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This book continues the rapprochement begun by Harry Guntrip (1971) between Melanie Klein's intrapsychic focus including object relations theory and Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal relations theory. I recall the great surprise that overcame me on reading Guntrip's essay, Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self, that linked together Klein and Sullivan! Psychoanalysts have had a reputation for enjoying the narcissism of small differences but Ferro, like Guntrip, is not in that camp, to be sure. Antonino Ferro reads at times like a good Kleinian and, at times, like a good Sullivanian. Ferro claims to be only in the lineage of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion.
Ferro is the beneficiary, luckily, of a change in the old psychoanalytic Zeitgeist. Today Ferro is more palatable partly because others have prepared us to think according to more than one rigid, exclusionary school and to be a bit eclectic in the process. Ferro's forerunners have aided his acceptance by those of us who now can read Ferro in English. Everyone is lucky because the use of bridging concepts and techniques is more familiar in today's psychoanalysis. The bridge is less surprising and shocking today because we have become more acclimatized to finding commonalities among the varied schools as we familiarize ourselves with the work of Stephen Mitchell, Robert Stolorow, Frank Lachmann, George Atwood, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld, Donald Meltzer, and others.
Ferro is an Italian psychoanalyst, a child analyst, who makes no secret of what he does in child analysis. For that candor he deserves high credit. He describes in separate chapters how he uses the child's drawings, play, dreams, and dialogue to build—with the child—a bipersonal field in an enchanted world where adult and child interact with a waxing mutual respect and empathy. He can declare at the end, “Among our patients, it is the children who most often force us both to listen to truths we would rather not hear and also to