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The title of this book published by Antonino Ferro in 2010 paraphrases a famous film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Secrets of a Soul [Geheimnisse einer Seele], which reached movie theatres in 1926. Availing himself of consultations with Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs, Pabst succeeded in a difficult undertaking that was in some ways paradoxical: to make known the method and goals of psychoanalysis by utilizing an art form that was at that time still silent. The film is thus a brilliant paradox: “a silent movie about the talking cure” (Sabbadini, 1994). Making use of Bion's thinking, Ferro pursues an objective no less arduous and equally paradoxical: to contribute to the development of psychoanalysis, emphasizing not what it has been able to explain up until now, but instead discussing the limits of our knowledge of the psychic apparatus.
In the first chapter of the book, the author clearly explicates the conceptual perspective that seems most convincing to him - the only one, in fact, that he finds reasonable. Psychoanalytic theories, he writes, are conceptual systems that are barely comparable to each other, in part because they have been constructed in thinking about various aspects of experience (the Newtonian mechanics of tangible objects is one, while the microphysics of particles is another), and in part because their utilization is influenced by defensive phenomena analogous to keloids (overgrown scars on our will to know) and to para-amnesias (confabulations and pseudo-memories that have come into being in order not to recognize lapses in memory).
Ferro maintains that, in order to avoid having to tolerate the limited degree of our knowledge, we tend to become “like shipbuilders who insert plugs into the keel of a ship”: “patches to avoid sinking into not knowing” (Ferro, p. 6).2 Given that we do not like to face our ignorance and that uncertainty terrifies us, we often function like a religious community that sanctifies its theoretical canon (orthodoxy) and defends it,