Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions by Antonino Ferro, translated by Ian Harvey. The New Library of Psychoanalysis. Published by  Routledge in association with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2011;  222 pp; £23.99.

This is the latest in a series of books that Antonino Ferro has been writing since the early 1990s, which describe in progressively more evolved and detailed terms the model of the mind that he has been developing together with the clinical use of the concept of the analytic field.

In two central chapters, ‘Bion: Theoretical and Clinical Comments’ (Chapter 4) and ‘Bion's Thinking and its Fertilization: Clinical Implications’ (Chapter 5), Ferro outlines how his thought derives from Bion. Ferro confesses to liking the later work best, the Bion of the Seminars and Discussions, 1974-80. These are Bion at his most creative, and it is the ‘unsaturated’ nature of the text (an important word for Ferro) that he finds most stimulating, giving him the opportunity for a constant stream of new thoughts and ideas of his own. Ferro recommends reading the Seminars first and ‘once one has grasped the spirit, the way of thinking, the courage that emanates from each of these seminars, one can then go on to his more theoretical works’ (p. 49). These should be read in groups, he says, ‘because they are like freeze-dried food requiring continuous hydration to turn them into something unexpectedly and extraordinarily alive’ (p. 49).

Ferro believes that there is a ‘quantum leap’ between the early, strongly Kleinian matrix and the later Bion:

Bion provides us with a set of tools for thinking we previously did not possess and which enable us to think things we previously could not think. These tools are not only a formal enrichment; they allow us to perform new operations or to acquire an

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awareness of the operations performed in the consulting room previously we did not have. (p. 50)

The ‘waking dream thought’ Ferro believes to be Bion's ‘most significant and powerful conceptualization’ (p. 59), creating the new tools for thinking to which he refers. Our mind constantly dreams even when it is awake and it is alpha function that creates this dream thought. In the session there is the waking dre