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Psychoanalysis matters because it is shaped by a progressive dialogue. There is no throwing out of the past. The arrival of deeply new ways of seeing the analytic encounter, then, always sneaks up on us. We are reading a neo-Kleinian, a neo-Bionian, we know the terms of understanding, and, then, when the work matters most, we find ourselves in surprising terrain, re-imagining the possibilities of analysis and our work. This has been my experience in reading the work of Antonino Ferro.
Ferro, an Italian analyst working with children and adults, has two books that have been translated into English: The Bi-Personal Field (1999) and In the Analyst's Consulting Room (2002). Ferro locates himself as the heir of Freud, Klein, and, most importantly, Bion. He takes as his task the unfolding of the clinical implications of Bion. But his reading of Bion goes much further than a simple understanding of containment and the relational foundations of thought. Ferro takes seriously the evolutions in Bion's latter work and finds a way to show how this conception can take form in the clinical encounter. Ferro listens to the analysand's play or associations, to the transference, through multiple lenses or vertices that reflect the evolution of analytic thought. As a Freudian, Ferro is prepared to see and speak to the way the past is projected onto the present; as a Kleinian, he interprets how the intrapsychic world is painted onto the canvas of external reality; but as a Bionian, and this is where Ferro makes his singular contribution, he listens to the patient's material as a continuous and evolving commentary on the functioning of the analytic couple and on how the analyst uses thought to make or prevent contact. This way of listening and interpreting, although this is not Ferro's goal, begins to create a bridge between neo-Kleinian and American Relational schools of thought, making him one of the most creative and important voices in contemporary psychoanalysis.
As an Italian analyst