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Giuseppe Civitarese is a training and supervising analyst in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. A central figure, alongside Antonino Ferro, in the post-Bionian theory of the analytic field, he has published over the past fifteen years a remarkable body of work – The Violence of Emotions, The Necessary Dream, Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, Sublime Subjects, Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction – each of which testifies to a profound knowledge of the Bionian corpus and a
singular capacity to bring philosophical resources (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, the American pragmatists) into productive contact with clinical thinking. Where Ferro is more on the side of the narrative toolkit, Civitarese constructs the epistemological and aesthetic scaffolding that sustains it. Yet his earlier books were devoted almost exclusively to the ‘late’ Bion: the Bion of Transformations, Attention and Interpretation, and A Memoir of the Future. The present volume marks a notable departure.
The Limits of Interpretation gathers six essays, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Dialogues between 2019 and 2024, devoted to Bion's Kleinian-period writings: Experiences in Groups (Bion, 1961), ‘On Arrogance’ , ‘Attacks on Linking’ and ‘A Theory of Thinking’ , followed by two concluding chapters on intuition and the concept of O. The discontinuity, however, is more apparent than real, and it is here that the book's deepest coherence lies. Bion himself published Second Thoughts (Bion, 1967) after Transformations – that is, after having developed his most original theses – in order to revisit his early essays and furnish them with retrospective commentaries. What Civitarese accomplishes in this volume is structurally analogous: a thinker steeped in the late Bion returns to the early texts with a gaze shaped by decades of work on transformations, dreaming, the