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Donnel Stern (2013a, p. 524) aptly states in his description of Bionian versus Interpersonal/Relational field theories that unless you “live within the belly of the beast” you cannot adequately describe another theory in a dispassionate or unbiased manner. To attempt to do so here, flirts with failure. Neo-Bionian theory is alive with phantasy and dream life, whereas the American turn toward the Relational derives its breath from co-activity and its inevitable enactments. Field theories do however, share experience-near perspectives and a lack of abstraction, says Stern (2013b, p. 631), because the clinical dialogue—rather than the patient's history—primarily dictates therapeutic outcomes.
And as novel and provocative as Bion's and his descendants’ ideas are for most analysts who have not been formally schooled in this tradition, the material in each of the chapters in Contemporary Theory and Technique in Psychoanalysis requires more than casual curiosity; it can leave the reader with innumerable “thoughts without a thinker” to borrow Mark Epstein's words.
So acknowledging a cursory knowledge in Bion and working under the Relational umbrella, here is my experience in reading this book.
This weighty little volume is best read with some elementary understanding of Bion; it contains a series of workmanlike articles, and I underscore the syllable “work,” for each chapter feels differently calibrated; many demand the reader's laser-like focus. Its editor, Antonino Ferro, is the best known to audiences in the Americas from among his fellow Italian authors, and is a master of metaphor. His introduction tells us that this is:
… a book that rotates through 360 degrees, just like the London Eye. In other words it gives an overview of multiple, ever-moving horizons, in the understanding that the panorama will change rapidly with the movement of the wheel, and then alter again because of the changes in the layout of the city. Equally the wheel will remain in place, even over relati