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In recent years Antonino Ferro's body of work has received increasing recognition throughout the psychoanalytic world. In his latest book, Torments of the Soul: Passions, Symptoms, Dreams,1 he revisits and expands some of his fundamental ideas, making a strong claim for the value of his approach while bringing us ever more vividly into analytic sessions described in a rich and deeply textured narrative. That his text is engaging and frequently absorbing is testimony not only to his skill as a writer, but to his commitment to the importance of narrative theory, which along with semiotics and Bionian ideas, informs his psychoanalytic approach. In this new work, dense with clinical material, psychoanalytic diagrams and schemas, and material drawn from the world of literature, film, and the visual arts (he includes some of Fellini's drawings as well as drawings by patients), Ferro gives us an intimate sense of how he thinks, not only about analysis but about the foundation of human subjectivity and how this translates into clinical work with adults and children.
Ferro has been one of the most creative, prolific, and fecund disciples of Bion, if one can use the word disciple for one so devoted to the destabilizing of orthodoxy and to the privileging of creativity as central, not only to psychoanalysis, but to the human condition generally. Ferro's ideas have become familiar to many of late, and this work serves equally well as either an introduction or an opportunity for deepening one's acquaintance. For Ferro, the analytic session functions as a dream. He advises the analyst to understand any communication within a session,