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Eight urgent and intense chapters, to engage us - as Antonino Ferro puts it in his preface - on the topics of transference, relating and the analytic field. This work comes from an author who can be counted ‘among the very few’ who work on the analytic field. What is more, he is not an ‘easy’ author (to quote Ferro again), by which he means, it seems to me, that it is not Civitarese's style to illustrate and thus dilute the bold positions of an experienced analyst, which would entail abandoning the complexity of psychoanalytic work and its great resources of knowledge and experience.
We shall start with the first chapter, ‘Fire at the Theatre’. The reader finds himself suddenly caught up in fierce tension between transference as an event which is eminently repetitive and transference as a new and original creation of the analytic encounter. Civitarese takes up the challenge to save both of these positions. Therefore he does not yield either to Fonagy's position (“a mode of being with the other”) or to Stern's (“moments of meeting”), or to Bion's (“being in unison”) (p. 35). Instead, along with Ferro, he works “in the today of the meeting”, but this is done so as to work through “what happens in the emotional field that the encounter constructs”. In my opinion, the challenge proposed by the author and the risk it entails is that of the ‘hystericization’ of the transference. This means allowing both the greatest possible exposition of the patient's story as well as maximizing exposure to it (en abîme, a term which will be used later in the book); the analyst ‘saves’ himself, that is, steps out of this ‘mirror play’ only at the last moment - at the latest possible moment - so that the patient's ‘secret’ is not ripped out.
Not without reason is the second chapter dedicated to ‘The Symbiotic Bond and the Setting’. It takes an off-beat route which starts with Bleger, with his ‘agglutinated nucleus’ and then picks up the ideas of post-Kleinian authors, with Marcelli's ‘fusio