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If Fred Busch had been on my mind during a session with a patient would it have been a reverie, a dream state, hallucination … what to think, what to do?
One of the reasons I gobbled up this paper so quickly is because I've long wanted someone really savvy to explain why “ … it's [astounding] incorporation … over the last two decades” has happened.
Busch has done a masterful job helping strong skeptics like me feel better about this chain of clinical/theoretical events. The paper is thorough, well-reasoned, and in a very subtle manner, counter-revolutionary. It demands re-reading, re-thinking, and re-finding of basic principles. It seems to me that it should be a core paper in theory, technique, and the as-yet-unresolved differences among major schools of thought.
I admire its quiet, careful, indirect, insistence that: the analyst's responsibility to know his own mind (as distinct from an amorphous fusion with that of the patient), free association, and interpretation, not to mention defense against counter resistance and countertransference(!), remain hallmarks of analytic technique.
Busch pays particular attention to Bion and Ogden, but first a word about three other significant contributors (da Rocha Barros (E.M. & E.L. and Ferro) in this area to whom he refers and whose work he admires.
While I know the Barros' work slightly, I was happy to be introduced to it more thoroughly and incisively via Busch's careful presentation of their thinking. While only a short part of this paper, its description of how they put reverie to use is enriching. And, as Busch points out, they remain in the Freudian/Kleinian mindset when it comes to symbolization and the importance of language.
Busch spends more time on Ferro's clinical work, in particular using one of his clinical examples to again make the point that transformation of primitive, “under-metabolized” words remains key to analytic progress. But perhaps more important, certainly more provocative, is Ferro's claim that Freud is