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In 1979 I had the memorable experience of attending a series of seminars that Wilfred Bion, then in his eighties, was giving at the Tavistock Clinic a few months before his death. These were structured, or should I say unstructured, in such a way as to represent and convey a sense of what some psychoanalytic sessions could feel like to patients and analysts alike: dominated by the logic of Primary Process functioning, a sense of timelessness, occasionally with an apparent lack of narrative beyond a free associative one, flooded with undigested proto-emotions, perhaps more similar to lived-out dreams than to the cultural events we expected those seminars to be. This uncanny sort of reverie experience, at least for many of us in the audience, was both surprising (we expected to be told about psychoanalysis, not to find ourselves immersed into it!) and also, I must confess, quite infuriating.
Torments of the Soul, originally published in Italy in 2010 and recently brought out by Routledge in a good English translation by Ian Harvey, has provoked in me similar reactions to those I had felt at the Tavistock so many years ago. This is no coincidence, since the book's author, the prominent Sicilian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro, was much influenced by Bion: by his theories, such as those about reverie, alpha function and beta elements, as well as by his very ‘philosophy’ of what psychoanalytic work should be about. Chapter nine of Ferro's book, entitled ‘Clinical implications of Bion's thinking’, clarifies his relationship to his English mentor.
Ferro, of course, is not just a ‘Bionian’: his often controversial views ‘at the cutting edge’ of psychoanalysis, as James Grotstein writes in the Preface to the book, have also been shaped by his extensive reading of many other analytic authors, in particular Grotstein himself, Ogden, the Barangers and the Botellas. But there is no doubt that Bion's personality, as well as his key theoretical and clinical concepts, dominate Ferro's u