idea first developed by Bion to explain the process that transforms raw experience (β elements) into the basic elements of thought (α elements).
From this central organizing point, Ferro argues that avoidance is a primary mental activity, to which the psychoanalyst is not immune. We allow ourselves to know only what we can tolerate. This difficulty finds expression and can be rationalized through the use of “inadequate theories that filter the reception and timing of what the patient wants to communicate” (p. 5). He attributes the stagnation of psychoanalytic theory to this misuse of both theory and technique, which might be more prevalent than we care to admit.
Ferro's own thinking travels full circle from ind