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The concept of “transformation” is found everywhere in Freud and in psychoanalytic literature, but only with Bion and Analytic Field Theory (Ferro & Civitarese, 2015) does it become the specific concept of a new paradigm that we can call “aesthetic-intersubjective,” as compared to the previous “archeological-circumstantial” paradigm. The essential difference lies in thinking of analytic work as directed not to the discovery of repressed contents, but to the development of the psychic container's capacity to “process” the emotional experience, that is, to give meaning to the experience. The main therapeutic principle, then, becomes to be in unison with the patient (at-one-ment) in order to grasp what is “true” at the deep emotional level of the relationship. Basic postulates of this paradigm are:
the concept of the unconscious as a psychoanalytic function of the personality — the psyche dreams continuously (digests) the real / “O” to transform it to livable reality;
the concept of waking dream thought — the idea that one dreams not only at night but also during the day;
the consideration of “the space where meaning is created” as the focus of the analysis, the so-called “something between” analyst and patient — the capacity to dream (to think) is not innate, but learned, since it is based on the “social” system of the language, and the dream is dreamt neither by the patient nor the analyst, but from the shared unconscious field that generates from their encounter;
This paper was originally presented at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP) program, “A Day with Giuseppe Civitarese,” November 18, 2017, San Francisco, CA.
the technical point-of-view of virtually reading the whole session like a dream or a play. The different manifestations of the dream in the session arrange themselves along a spectrum of phenomena. Each one matches a precise theoretical-technical device — a tool! — that the analyst has to try to grasp what is the deep emotional experience in t