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Antonino Ferro could be read just for his truly inspiring clinical writing. This book is his fourth to be translated into English and contains an absolute wealth of fascinating clinical material, but the material is used to underpin and illustrate what Ferro calls a ‘strong’ theoretical standpoint. This has implications for how Ferro believes clinical material should be listened to, and how it should be responded to.
Ferro describes his theoretical position as a ‘fruitful convergence of many concepts elaborated by Wilfred Bion and by William and Madeleine Baranger’ (1999, p. 157).1 First, the influence of the Barangers, two French analysts working in South America since the 1960s. They described the analytic situation as a ‘field’, and the notion of the bi-personal field was first described by Ferro in a series of articles in the 1990s and in The Bi-Personal Field (Ferro, 1999). The patient and the analyst in the setting create together a relational and emotional field, and Ferro believes that all communications by the patient relate to the field, which means essentially that the patient is constantly commenting on how he has received what the analyst has said. The analyst must be listening firstly to the response of the patient, but then, and this is the important point, moderate accordingly what he is saying in order to be better in tune with what the patient can take in.
The crucial point is the response to an interpretation. For example, if a patient responds to an increase in the interpretative dose by saying ‘Yesterday my little boy cried all evening because my husband insisted on making him eat up all his food, although he had already had a snack not long before and he could not get any more food down’, this can only be a signal of interpretative ‘excess’, for which no place can be found. If the same patient were to say ‘Yesterday my husband exhausted me with his caresses and never-ending foreplay’ … she would be signalling her need for ‘penetrating’ interpreta