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Contemporary Bionian Theory and Technique in Psychoanalysis offers the reader a comprehensive overview of post-Bionian Italian psychoanalytic theory. Each author examines the historical evolution of one core psychoanalytic concept. Maurizio Collovà takes up the setting; Giuseppe Civitarese: transference and countertransference; Giovanni Foresti: interpretation; Ferro, the dream model; Pierluigi Politi: dreaming; Elena Molinari: child and adolescent psychoanalysis; and Fulvio Mazzacone: the “vicissitudes” of the analytic field. These essays clarify theoretical continuity and discontinuity as well as spotlight specific invigorating contributions to a concept. Freud, Klein, Bleger, Winnicott, the Barangers, Bion, Grotstein, Ogden and Merleau-Ponty among others circulate in this volume. Each chapter emphasizes the significant contribution of Italian field theory, “[bringing] to life the concept of the field” (xi).
Although these seven authors share the field paradigm, each individual writes with a unique voice. Close reading of chapters reveals differences, some subtle and some significant. For example, Maurizio Collovà takes up the issue of self-disclosure, proposing that a story from his own life that arrives unbidden is a particular kind of reverie. Such a story functions as a communicable dream “but … should not bring with it the risk of collapse of the field due to excess of reality” (22). Ferro, on the other hand, asserts that the analyst can make up a story and present it as true even when it is a “lie” calculated to stimulate transformation in the field. A lie may work on a narrative level, but one may argue that a true story conveys genuine emotion and catalyses transformation more effectively. A second example: Ferro operates strictly within the view that characters are emotional holograms of the emotional here-and-now of the field. However, the authors in this volume more broadly state that the “field [is a model] in which various levels of interpreting the ch