Seeds of Illness, Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the Role of Psychoanalysis. By Antonino Ferro. Translated by Philip Slotkin. New York:  Brunner-Routledge, 2005,  125 pp., $78.95 hardcover, $31.95 paperback.

In Seeds of Illness, Seeds of Recovery Antonino Ferro continues to elaborate Wilfred Bion's theory of thinking and mental functioning (1962a, b, 1970) into a masterful vision of psychoanalysis deeply rooted in an understanding of unconscious mental processes and the transformational power of human relationships. Ferro's view of the aims and process of psychoanalysis is relational (two-person), intersubjective (the analyst's unconscious not only is receptive to that of the patient, but also determines the analytic process), and deeply psychoanalytic (rooted in the understanding of unconscious mental processes). It locates the origins of psychic suffering “in the trauma of availability/nonavailability, or, better, the gradient of availability … together with the type and quality of emotions present” in the mind of the other (p. 6); views psychopathology as resulting from “a failure of the process of mental development” (p. 17), which leaves patients overwhelmed by primitive mental states; and links the therapeutic process to the patient's gradual acquisition of the capacity for mentalization of experience and narrative competence.