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Since the 1990s, Antonino Ferro has been developing a complex and coherent theoretical-technical model that indicates the shift specific to Italian psychoanalysis away from focusing pre-eminently on the representative to full recognition of the communicative value of the figurative register. This recognition has allowed the more silent, not yet symbolisable, inner dimensions of patients to be brought closer and has opened up prospects for the psychoanalytic treatment of psychoses.
The book collects together two thematic seminars and seven clinical seminars held by Ferro in 2000 in Brazil. Marta Petricciani's beautiful translation into Italian also leads the reader with great vivacity into the debates following the seminars.
The book is faithful to the author's preface in which he declares his loyalty to the orthodox, Freudian method, which, as Bion noted, widens the field to be explored, and his freedom to provide the patient with ‘heterodox’ answers. Ferro justifies this heterodoxy with his reflections on the risk that psychoanalysts run in using Freud's authority as a barrier to the search for knowledge. The risk of using our discipline like a religion is the other side of the question posed by Bion: who knows if we will be able to study the ‘living mind’.
All theories, as the author points out (p. 10), tend to ‘become wooden’, to crystallise until they become dogmas, with the inevitable consequence of peopling the clinical and organisational practice with priests of orthodoxy. Holders of firm beliefs often become the hub on which a group becomes institutionalised; at this point repetition and transmission of the ‘already known’ prevails.
The psychoanalysis that Ferro likes to practise implies, instead, the need to ‘think just one more time’, whereas the temptation of all of us and of every institution is that of having thought once and for all (p. 11). Listening to patients is the antidote to this attraction for what we already know. Here Ferro would seem to take up