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With Mind Works, Antonino Ferro continues his elaboration of Bion's theory in his own lively and instructive way. This book's general theme concerns the mind which doesn't work—the mind with a severely limited capacity to reflect—as well as the way the analyst's mind might have to work in order to foster this capacity. The mind which is unable to metabolize, symbolize, alphabetize (Ferro draws on various models, including narratology) internal and external stimuli, must evacuate them, or manage them by developing defensive maneuvers ranging from autism and narcissism, to extreme disavowal, splitting, or psychosomatic symptoms.
Faced with this situation, Ferro is particularly concerned with ‘how to speak in order to be understood’, as one sub-heading puts it. This méans that for him technique must serve the issue of how to reach the patient. Classical psychoanalytic aims of analysing repression and unconscious conflict in the transference cannot usefully be addressed until certain links have been fostered—between emotion and experience and thought—which may require the analyst to perform a mentalizing function on the patient's behalf for a long time. The analyst's reverie and fantasy can expand the technical field of operations through the creative capacity to make connections. The book is full of vividly evoked clinical examples which invite the reader into Ferro's intuitive, imaginative way of working as analyst and supervisor.
There are interesting chapters on psychosomatic and narcissistic pathologies, styles of relating considered figuratively as homosexual, and unorthodox terminations; but the aspect I found particularly engaging, in the chapters on interpretation and the patient's response to it (and throughout), was Ferro's passionate polemic against academic, theory-driven analysis, and on behalf of the creative use of the analyst's reverie. Early in the book he asks of the analyst: ‘can he be himself and be creative, or does he need to operate like a ‘chamele