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Civitarese is an Italian psychoanalyst and close colleague of Antonino Ferro. His body of work falls within the post-Bionian school of thought but his work also reflects the richness, diversity, and freedom of theoretical orientation that characterizes many analysts who have emerged from training institutes in Italy (Conci, 2008). Like many post-Bionian authors, the emphasis in Civitarese's work in analysis isn't on repressive processes (as with Freud and Jung) or on dissociative processes (as with Jung and Kalsched), but rather he focuses on the failure to develop adequate psychological structures (α - alpha function) for the processing, digestion and assimilation of raw, previously unmetabolized psychological experience (β - beta elements); in other words, not just pre-symbolic but often pre-representational.
Civitarese takes the title of the book from a passage in Bion's volume (p. 33), Cogitations, ‘the way in which the necessary dream is constructed’. The emphasis taken from this passage highlights the thrust of The Necessary Dream, i.e. how dreaming facilitates growth in the individual. This is a different approach from the traditional Jungian orientation to dreams which emphasizes how consciousness might expand through the understanding of one's dreams. For Civitarese, the dream is no longer the royal road to the unconscious, as in a traditional Freudian approach, which reveals the disguises that the dream-work imposes on latent experience. In Civitarese's post-Bionian model, the dream becomes the vehicle to ‘develop the narrative competence of the mind. That's why we say working with dreams and not on dreams’ (p. xiii). He goes on to state: ‘the dream becomes the very model of thought’ (p. xiv). These points of emphasis locate The Necessary Dream, and the role of the dream in analysis and psychological growth, squarely within Bion's (1962) theory of thinking and the development of the mind.