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This book, edited and written by several authors, reflects a differentiated yet coherent way of working clinically. This is one of the merits of this volume which is a collection of contributions from thinkers with personal autonomy and originality, which come from a common unconscious sense of belonging to a group. There is, in this project, neither dilution nor conformity.
Its sub-title, Clinical Developments in Wilfred R. Bion's Thought, is respectfully adhered to both in form and content: the theoretical reference is Bion's thought, enriched and widened by Antonino Ferro's developments of it; his article - with a similar title, ‘Clinical Implications in Wilfred R. Bion's Thought’ — is the first one in the book. In clear and synthetic form Ferro offers here his own conception of the mental apparatus and of analytic work:
What is at stake here is no longer a psychoanalysis which tries to remove the cover of repression or to bring the split parts back together again, but instead a psychoanalysis which is concerned with the development of its own tools — those tools which make possible the
Review translated from the Italian by Andrea Sabbadini.
Page 697development and the production itself of thought. In other words, the dreaming and thinking apparatus.
Ferro clarifies those of Bion's key concepts which he utilizes himself in a clear and efficient way (at the end of the volume there is also a useful glossary of Bion's terminology), like a skilful painter who, with just a few paint-strokes, can make a figure emerge from the canvas, a figure who could be recognized by those looking at it straightaway:
The first activity that gives life to that big bang, which in our species is the switching on of mental activity, consists of the mass evacuation on the part of the child of proto-sensorial and proto-emotional states. Such evacuations (of p elements), if taken in, accepted and transformed by a mind that can absorb and metabolize them (the a function), become gradually transf