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it is not ‘the mind’ that governs the instincts … the human problem is having a mind … It is the existence of a mind that has been unable to develop that gives rise to antisocial and violent behaviour … the violence is not in the instinct… it is a suffering mind that disturbs … if man did not have a mind, he would be a functioning primate (p. 115; my italics).
These ideas, which stem from Bion, underlie the entire psychoanalytic research of Antonino Ferro, who has devoted himself for years to the subject of the encounter between two minds in the analytic session and its transformational potential. This is his third book, after The Bipersonal Field: Experiences in Child Analysis (published in Italy in 1992 and in English translation in 1998) and Nella stanza d'analisi [In the analyst's consulting room] (1996).
What does Ferro see as a malfunctioning mind? It is a mind cluttered with beta elements that cannot be metabolised nor digested by a deficient alpha function, which give rise to the suffering of unthinkability and must therefore somehow be evacuated.
The crux of the matter is therefore not so much the accumulation of beta elements as the deficiency of the alpha function—i.e. damage due to the very early failure of ‘social’ relations, which has prevented introjection of the alpha function, the fundamental component of any form of ‘mentality’ (p. 3).
According to this conception of the mind, the whole of psychopathology (from panic attacks via hypochondria, phobias and hallucinations to delusions and other such manifestations) can be revisited in terms not of the symptom but of the genesis of the disturbance. This is placed in the relational context of the analysis, where ‘mental facts that have never happened before can come to pass, constituting the “big bang” that kindles the mental processes, which depends on the existence of a relationship with another mind’ to collect the evacuated beta elements and transform them into alpha—thus eventually permitting ‘the esta