Appreciating Antonino Ferro

Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro is the first psychoanalytic writer I have read who traces the evolution “in action” of his thinking about analysis. He offers the reader a genuine and sustained window (true to the title of his latest book): In[to] the Analyst's [Ferro's] Consulting Room (2002). What seems especially unusual about this book is that he allows us to learn (with him) from his experience, giving us another rendering “in action” of the lessons of Bion—taught through experience in contrast to explanation. How better to learn? Ferro doesn't tell us what to learn. Instead, with out-of-the-ordinary candor, he invites us to accompany him as he reflects back on the theoretical guideposts that shaped the ways he was taught to listen to (and think about) his patients. In the setting of his reflections, he offers one clinical vignette after another in which he reveals a series of brief analytic exchanges, and then offers a critique of his interventions. Here, Ferro brings Bion's teachings to life. Through re-examining these analytic still-lifes (patient-analyst couples), in which Ferro is himself one of the figures, the following emerged as exemplary lessons: the antithesis of negative capability; insufficient receptivity; being in “K” instead of “O”; “saturating the text” by crowding the patient with interpretations; interpreting the patient's communications (“decoding”), which inhibits the construction of a new “shared” text; and pressuring the patient with forced transference interpretations.

From his unique (and possibly “unsaturated”) Milanese vantage point, Ferro has addressed the brewing discontent within psychoanalysis concerning the distancing effects of theory on the entire analytic enterprise. The surge of interest in Bion, of which Ferro's teachings are an example, is one outcome of that discontent, which has helped swing the psychoanalytic pendulum to the side of immediacy and direct emotional (the “O” of) experience, without collapsing the importa