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In his latest book Antonino Ferro proposes a new way of describing and analysing the theoretical and clinical concepts from which he has developed his psychoanalytical skills, particularly in the field of child analysis.
In the first chapter, ‘Fattori di malattia e difese [Factors of illness and defences]’, the author tackles the relationship between psychoanalytical and clinical theory with determination and clarity, giving a concise presentation of his own model. Throughout the book, he displays his great familiarity with problems of the unconscious, already demonstrated in the clinical cases described in his previous publications, while moving with the ease of a great musician performing without a score, even through his presentation of the theoretical concepts, supported by interesting new clinical cases.
Ferro gives a clear and precise account of the mental model he is referring to: this is a model that stems from combining conceptualisations about the Barangers' ‘field’ with an expansion of Bion's conceptualisations about waking dream thought. The Barangers attach importance to the functioning/dysfunctioning of the analyst's mental life during sessions. They believe that the area of unconscious collusion created between the analyst and the patient can become an important object of exploration and interpretation for the analyst who uses the concept of projective identification as a phenomenon that occurs between two people, and that does not only concern the patient. Bion places the analyst's mental life at the centre of his thinking, as a negative capacity for the tolerating of doubt and uncertainty, swinging between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position, and as an activity of rêverie understood as the metabolising function of beta elements into alpha elements. Ferro clearly defines the elements that make up psychoanalytical work: patient, analyst, setting. On the basis of these fundamental elements, he unfolds his theoretical-clinical appar