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The panel held at the Chicago IPA Congress, ‘The Use of the Alpha Function in Analytical Construction’ was a really good occasion to reflect on Bion's thinking. Lucilla Ruberti and Marina Parisi (Italian Psychoanalytical Society) presented a very interesting paper, discussed by Lia Pistiner De Cortiñas, from Argentina (Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association) and Lawrence J. Brown, from the USA (American Psychoanalytic Association).
Following the outlines of the congress, the paper dealt with the way in which Italian psychoanalysis approaches some aspects of Bion's thinking that gained acceptance relatively early in Italy compared to other European Societies. This was perhaps because it arrived at the right time to give space to call for authenticity in a group which had then just recently been formed, and which clearly needed to start feeling freer from rigid elements of theory.
In their paper, Lucilla Ruberti and Marina Parisi refer significantly to Francesco Corrao who was one of the first Italian analysts to be influenced by the profoundly innovative quality of Bion's thought. Corrao described the change that took place in his way of conceiving the process of knowledge in psychoanalysis, which has become our own, “replace the impatient pretension of finding a method to capture ‘the truth’ with the patience of the never-ending search”. This call ‘to be patient’ and to ‘renounce’ was supplemented by a proposal to use indirect or ‘metaphorical’ knowledge in approaching reality respecfully, introducing ‘narrative construction’ - which, within the psychoanalytical space, becomes ‘narrative interpretation’ - a tool of analysis that transforms emotive turbulence and lends meaning to un-thought thoughts. This way of rethinking interpretation was new, but also profoundly linked to Freud in Constructions in Analysis.
In this perspective Parisi and Ruberti present two clinical cases. Marina Parisi (in Laura: Construction of narration), through fragments of the treatment of a