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This book's author is one of the fifteen analysts whose clinical accounts of psychoanalysis were published in Part 3/1991 of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Trained at the Milan Institute of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, he describes his theoretical orientation as Kleinian influenced by Bion.
In her Introduction to ‘The analysis of children’, Part Three, in Volume 2, Mainly Practice, of Melanie Klein Today , E. Bott Spillius mentions that child analysis began to decline in the 1950s (with the notable exception of the work of Meltzer), experiencing something of a revival from the mid 1970s. For this reason it seems both useful and important to consider the development of child analysis in Italy, where Meltzer taught a great deal and where the influence of Bion's ideas is strong and has anything but well defined and predictable effects on the technique of Kleinian analysis. In ‘Notes on memory and desire’, which E. Bott Spillius places first among the ‘Developments in technique’ in Melanie Klein Today, Bion concludes:
“His interpretations should gain in force and conviction - both for himself and his patient - because they derive from the emotional experience with a unique individual and not from generalized theories imperfectly ‘remembered’.”
From the emotional experience with the child and the relationship with him, which always generates an emotional field, the interpretation is gradually constructed - as Dr. Ferro already maintains in the title of his forcefully written and courageous book.
The first chapter is entitled ‘A survey of the theoretical models’. Here, the author refers not only to the models of Freud, Klein and Bion but also to the most recent models of Meltzer and Rosenfeld (Impasse and Interpretation), describing “how the models live within me and how I have negotiated them up to the present day”. He notes that we have passed from repression (Freud) via splitting (M. Klein) - together with projective identification, which is closely