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This well-written and pleasant to read book belongs to that group of studies that are marking a change among the theoretical and clinical paradigms of psychoanalysis. The attention of psychoanalysts is, in fact, moving from the construction- reconstruction of a ‘sense’ to the research for a shared ‘feeling’ capable of acting as a connective for the interpretative activity.
This is a point of view, or rather a point of listening, which opens new theoretical perspectives. It holds in great account Bion's lesson about the necessity, in psycho analysis, of an ‘unsaturated’knowledge, which can integrate the wealth of knowledge inherited from the past with an availability to receive what is new, what is not-yet-thought; yet tolerating the paradox, inescapable in psychoanalytic knowledge, of having to base itself on the already known in order to deconstruct it, thus activating a mental space open to what was inaudible before. In this sense, the ideal cognitive model is one which can work as a starting point of divergent lines of thought, namely one which can provide lines of flight like the ones in a pictorial perspective, to widen the visible scenery. A model that avoids the temptation to elaborate a ‘strong theory’ risks entrapping analytical knowledge into a few explanatory concepts which would not do justice to the complexity of experience.
Any theory, however strong it might be, sooner or later will have to acknowledge its inability to explain a great part of the subjectively lived experience. Hence, the importance of a resonant listening, which approaches the subjectivity of the other with an auditory instrument made of sensorial acuity, as well as of affective perspicacity: an instrument which can make the analytical mind work as (allow me the metaphor) an empty soundbox, which can receive that part of psychic reality not included in codified metapsychological explanations.
After this preliminary introduction, which constitutes the author's epistemological background,