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Antonino Ferro, editor and contributor to this innovative and original book, has developed the post-Bionian model of psychoanalytic thinking known as Field Theory. All eight contributors, alongside Ferro, recipient of the Sigourney Award 2007, are members of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and International Psychoanalytic Association. They identify with Field Theory, as elaborated by a group of Italian and American analysts including Ferro, Civitarese (2014), Stern (2015), Grotstein and Ogden (2008).
This is a rich and illuminating book, traversing many psychoanalytic theories as well as literary references employed to enhance psychological understandings and develop a breadth of thought and reflection. It has much in it to enrich our profession and inform us as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, including clinical insights from work with adults and children. Although this is not made explicit, the clinical material which illustrates many of the theoretical points seems to be largely drawn from high frequency treatments in private practice. High frequency treatments do inevitably allow more intensive analytic work and tend to be offered to more privileged patients; at the same time, the underlying thinking within Field Theory in my view can be readily applied to time-limited, once-a-week treatments. This is because Field Theory brings breadth and depth to all engagements, which it sees as being unique. It is built on the foundations of more classical approaches but has particular emphasis on the oneiric process within each therapeutic meeting, not unlike Bollas’ (1987) concept of ‘the unthought known’.
Violet Pietrantoni in Chapter 5 eloquently describes the concept of the Field: ‘The analytic field is that unconscious intersubjective area which comes to life in the encounter between two minds in analysis, and becomes the seat, object, and instrument of all analytic work’. She adds ‘Each analytic couple, in each analytic session, will generate a unique and original f