You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Binocular Vision: An Inquiry into Psychoanalytic Techniques and Field Theory by Elena Molinari is first and foremost a clinical book about the analyst’s capacity to hold multiple, simultaneous perspectives within an analytic experience. In Italian field theory, the analyst is both participant and observer. The total situation in the consulting room is the stimulus for the development of an analytic field. The moment of interaction between two persons in the clinical hours is the focus of therapist’s attention.
The book maintains a solid analytic stance: recognizing the unconscious always at work, the importance of the setting and the frame, and the always present but often unnamed dialectic process between analyst and analysand. Binocular vision is thus created in the here and now between two subjects. In this review, I will attempt to differentiate my understanding of binocular vision as described by Molinari from any preconceived ideas I have about binocular vision derived from my personal reading of Bion. I recognize how difficult that might prove to be.
The book effortlessly moves between the aesthetics of relationship as found in psychoanalysis and the expression found in application in the consulting room. The clinical examples are beautiful, almost poetic, especially in chapter five, which includes recognition and the comparison of a clinical couple to Homer’s couples. The use of fine art, performance art, and poetry to describe clinical experience that is difficult to articulate helps us as clinicians understand transformations derived from emotional relational experience. The book also gives us access to the analyst’s associations, many of which are great works of art.
These aesthetic expressions, sometimes discovered as images found in the mind of the analyst, serve a function of containing that which cannot yet be placed into words. The expressions reveal emotional undercurrents ready to be transformed into meaningful connections in the dyad. Verbalizing the