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.
“How many articles in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis have you read that were already dead?” (p. 13) Bion asked provocatively, drawing attention to the lack of vitality in psychoanalytic writing. This could well be the epigraph to this book that insists on holding vitality at the heart of psychoanalytic work.
The little town of Pavia, it seems, has stormed the bastions of psychoanalysis. In the eye of this storm, is the creative team of Giuseppe Civitarese and Antonino Ferro, and what they have co-created and christened as “field theory.” With their characteristically infectious energy, the authors continue to expand the field of Post-Bionian psychoanalysis, also often referred to as Bionian Field Theory.
In their writings, the unconscious is imagined not as a seething cauldron in the recesses of the psyche, but as a function of the personality. In this we may recall Bion's attempt to shift psychoanalysis from excavating the unconscious, to the function of unconsciousing. The psychotic part of the personality is unable to use this function: unable to dream or think. And reality “is that thing that needs to be dreamed in order for it to become thinkable and manageable” (p. 118).
When I used the metaphor of the storm, I meant the divergences from the orthodoxies of psychoanalysis, or the “radical reformism” of the writings (p. 19). The introduction points to the ways of listening, in order to locate the implications of metapsychology on technique. Various schools place the emphasis in different degrees to the patient's history, the internal world, and the dyadic relationship. The authors emphatically and I think quite rightly dismiss giving weight to history:
Giving too much weight to history results in our neglecting the patient's suffering or, rather, it can produce an understanding of it from the outside that is only rational and, in the best-case scenario, through conscious identification… (p. 156).
The authors urge us to listen to the communication in the