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In The New Analyst's Guide to the Galaxy: Questions about Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Antonino Ferro addresses the young clinician daunted by the mission of psychoanalysis, hesitant to invest in this peculiar profession. An avuncular Ferro invites the reader to fly with him into unexpected territories of the human mind. Road map in hand, Ferro suggests that the analytic journey will be pleasurable and satisfying as both analyst and patient learn and grow on their playful journey. Interviewer Luca Nicoli escorts the reader into Ferro's virtual study for a frank dialogue. Ferro is eager to reach a wider readership and to challenge the view of psychoanalysis as a “dusty oddity” (xii). Nicoli plays the interviewer well, prompting Ferro to explain his theory in an accessible, conversational way. He also sets Ferro up to address specific critiques and misunderstandings of field theory.
Ferro’s (2017) field is fourth generation, a post-Bionian field in which Bion's radical conception of unconscious waking dream thought is mated with narratology. The Barangers (1960s) are the first generation, the first to consider the analytic situation as a dynamic field in which the minds of analyst and patient co-create and share unconscious phantasy in the here-and-now of the session. Their theory accounts for blind spots (“bastions”) that obstruct analytic development and relocates resistance from the patient to the couple. Second-generation field theory was influenced by narratology and French structuralist theory. Ferro cites Francesco Corrao (1986) who proposed: “there is no analysis between two people, but that each analysis involves a group … of characters that emerge in the session … the joint creation by patient and analyst” (87). Ferro introduces the third generation by joining field theory with “Bion's greatest discovery” (63): alpha-function or unconscious waking dreaming. Ferro uses Bion's early theorizing on the container–contained and reverie as the foundation of his drea