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Following James Grotstein's lead, Civitarese views aesthetic experience, of which he includes dreaming, as central to psychoanalysis and the unifying thread of this offering. Civitarese places Bion “… on an axis of continuity with Freud and Klein” (p. 1). However, he also demonstrates separations and describes the clinical relevancy of Bion's ideas. He takes a philosophical stance and initiates his stated task by comparing Bion's (1977 [1989]) “Caesura” with Descartes' XVII c. work, Discourse on Method (elaborated in the first part of the book, pp. 8-33).
This penetrating and perceptive foray into the origins of thought becomes deep, abstract, and potentially obtuse if not for Civitarese's capacity to ground his thinking through often playful clinical vignettes that clearly demonstrate how this line of thinking can create profound shifts in psychoanalytic technique. For instance, drawing from both Bion and from Ferro's notion of “play casting,” he raises the following point: “The question is: What does the choice of a certain figure from the manifest text, or of a certain reverie, represent for the analytic dialogue and the process that underlies it?” (p. 4) The stance that this question represents places both manifest and latent content on equal footing and neutralizes the over-privileging of latent content and an associated “disease called compulsive transference interpretation” (p. 171) of earlier psychoanalytic formulations. Here, Civaterese cites from the work of Ferro (2006 [2008]), his “teacher and friend” and the dedicatee of this book (p. 191). In this regard, the reader is exposed to an expression of a truth-based model, which is radically different than a positivist-oriented fact-based model that has dominated and plagued psychoanalytic thinking since its inception, with its “irritable reaching after facts and reason” (John Keats, in Bion, 1970 [1984], cited on p. 125). Manifest content from this perspective becomes a communication that leads to an extensi