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If, as often has been said, all politics are local, then the same could be said to apply to all psychoanalysis. Nothing could illustrate this more effectively and one might say beautifully than this brief and enigmatic book by one of Italy's best known psychoanalysts. Reveries: An Unfettered Mind by Antonino Ferro is a book of waking dreams or dream fragments and at times lengthy narratives that have been generated in Ferro's mind during the time he spends analyzing his patients. However, he includes no material from the clinical encounter or session that might orient the reader as to how the patient's associations or affects generated these “dreams” nor does he want to show us how he utilized them to understand his patients. As a result, and this is I believe intended by the author, we the readers are left with a strange sense of being at sea, dislocated and unable to understand why we are reading a series of hardly connected fragments of Ferro's mind. Is this merely a narcissistic exercise and indulgence? Ferro is too important and serious a psychoanalyst for this reviewer to dismiss his 224 pages that sometimes consist of a single sentence such as the final entry page, titled “ADDING INSULT TO INJURY,” which reads simply “Taking Viagra to have a wank” (p. 224) This should give the reader of this review some sense of Ferro's humor but it is balanced with many fragments about dismemberment, illness, and death, always death.
As a reviewer I have chosen to take this “slight and slender” work by Ferro seriously by extracting elements from it that helps identify the local aspects of Italian psychoanalysis. As President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and a frequent visitor to the American Psychoanalytic Association's meetings his approach to the task of psychoanalysis is of importance to our understanding of differences in a distinctly Italian way from that in North America. Italian psychoanalysts appear to follow two psychoanalysts, Bion and Winnicott, in generat