A Conversation with Giuseppe Civitarese1

Finally, we have the concept of the field. The field is a model whose basic postulate is that, at any time, when we are in proximity to another person, unconsciously there is something that is jointly created, which cannot be isolated and said ‘that belongs to one or the other’. Once a field is generated, you can't split off the emergent properties that characterize it. So, this is the metaphor that we always use to look at this unconscious ‘common’ layer, a kind of dynamic Gestalt field. At any given time. It's not limited in space and time, like the notion of the intersubjective third, it's not limited like enactment, which happens at certain times and refers to the patient's past. No, you are always there in the field, spontaneously engaged with the patient and vice versa. So, this is a way of going beyond the you and me split, which is still relational. Let's pay some attention to that. A true ‘relational’ approach is one that still describes how I give you something, you give me something else, you attack or seduce and vice versa, I defend, etc. No, this is still not the field… The starting postulate of the field is that there is this layer where it is not possible to say, at this level, what is yours and what is mine. It's like in quantum physics: there is no isolated particle, only waves and vibrations in the field. So, you see, I think this is the most radical way to bring the analyst's unconscious into the “game of psychoanalysis,” as Bion calls it, but it can still be seen as an end of the red line… But why do we change our concepts? We change because at some point our community or at least an important part of our community thinks that the new concepts somehow help us more and better to understand what is going on in analysis, even if we cannot give a mathematical demonstration of it. It's a matter of internal dialogue in our community. Now, if you look at psychoanalysis around the world, the relational paradigm is prevailing in all its different forms, in South and North America, in Europe… There has to be a reason for that.

You see now the direct link between what we said about my biography and the relevance of the relationship in school to what I am interested in?… I think the “big bang” was around the early 1960s when Winnicott said that “there is no such thing as a child” unless you consider it with the mother. Bion said the same thing, not ‘as a pediatrician’, but because of his work on groups. In a sense, for Bion the subject is a group, internally it is structured as a group. So, they both said the same thing, but coming from different places. They all quote Winnicott's phrase, or the way Bion translates it, for example, when he says that an emotion has no meaning outside of a relationship—that's why for Bion an emotion is already a kind of primordial type of a mental concept that arises from a negotiation within a field. So, you see, this is the big bang. Everyone quotes this Winnicott quote a lot, but not everyone asks, ‘What is he saying and why?‘. Because, if we think it's revolutionary in some way, then we have to ask why. Yet, many of our colleagues quote this Winnicott's quote but continue to work classically. So, there is a contradiction there. I think we need to be consistent. If we quote this phrase, it is because there is something new. If there is nothing new, why do we give it so much emphasis?… Approaching my own conception of BFT… I was seduced by the way the notion of field makes our work come alive again, but the problem is you can't integrate BFT with an epistemic paradigm in psychoanalysis marked by suspicion…

Now, when I go around teaching, people always ask me what the difference is between BFT and intersubjectivity. It's not that I necessarily wanted to talk about intersubjectivity. Ferro never uses that word. It's out of his lexicon. I got interested in intersubjectivity because people ask me about it. Well, of course, you also know that in the United States there are psychoanalytic models that

call themselves ‘intersubjective’. I say intersubjective or intersubjectivism, it's an ambiguous term. Because it suggests to you the interaction, what happens between two. But this for me is not enough, because if we take the concept of intersubjectivity that belongs to the speculative discipline, to philosophy, to Husserl or even to Hegel, even if he never uses this word, and we bring it to psychoanalysis, there must be a reason. Otherwise, why? The only reason I see is that if you take it from Hegel you have to stick consistently to his theory of the dialectic of recognition which explains how you become a subject.

There is another paradox here. BFT, which is hyper-relational, can also be called anti-relational if we consider that it goes beyond the traditional I/You division. This has significant technical implications, particularly in the way of listening. I can anticipate that for me this aspect is very important, because it helps us to approach an ethical refoundation of psychoanalysis. In fact, I think we need to move beyond the suspicious attitude in the way we listen in analysis.

If you take it from Husserl, you should understand what Husserl came to think of intersubjectivity as this common and shared transcendental layer of being, which is pre-reflective, but later also linguistic-reflective, and of the fact that only then did he come to think that he could explain why I have access to the other and vice versa. Thus, the concept of empathy, for example, is not sufficient because it already presupposes what is yet to be explained, that is, how one accesses the other. Of course, this is perhaps a philosophical question. Instead, for some authors, who do refer to it, the concept of intersubjectivity need not be consistent with Husserl's principle of intersubjectivity, but only with a greater sensitivity to the unconscious participation of the analyst in the analytic process.

The point is that this development of Husserl's idea can be found in his manuscripts and unpublished writings that have only become available over the years. Do we need to make a difference between simple interaction and intersubjectivity? What might be a way to better conceptualize the concept of the unconscious as a field that is created socially, politically? As human beings we are living paradoxes. As subjects, we have a subjectivity and intersubjectivity dialectically linked to each other.

So, for me what's interesting is to develop this kind of intersubjectivity, not just stick to the interaction between subjects, but that kind of phenomena that is the unconscious (transcendental) common layer. It is true that we have to accept the fact we will continue to use the term intersubjective either at a descriptive level, to say interaction, or at a metapsychological or ontological level, and then we are at Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. My effort is to provide more ontological/metapsychological substance to the concept of field.

There is another paradox here. BFT, which is hyper-relational, can also be called anti-relational if we consider that it goes beyond the traditional I/You division. This has significant technical implications, particularly in the way of listening. I can anticipate that for me this aspect is very important, because it helps us to approach an ethical refoundation of psychoanalysis. In fact, I think we need to move beyond the suspicious attitude in the way we listen in analysis.

BRF: You seem to be pointing to something Merleau-Ponty develops when he refers to a sort of layer that sustains our way of being with the other, which is a strong reference for field theory. Can you elaborate on how this way of co-being translates into analytic listening, and the way you think about narrativity and emotional exchange between the analytic couple?

GC: I will try to be schematic because there is always a lot at stake. I always remember that Ludwig Binswanger, the great psychiatrist and father of existential psychotherapy, said that the Cartesian vision of the subject, the split between mind and body, and between subject and object, is the cancer of psychology. We also know that all the great philosophy of the entire last century wanted to go beyond this Cartesian vision. So, there is Husserl, of course Heidegger who was his student, although they split, and then Merleau-Ponty—I think he became Merleau-Ponty precisely because he was able to read Husserl's unpublished manuscripts in the Leuven archive—and then Derrida, and so on. So, you see, the great tendency of philosophy in the last century was ultimately what? I think it was to theorize the field in several scientific domains. When Heidegger says that we are not just monads, but that we live in an environment, in constant exchanges with the environment, he was

trying to overcome the Cartesian division between subject and object. He was trying to cure the cancer of psychology that Binswanger talks about. That's why I love reading some of these philosophers because they help us refine our conceptions. And because they too have benefited from the contributions of psychoanalysis—think of Derrida, Ricoeur and others.

I think psychoanalysis should be the art of giving hospitality to the Other, and not playing Sherlock Holmes by suspecting that the other is the culprit. Sometimes we say that we ally ourselves with the healthy part of the patient against the sick part. But in the end, with transference interpretation, every time we disconfirm the patient's perspective and say “OK, I'll tell you what really happened”.

I really enjoy intertextual dialogue with other disciplines, but it has to be between equals. It must not be a dominating relationship, which is what is happening today in the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, which undermines the specific epistemic and clinical contribution of psychoanalysis.

Thus, the notion of field was introduced into psychoanalysis by the Barangers. In the Barangers' first article, in the early 1960s, they cite neither Bion nor Merleau-Ponty. In this article they quote only Kurt Lewin. But this article was republished a few years later and then if you go back to see the two versions you no longer find Kurt Levin, but you do find Merleau-Ponty, and also Bion. At this point you can say that the idea of the field was influenced not only obviously by Klein, but also by Bion and Merleau-Ponty. I think that before going to Argentina, Willy Baranger must have had a philosophical training in Paris.

Now, let's see what I mean by overcoming the suspicious attitude in psychoanalysis. You know that Ricoeur said that Freud, along with Marx and Nietzsche, belongs to the school of suspicion. And this comes largely from the positivist position in Freud's attitude, from the fact that very fundamentally Freud's conception of the unconscious is that it is the wild cauldron of dirty things, of primitive desires and immoral drives, a kind of Dantean hell. In fact, even in our current institutions, if a colleague makes a slip of the tongue, another can respond with “I caught you,” “I saw,” “now I know what your immoral desire is”. As Kernberg says, this is a way of establishing a relationship of dominance. I am not trying to say that the positivist perspective is not legitimate. What I am trying to say is that it is very easy for this suspicious attitude in listening to the other to be infiltrated by the ideology of the listener.

On the contrary, I think psychoanalysis should be the art of giving hospitality to the Other, and not playing Sherlock Holmes by suspecting that the other is the culprit. Sometimes we say that we ally ourselves with the healthy part of the patient against the sick part. But in the end, with transference interpretation, every time we disconfirm the patient's perspective and say ‘OK, I'll tell you what really happened’. I don't like this approach anymore; now we have a completely different understanding of what the unconscious is. Here we can only say it briefly with some simplification.

We no longer think of the unconscious as hell but, as Bion says, as the psychoanalytic function of the personality. A ‘device’ that gives us in some way the possibility to make sense of our experience, or better, sense and meaning, implicit and procedural sense and linguistic conceptual meaning. This is why, for example, Merleau-Ponty says that perception is the unconscious, because we already put everything of ourselves into the perceptual process… our hallucinatory activity, that is always there, our memories, our body, everything. With this completely different idea of the unconscious, of course the technique changes as well. To give an example, what is important for us, from a Bionian point of view, is to understand whether or not the emotional climate of the session is conducive to the development of the mind. The focus is whether and how minds come together in the here and now, because we now have a clearer understanding of how minds are born.

For example, in the relationship between mother and child, even when the child does not understand the meaning of words… Infant in Latin means one who does not speak. This is the main issue, how can we promote the growth of the psyche in someone who does not understand words? You see, if we ask ourselves this, we immediately cut out the more cognitive part of our theories. Still we need to be aware that when the mother interacts with an infant, they are already in the symbolic register, because language and symbolic meanings

are brought into this realm by the mother, and then inevitably pervade all the field. But from this point of view, we can no longer see the mother as separate, because otherwise you can't understand anything that's going on. What does “there is no such thing as the child” mean, after all? It means that we have to see the bond and the field that mother and child form together. And it's the same if you are working with an adult. The central point is: does the affective climate foster the growth of the mind and bonds or not?

What happens in field theory? The big difference is that as analyst I take responsibility for the disappointment, for the quality of this emotion. It is not yours alone, or mine alone, but it results from our being together… if it is ours, therefore, I can only trust in our common effort and in our more or less effective ability to transform raw emotions (beta elements) into meaningful emotions (alpha elements).

To give an example, think of a child growing up in a family where hate and anxiety almost always prevail. His development will be terribly inhibited. A session is the same thing. In every minute, the analyst should be able to sense the atmosphere: using Bion's jargon, whether there is hate (H), love (L), or knowledge (K). Since K can go toward H or L, it is ultimately a matter of H or L. It is always dialectical in the end. How can we know what the weather is there? We don't, and we can't directly. We can only listen to what we have available to us in the session, mainly the conversation, but also what accompanies it, sensations, emotions, actions, reveries.

Then, what is the postulate that guides the listening of the unconscious? Again, the postulate is that if the analytic theater is working, if the setting is safe, if there is no fire in the theater, then virtually everything that happens at the common, transcendental or unconscious levels is co-generated…

A patient says, ‘Yesterday, I was so disappointed because I had planned to go to the theater in Milan, but the highway was closed’. Is the narrative in itself important, or rather the emotion it reflects? The emotion is important to us, to try to understand the link, the connection that links us in a given moment. What might the patient be expressing? So, here we have a frustration, there is the representation of an obstacle. The analyst should use his compass, which is his own concept of the unconscious. What is this patient unconsciously telling me? In the classical model, does this narrative reflect a transference? Or does it allow me to intuit the presence of some projective identification going on? Or perhaps I should pay attention to how I am feeling right now? Is there something that I don't yet understand but that indicates some possibility of enactment that may become clear in the future?

Or, if we come to BFT, it doesn't matter if you read the text of the session or I read it. The “text' might even be a reverie of mine, which most of the time I keep to myself. But if the postulate is that practically everything belongs to the field because it is co-generated at the unconscious level, that it means that frustration from this point of view is the feeling that belongs to both of us, it is ours, not just yours, or mine. I infer that I myself for some reason feel the patient's feeling of disappointment. Is this emotion that we share conducive or not to being in unison, to somehow arriving at an effective synchronization, which in this model is the factor that produces order and makes our minds grow? I would say no. Somehow, I have to reopen this metaphorical highway so that we can go to La Scala in Milan and enjoy the show together.

In this way, you stop studying the patient and telling him that he unconsciously is experiencing us as an obstacle because of his past; or à la Klein, that he is seeing me through the glasses of an unconscious fantasy, active at the moment, when an obstacle arises between him and satisfaction, and that it would be a breast that is not available. What is the big difference with the field? What happens in field theory? The big difference is that as analyst I take responsibility for the disappointment, for the quality of this emotion. It is not yours alone, or mine alone, but it results from our being together… if it is ours, therefore, I can only trust in our common effort and in our more or less effective ability to transform raw emotions (beta elements) into meaningful emotions (alpha elements). So it's us, who are now trapped or stuck in a place where we are breathing air intoxicated by hate, anger, envy, etc. If I listen in this way, I am already beyond the I and You split, not suspicious of the patient, and trusting his and my unconscious at work.

This reversal of perspective, as a relational experience, is already therapeutic in itself. The result, I think, is that we're less exposed to the risk of a kind of

very subtle ideological infiltration, which means that often with good intentions we run the risk of judging the other, diagnosing the other, disapproving of the other, perhaps implying that if they don't change it's their business… or they have some kind of primitive destructive core, so to speak, that makes them wrong. Well, do you see how the technique changes?

You don't need to draw away pieces of other models or psychoanalytic wisdom, even if when working clinically I think you need to be coherent and be capable to justify how you listen, why, what you do, what is your theory of therapeutic action… So, it's not that I could ever embrace a naif attitude of eclecticism… immediately I would see the contradictions.

So, when we talk about very speculative and abstract things like the transcendental common layer of intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, to me this is important because what interests me is what we can derive from this for clinical work, how to refine our technical tools. Some people, like Donna Orange, would ask: ‘Isn't this is too abstract?‘. No, it isn't. Freud can be very abstract… What about his metapsychology?… never heard of Vorstellungen repräsentant des triebes or of primary repression?

patient tells you narratives about his masochism, here of course we enter in the dream of the session. Immediately ‘masochism’ becomes a character in the field that hypothetically is expressing what is the quality of the emotional linking in the here and now.

Envy is a kind of fever, it signals that someone is missing something that is very important to them. So it should not be seen as a sin, as the Catholic church tells us. If you see it as a sin, as if the patient is bad because of his desire for omnipotence and wants to take advantage of you, you are not understanding the patient. The envious patient is someone who is dying of thirst, because he is in the desert and has no water to drink. You have to give him water, not hit him by saying he is envious and bad or wrong. Like shame, envy is the thermometer of the quality of the relationship.

I could give you another little example. A patient tells you that she suffered a real trauma in the past. She was abused at ten years old. You understand that, react humanly, keep in mind all theories about what trauma can do, etc. But the last lens that you should use, which is the most meaningful to me, is the Why this, why now? Who is ‘abusing’ who here? Are we both being prevaricating on each other?

‘Abuse mode’ in the session could be a lack of emotional availability… could be many subtle things that are narrated through recollections about traumas and so on. Is it a matter of overlooking the past or the reality of the trauma? Not at all. It depends on what your main goal is.

If it is to develop the capacity for thinking and for symbolizing, then the lens that gives me a picture of what is happening of a higher possible level of resolution is the meetings of the mind. If I use the electronic microscope, it's not that I neglect the optical microscope. Is that in that moment I choose this tool and not another tool. I know this can be seen as too radical but is very coherent and it's very logical. If the unconscious is always speaking, then it is speaking also when the patient is telling you about the highway that was closed or the trauma that he suffered in the past. And again, the basic postulate is that, no matter what is the narrative, we are going to look at it as a shared and as a clue about the quality of the emotional linking.

If you go back to Beyond the pleasure principle, you will see in that incredibly beautiful book, Freud says that dream-work tries to take us from Shreck, which can be traumatic, to Angst, ‘just’ anxiety or fear. I love this essay very much because Freud shows already a beautiful understanding of the transformative function of dreams which is very much in agreement with Bion's and post-Bionian's view. In that paper, he aligns traumatic dreams, masochism and the beautiful pages about Ernst playing with cotton reel game. Why does Freud line them up? Because he is telling that they have something in common. What? Precisely, this transformative quality. When Ernst draws away the toy (the object, the mother), and then he keeps it back, what is going on there? Is he masochist because he draws away the mother? No, he is transforming the absence of the concrete mother into a symbol in his mind. He's learning to symbolize. This my take on masochism in the patient, not something destructive by nature.

CMA: So you view phenomena like masochism and envy through very different lenses than the traditional ones?

GC: Absolutely. Envy for Melanie Klein is linked to death drive. And also, up to a certain time, for Bion, and for Bion is difficult to understand. Why? Because you have to listen the four Bions: you have the Bion of groups, the Bion of the Kleinian essays, the Bion of the four big books and seminars, and you have the Bion of A Memoir of the Future. If you re-read “Attacks on Linking”, all the time Bion tells the patient that the patient doesn't want to accept the good things he his giving him. This is because of envy, this is because of death drive and there is this kind of internal explosion of the invisible visual hallucinations—precisely, the attack on linking. He never considers the possibility that he might be the one who is attacking the patient with his disorganizing interpretations. So, this is very Kleinian… And nonetheless it is a brilliant essay, not only from the Kleinian perspective, but also for all the things that can be glimpsed that prepare for future developments in his thinking.

So, envy sounds completely different to me. I was discussing this yesterday with a colleague who wants to write about envy. Envy is a kind of fever; it signals that someone is missing something that is very important to them. So, it should not be seen as a sin, as the Catholic church tells us. If you see it as a sin, as if the patient is bad because of his desire for omnipotence and wants

to take advantage of you, you are not understanding the patient. The envious patient is someone who is dying of thirst, because he is in the desert and has no water to drink. You have to give him water, not hit him by saying he is envious and bad or wrong. Like shame, envy is the thermometer of the quality of the relationship.

CMA: In “Attacks on Linking” Bion described how destructive aspects of personality affect links between psychic elements. How do you think about destructive parts of the mind in your psychoanalytic work?

GC: We can think of destructiveness or aggression in different ways. Aggression is either primitive, animality, wild crowd, as Freud would say, needing a police force to contain it; or a result of frustration. It's a big division in psychoanalytic thought. Of course, pathological aggression is not the healthy capacity for self-assertion. Maybe I'm too optimistic, I don't know, but for me, aggression always comes from frustration. By the way, there's something wrong when Freud seems to be sort of idealizing, for example, ‘animal’ sexuality, where he says that somehow civilization is based on the repression of sexuality. I think he's confusing reproductive behavior in animals with human sexuality. Animals don't have sexuality. So, in the same way that we repress sexuality, we also liberate (human) sexuality. The same with violence. Our violence is not animal violence. We liberate our specific ways of exercising violence. Foucault and Girard address this same criticism to Freud. When we look at the animal as a model it is very easy to forget our specificity, which is given by language and self-consciousness. As some neuroscientists do, you cannot study animal perception, for example mirror neurons, and say that this explains human perception. No, because human perception, as Merleau-Ponty writes, is the unconscious; that is, it is also linguistic, cultural, social, political, etc. A short circuit is triggered every time we reason in this way.

BRF: And what about the place of sexuality inside the analytic room. How do you deal with it?

GC: Well, I think I have already answered that question, you see. Of course, sexuality is very important in psychoanalysis, we know the whole story. But perhaps we have to ask why sexuality is so important in people's lives. What would you say?

BRF: From a relational point of view, maybe it is because it has to do with pleasure in bonds and intimacy between people.

GC: Yes, that's right, but it still is too general. Why is it so dangerous?

CMA: Maybe it is because it has to do with the balance between being too much close or too much distant.

GC: Yes, of course, I would say that intimacy (L) never comes without the fear of betrayal and abandonment (H). The point is that every time you feel gratified because you have gained more intimacy, your fears of being betrayed and abandoned, destroyed by this relationship, also grow. That's why sexuality is important in people's lives. But from a BFT perspective, it is the ‘sexuality’ in the analytic room that matters, not the sexuality that you can talk about elsewhere. In the analytic session, I don't see why a certain narrative content, for example sexual, should be privileged over another. At the theater everything is theatrical, that is ‘fictional’.

However, we must remember that this may be your point of view but not necessarily that of the patient. Consider that in the example of the blocked highway that event is real, but in the session, we can feel it as a dream. But this is not the patient's perspective. So, because it's always a special event, we have to consider the formal aspect of what it means to tell another person a dream or to talk about intimate things. By the way, in my perspective, the analytic dream is not the dream that the patient had at night, but the telling of the

dream in the here and now, which, again, is a shared event. The same applies to sexuality.

There's something wrong when Freud seems to be sort of idealizing, for example, ‘animal’ sexuality, where he says that somehow civilization is based on the repression of sexuality. I think he's confusing reproductive behavior in animals with human sexuality. Animals don't have sexuality. So, in the same way that we repress sexuality, we also liberate (human) sexuality. The same with violence. Our violence is not animal violence. We liberate our specific ways of exercising violence.

Another key point is that even if this is our theoretical perspective, and if these are the tools, we use to be receptive to the discourse of the unconscious, we should not pay too much attention to interpreting. The whole thing would become a kind of perverse decoding of the conversation. Absolutely not. In this way, we would not understand what Bion means when he says that we must listen without memory, desire, and understanding.

This basically means that you have to do your homework, understand the principles, the basic postulates, be able to tell someone the differences between models and concepts, explain why you choose to do this instead of that, and at the same time give yourself the space and time in the analytic situation to be surprised by the moment when this concept or perspective spontaneously comes back to you. This is the only way to allow the ‘selected fact’, in Bion's jargon, to pop up. An event, something, a feeling, an image that gives you the idea that perhaps you are sensing something true about what is going on in the session. As Walter Benjamin says of artistic creativity, this is the art of shocking. But it is a “happy” shock. It's a shock that is immediately contained by the fact that it gives meaning to the experience. So, for me, it's important to immerse yourself in the dialogue for a while, one session, two or three sessions, whatever, even staying in the naively realistic way of seeing things. The important thing is that sooner or later you wake up from this dream/illusion of reality and ask yourself, ‘Um, what did we say or do here?‘.

BRF: I often hear in your speech a group dimension in the use of the word “we”, in the questioning of what “we are doing together”, when you refer to the analytic encounter. Perhaps what you are telling us that the concept of transference and countertransference still belongs to the division between self and other present in the relational model? If so, is your proposal that we should add another vertex of analysis regarding analytic phenomena, beyond what transference and countertransference allow us to access? Is that the case?

GC: This is a good question. First of all, I'd like to answer something that perhaps Bruno asked when he said that there are different ways of understanding the field. People tend to believe that the field model is the one proposed by the Barangers. Well, yes and no. Because the Barangers were saying that the ‘bastion’, the bulwark is something that is constituted by the participation of the analyst and the patient. So, it is something that would not exist if patient or analyst weren't not both there. But to me, their approach seems very similar to the concept of enactment. The fate of the bulwark is to be eliminated. In this way I could say that in Barangers' description of the concept the field is limited to the negative of the analytic field. On the contrary, what I mean is a much broader notion of the field as the metaphor that helps, despite its positive or negative valence, to attune to the unconscious life of the analytic couple. Nowadays that field theories are having much success everywhere, we have this proliferation of the concept of field. It's like parsley, which you can put everywhere. Okay, you can do that, but field theory comes from Lewin, from quantum physics. It means precisely that there is a system whose emergent properties cannot be explained by any of the properties of the parts of the system if we look at them in isolation. So when I see people using this metaphor and then there is not this field that works like this in what they are showing, I ask, why bother with the effort and struggle to use the concept of a field? It's just that what you're describing is not the concept of field, despite the use of the word. In any case. Can we be eclectic? Use different models? In different patients or with the same patient at different times? I'm a little skeptical about that. Why? For example, people always ask me, Giuseppe, but how can you say that this reverie you have is not a countertransference phenomenon?

First of all, the term reverie is getting a little confusing. That's kind of what happens to the concept of countertransference. Because it seems that people

have forgotten that countertransference is an unconscious phenomenon, but instead we see an indiscriminate use, as if everything the analyst feels is countertransference. So today it also seems that everything can be a reverie, but a reverie is like a dream while we are awake and by definition is something we experience in a state of passivity other than associative thinking. When a reverie emerges, it appears as a cut and has no clear connection to what is happening or being said. Furthermore, the capacity for reverie is more akin to Winnicott's primary maternal concern than to mere reverie. So, people ask me, how can you say that this reverie is not a countertransference phenomenon?

Another key point is that even if this is our theoretical perspective, and if these are the tools we use to be receptive to the discourse of the unconscious, we should not pay too much attention to interpreting. The whole thing would become a kind of perverse decoding of the conversation. Absolutely not. In this way, we would not understand what Bion means when he says that we must listen without memory, desire, and understanding.

And then I have to say that we should start having clear notions of epistemology. If my initial postulate is different, if my initial postulate says that what happens is co-created and shared, then that is no longer the appropriate question. Because, by definition, if my hypothesis pushes me to see everything as shared, there is no logical space for a phenomenon to be conceptualized as countertransference. That conception of the same phenomenon corresponds to another postulate. But now, why do I say that we have to have a clear sense of epistemology. Because we cannot prove a postulate. Not even in mathematics or geometry. How do we know if one postulate is better than another? From what allows it us to recognize, think and do ‘downstream’. Therefore, we cannot simply transfer a concept into another theoretical framework. Because even if it has the same name, a concept only exists in a network of concepts that gives it its meaning.

So, my answer is that yes, a reverie can be seen as a countertransference phenomenon, absolutely. But in another epistemic framework, where the postulates are different, by definition, it cannot, not in BFT. The issue is that you have to accept that either you see the profiles or the vase.

CMA: In 2014 you wrote an important article on the influences of Romantic aesthetics on Bion's work. In your latest book, The Hour of Birth, you have extended these ideas to explore the origin of the psyche and its ongoing development through life. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

GC: Ogden says that, in human history, Freud invented two new ways of relating to the other, which are the analytic session and the supervisory session. This is wonderful! The Freudian Junktim is wonderful. No one else can say these things using our own vertex. So, psychoanalysis is a technique of treatment, it is a theory of mind, but it is also a method of inquiry into psychic processes. It is also the foundation of critical theory and new way of doing art criticism. Psychoanalysis is a lot of things, and we should be proud of it. We know that Freud was the first to relate psychoanalysis to art, but over time classical Freudian criticism has become a bit obsolete. Putting the artwork on the couch, so to speak, doesn't work because you lose the most important part of art, which is the formal aspect. However, psychoanalysis has a lot to say about this, and vice versa. Why? Precisely because of what we said earlier. We said that the infant does not speak yet. What is the infant? The infant is, from one point of view, like an abstract painting. It is a system of sensations, affects, rhythms. A child moves from the womb to what Kristeva calls a semiotic chora, a dynamic space that, if “happy” enough, generates subjectivity. So, you see how important the aesthetic experience in art is to understand how we are born and continue to be born throughout our lives. Why do we seek art so much in our lives? Because we always want to continue to be born with new ideas, and especially new embodied ideas. We aim at enlarging our power to act, our freedom. And that's why I call it ‘the hour of birth’.

BRF: I would like to ask you what are the continuities and discontinuities between your concept of the sublime and that of the aesthetic conflict of Donald Meltzer?

GC: In my second book that in English is titled The Violence of the Emotions there is a long chapter on aesthetic conflict. I have always been very fond of Meltzer who is the author of this concept, even if he very

honestly admits having found it in Bion. Indeed, at the beginning of my chapter I remind the reader of this fact. I also had the good fortune to know Meltzer personally, because he used to come to Italy to supervise cases when I was a student trainee in psychiatry. He was the first to really comment on Bion's contributions and expand on Bion's ideas in a very original way. I think Meltzer has been somewhat sidelined lately. I don't know why, but he is a very, very interesting thinker.

What is the infant? The infant is, from one point of view, like an abstract painting. It is a system of sensations, affects, rhythms. A child moves from the womb to what Kristeva calls a semiotic chora, a dynamic space that, if “happy” enough, generates subjectivity. So you see how important the aesthetic experience in art is to understanding how we are born, and continue to be born throughout our lives. Why do we seek art so much in our lives? Because we always want to continue to be born with new ideas, and especially new embodied ideas.

So, what is essential about the birth of the psyche, when there is only the preverbal experience of breast and non-breast, of thing and no-thing (as opposed to the nothingness, that means pure terror)? It is the rhythm, as in little Ernest's fort-da game; the being and the non-being, the trace of the gratifying experience of contact with the breast, which then becomes a symbol or word that allows one to tolerate absence; but then also, of course, being able to experience gratification in presence again, because otherwise a person would fall into the abyss of non-sense.

Aesthetic conflict is the same thing. One has to tolerate the fact that we don't know what is beyond the realm of our conscious experience. We cannot know what is in the mind of the other, or in the mind of the mother, even if she is beautiful and smiling. In our analytic work, it is always the patient's question, ‘Do you love me because you love and accept me or because I pay you?’. But it's reciprocal, notice, it's a field even the analyst might ask: ‘Is the patient grateful to me, sincerely grateful because I helped him or not? So, does he love me or was it just an instrumental relationship?’.

Yesterday I had to console, calm down a young patient of mine in analysis who was abruptly abandoned by his patient. He was in a critical emotional state. So, it is always mutual, intimacy always brings the fear of betrayal and abandonment. Thus, the concept of aesthetic conflict, redefined by Meltzer, helps us as a tool to understand the various related issues of the emergence of meaning, in clinical work, theory, and art criticism. So, yes, my interest in the sublime is a way to continue my inquiry into aesthetic conflict.

BRF: Could you tell us something about your notion of embodied sublimation? Does it anticipate the emerging process of abstraction from concrete reality in which subjectivation consists of?

CG: Absolutely, and it's always intersubjective, it's always social. This is another very important aspect. Sometimes they ask me ‘Yes, Giuseppe, but if you say that everything is co-created and co-generated, where does the subject go?‘. Actually, the subject does not go anywhere, because the subject is there, the point is that the subject, the empirical self, as an isolated entity that moves, that takes initiative, is what is visible, is the conscious subject. Psychoanalysis is about the invisible, it is about expanding the invisible fabric of our intersubjective flesh. If subjectivity and intersubjectivity are the two sides of the same coin, this means that if our intersubjectivity expands, then it is also our subjectivity that is strengthened. There is no opposition between intersubjectivity and subjectivity. Intersubjectivity, as an expansion of one's internal sociability, is what allows for multiple points of view on a topic or subject, which is by definition being psychologically mature. Conversely, blending in with the crowd means that you have less connection to the infinity of others and language, and that you must dogmatically attach yourself to one perspective. It is in this condition, or moment, that our intersubjectivity is limited. Therefore, expanding intersubjectivity means at the same time expanding subjectivity in the subject, because they are dialectically related. This is also why it is important to develop the concept of intersubjectivity. To better understand this dialectical game and not get stuck in a naive and dichotomous view of the subject and intersubjectivity. What's more, this is precisely a wonderful model of what happens when psychological distress arrives. It comes, as Bion and Winnicott have wonderfully shown, when the child faced with an object that is not available, must somehow develop a false self, obey a cruel superego and live in a world of tyranny, not in a democratic

world; and he must stick to a single vision that is dictated by the object. This is not the realm of freedom.

We need to put our young colleagues in a position to develop careers and become creative in psychoanalysis, not infantilize them anymore and say that at forty-five years old they're still kids. And we seem to have a peculiar biology. While everybody else retires at seventy from institutional work and then goes on to do other things, we sometimes start in our seventies—for example, to teach.

Given this, by ‘sublimation’ I do not mean the classical Freudian concept; if anything, I try to see, for example in my book Sublime Subjects, how it can be made to dialogue with the concepts of the sublime, which comes from the field of aesthetics, and of sublimation of the flesh, which we owe to Merleau-Ponty-Ponty. In essence, I am trying to explore the field of intercorporeality, that is, the processes of abstraction (of subtraction of the concrete) that take place on the corporeal plane and not yet directly on the linguistic one. For example, an affect or a habit—as we know, already a subject of study for Hegel—from a certain point of view can be considered an embodied ‘concept’.

CMA: The SPP will celebrate its 40th anniversary. What would you like to convey to young psychoanalysts in our Society?

GC: I could say, as you can clearly see that after almost half a century of being interested in psychoanalysis in one way or another, my enthusiasm has grown with time. I feel that this is an absolutely vital, beautiful discipline, and it is worth devoting my life to it, but we need a theoretical and ethical re-foundation of our theories along the lines we have been saying. Then, we need to reform our institutions. At the recent Congress of the Mexican Society, I was asked to say something about the future of psychoanalysis. I said that we only have a few centuries left, but that we need to reread the Kernberg essays, which are beautiful, about how we are so capable of destroying the creativity of candidates and we are so capable of functioning as a church, not as a scientific institution.

The last one is called “How to Avoid the Suicide in Psychoanalytic Institutions.” If a former president of the IPA, and a creative and intelligent theorist, says it, we must take it seriously. We need more transparency, more democracy, to accept the normal rules for the evaluation of scientific work (the h-index), without appealing to the defense of local traditions, which is just a way to avoid confrontation. Nowadays, if a cardiologist or a psychiatrist said, ‘This is our tradition and we do as we like’, we would laugh at them. We need to put our young colleagues in a position to develop careers and become creative in psychoanalysis, not infantilize them anymore and say that at forty-five years old they're still kids. And we seem to have a peculiar biology. While everybody else retires at seventy from institutional work and then goes on to do other things, we sometimes start in our seventies—for example, to teach. I know of only one other institution where the career is tied to unquestioning loyalty to the institution and to age: the Church. Basically, I believe that if we don't reform our institutions there will be a risk of being delegitimized by the other institutions in our society. If we blindly claim to defend what can no longer be defended, we will be simply marginalized.

So, what I'm saying is that psychoanalysis is worth devoting your life to, it's really exciting and beautiful, but only if our institutions really show a willingness to reform themselves. That becomes very concrete for young analysts, a matter of life choices. For instance, I'm well aware that I didn't follow an academic career that was already there, because I somehow idealized psychoanalysis, which is normal; still, at the time I started, psychoanalysis had a very different place in society. We lost many positions. We have to ask ourselves why. I don't think this is just my sentiment.

CMA E BRF: Thank you very much Dr. Giuseppe Civitarese, for this honest, interesting and playful conversation. It was for us an honor to interview you and get to know in detail your thoughts. We are certain that this interview will be of great relevance and arouse the interest of Portuguese psychoanalysts.