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In this book Antonino Ferro writes with alacrity, and exhorts us to be chary of our theories as we too often blindly follow them, believing we know. We get comfortable in our interpretations. He urges us to feel under the gestures and the looks, to experience and see the wisps underneath the words, the quivering affects and derivative language not overtly expressed, those Bionic beta particles that strike us, affect us as we wait, allowing space and intuition to parse the messages from our clients and ours to them. He exhorts us to grasp the meaning of the story, to hear it as ‘if it were a dream’. Jung also guided us, like Freud, to see the symbolic meanings of the therapeutic meeting, but with different tools of perspective.
Ferro tells us that we must wait and struggle to intuit our experience, as we parse together beta particles and what we imagine is being spoken or not spoken, into threads of alpha bits. We wait for the knowing, and mostly it's a long time coming. We are enticed to decipher the codes of silence, the affective experiences in the room. We listen, feel into the interactive field as the client withholds, or pours out for us to hear. We become aware of our holding back, our avoidances, our theories, our constructions of reality. Our thoughts, affective responses come from where? We experience the mingling of our selves and our client's unconscious material. That, if we can get grounding, may allow us to volley in the field of play, of symbolic intercourse, discourse a shared reality, often finding ourselves in a participation mystique as outlined by Jung.
Ferro's numerous examples leave me wanting for more details; too often it seems he gives cursory illustrations of the points he is making. In part this may be a lack of my own familiarity with his previous writings. He does, however, challenge my perceptions and me in new ways and gives voice to the particulates, the necessity to consider those minutiae of details.
I see his work as a bridge, a formi