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Antonino Ferro is an expansive, playful, psychoanalytic clinician, well grounded in Bionian and intersubjective theory, with an abundance of his own distinctive ideas. There is an alive, down-to-earth quality in his discussions of analyst and patient as they mutually participate in the ongoing, holographic process of ‘waking dream thought’ and its narrative derivatives.
In this brief paper, Ferro succinctly yet thoroughly discusses his perspective on the crucial elements of Bion's work, including his own emphases and elaborations—especially his enthusiasm for field theory (Baranger & Baranger 2008). He divides these elements into six sections, illustrated by helpful clinical examples. These are entitled: the ‘waking dream thought’; the constant interplay between projective identifications and reverie; modulation of interpretative activity; the mind of the analyst; similarities in the analysis of adults, adolescents and children; and the concept of field. I will discuss each element in turn.
I. According to Ferro, the ‘waking dream thought’ is the most important of Bion's concepts (p. 989). He discusses how the mind's alpha-function ‘constantly creates a continuous operation of alphabetization of all the sensory stimuli and proto-emotions which we receive’ (p. 989). The result of this operation is the formation of alpha-elements that, put into sequence, produce the waking dream thought. This is the mind's primal creative/transformative activity. He calls such phenomena ‘pictograms’, meaning ‘a translation of ideas into figurative and symbolic scenes… fruit of the alpha-function, which creates symbols by means of figurations for dream thought’ (p. 994). These may eventually become multiple ‘narrative derivatives’ and can include drawings and play (p. 996). It is only through such derivatives that we ‘know’ the waking dream thought. It remains, in itself, unknown.
The narrative derivatives of the waking dream thought also enable a constant monitoring of the analytic field