Psychoanalysis and Dreams

Bion, the Field and the Viscera of the Mind

Antonino Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620249
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis and Dreams explores some of the cornerstones of Antonino Ferro's theoretical model but also attempts to extend the dreamlike boundaries of the model. Based on Bion's theory of alpha function and the analytic field, Ferro has developed his own original theorization of transformations in dreams and of work in the analytic session as a waking dream.

Clearly highlighted in the book is Ferro's theory that transformation in dreams is the activity which is constantly carried out in the mind of the analyst, who nullifies the reality-status of the patient's communication and considers the patient's narrative as a dream which must be constructed in real time in the encounter between the two minds at work. At the centre of Ferro's theoretical proposal stands the transition from a psychoanalysis of contents to a psychoanalysis which develops the apparatus for thinking, based on the conception of an unconscious in a perennial state of construction and transformation, which must be dreamed, and which continuously expands as it is dreamed.

Psychoanalysis and Dreams is written for practicing and training psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists and will be helpful in everyday psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work.

1

SWIMMING TO THE FUNDAMENTAL RULE

Introduction

In the history of psychoanalytic technique, the “fundamental rule” has had an immeasurable importance, because it establishes the mental setting in which patients have to find their way. “The analysand is asked to say what he thinks and feels, selecting nothing and omitting nothing from what comes into his mind, even where this seems to him unpleasant to have to communicate, ridiculous, devoid of interest or irrelevant” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967).

“Say whatever goes through your mind”: this is followed in Freud’s text by the metaphor of the traveller in a train telling whoever he is sharing the compartment with about the changing landscape outside. This in turn is followed by the request for sincerity and a number of other suggestions.

I think that when psychoanalysis was being born, and its method was very little known, there was a need for “regulation” and for simple, unambiguous rules of conduct, and so, as a result, such communications were totally necessary.

I remember that when I started working as an analyst I too gave these instructions to the patient, in an ever more simplified form as the years went by; whereas now – on the whole – I do not provide these rules, for several reasons.

Nowadays I find it, on the one hand, a highly prescriptive and superegoistical approach and, on the other, one very much based on the attention being addressed to the patient’s mental functioning (or rather, the way in which the patient “should” communicate), whereas today I would tend to consider that the mental and communicative functioning is co-generated by the way the analyst presents himself, including mentally.

I think the method of functioning “by free association” is a point to aim for, and one not to be reached immediately, in the development of something to which the analyst also contributes: hence the title of this chapter, borrowed from a book on dyslexia that was famous in Italy during the nineteen-eighties (Bing, 1976).

Now, once we have come to the first session, if there is a very long silence or a difficulty on the part of the patient, only then do I intervene, often a highly unsaturated way, with “What then?” or alternatively, “Naturally you can tell me what’s passing through your mind”, and sometimes with an interpretation of the atmosphere that seems to be being created.

A while ago, a writer – I don’t remember who – made a collection of all the ways in which the principal novels of world literature begin, and – again I don’t remember whether it was the same writer or not – a collection of all the ways of ending a novel.

With the development of analysis – while always standing on Freud’s shoulders and being grateful to him – I think we can give up the metaphor of the chess game in which the opening and closing moves are the only acceptable steps in a “systematic presentation”: I would also give up the “certainty” of these moves, in the sense that I think every analysis can open and close in its own way (as can every session); over the years I have seen that there is an extreme variability of styles in this area too.

In narratology, the name “encyclopaedia” is given to the totality of knowledges that we have acquired about the functioning of a text. Hence, a highly saturated encyclopaedia stops us having the taste for the co-construction of the text, putting us into an anticipatory bottleneck (the paradoxical extreme case of which would be that it was always the butler who did it); whereas having an unsaturated reference to “encyclopaedias” and to “possible worlds” makes us open to unforeseen and unprecedented narratives.

I think I would interpret the patient’s way of communicating/not communicating and these narrative modes insofar as they become a problem, having in mind a series of precise facts. In fact, a range of different lines of development will take shape in this context.

• The analyst’s ability to be “without memory and desire” (Bion, 1970), in the sense of not having expectations or predictions about the stories that will come to life (Freud speaks indirectly about this when he tells us that there will be greater difficulties to address if the patient is the child of friends or acquaintances, or if there are some lines of development already determined by prior knowledge). This mental state is not easy because we feel a whole set of internal and external pressures strongly imposing themselves on us.
• The analyst’s negative capability (Bion, 1963): that is, the ability described by Bion to tolerate being in a paranoid-schizoid (PS) position without persecution, until one can direct oneself towards a selected fact, as in cat’s cradle game, in which a different figure is defined depending on which part of the string we unhook. Closely connected to this are the qualities of analytic listening, which would be open to all the possible variations I have described in the oscillations between “grasping” and “casting” (Ferro, 2008; 2009). But “What does the analyst listen to?”: Grotstein’s (2009) reply is blunt: the analyst must “listen to the unconscious”.
• But how do we conceive of the unconscious? As described by Freud, by Klein, or by Lacan? Naturally, we could embark on a long digression about how Bion (1962; 1992) understood the unconscious, and many with him from Grotstein (2007; 2009) to Ogden (1994; 2009), and how this new conceptualisation may revolutionise the very way in which we conceive the field, as I shall say below.
• The analyst’s capacity for rêverie, that is his capacity to transform into images the elements of sensoriality deriving from the situation and from the analytic atmosphere, a topic too well known to be dwelt on here.
• The different way in which, right from the start, we will consider the characters (Ferro, 2009) who come into the session: characters from history, characters from the internal world, hologram-characters reflecting the functioning of the analytic field (Ferro and Basile, 2009).
• The type of interpretative “response”, verbal, silent, acted or countertransferential, made by the analyst to the patient’s first communication. Naturally, here we come across the enormous problem of how to validate the interpretation: two points I would like to emphasise are, first, Bion speaking of the “patient as our best colleague” and hence as the person who always knows what is in our mind (Bion, 1983; 2005), and that of the patient considered as a satellite navigation system, who unconsciously “dreams” his response to the interpretations, thereby constantly giving us the location of the analytic situation.

To sum up, I am not saying that the analytic rule must not be stated, but stressing that it is a multifaceted question, which has much more complex effects than we may have believed, and is much less neutral than we had thought; in some ways it is even a sort of self-disclosure of the analyst’s desires and expectations. It is often a destination, otherwise the possibility of being accepted and respected would become a serious “crux” in relation to the criteria of analysability.

It is as if a canvas could give information about how it is to be painted: what would become of paintings by Fontana or others in which the canvas is torn all the way to the frame, or those paintings in which the frame itself “explodes”? And why must the analysis have the immediate flavour of a confession in which it is a “sin” to leave out things that one isn’t ready to share? And why should we remain seated by the window commentating if, for example, there is a fire? And if the flames reached the train and the compartment? And if one of the passengers pulled out a pistol, or a knife? And what if a Rottweiler came in? And what if there was a robber, or one of the passengers died?

I shall stop here, but I could go on ad infinitum, without even mentioning child analysis or the analysis of patients with severe pathologies (borderline, psychotic, etc.). And what are we to do with a compliant or Zelig-like patient?

And what should we think of the “promise of absolute sincerity” which ends up shutting off an infinity of possible worlds and narratives?

We would end up laying down excessively strict rules which would put a straitjacket, or at least a corset, on the patient’s freedom of expression, which remains free as long as it is not excessively codified. It will be different if, instead of being a sacred rule, it is passed through the analyst’s mental functioning, or takes the form of metaphors such as “airport duty free”, or of the analysis as a place where one pays no import duty and any game is permitted.

Naturally, there is then the problem of what model the analyst has of the analytic process. For example, if after the “fundamental rule” has been communicated, a patient were to say, “It reminds me of when I was at school and the priest told us how we should behave”, would this be a memory that opens up a scenario of the analysis or would it describe the patient’s emotional state, feeling himself to be in a religious school with rules for behaviour?

Or if another patient said, “I remember that when I was a child, I held back my faeces; I wanted to go, but I couldn’t”, would this be another possible opening deriving from infancy, or is the patient transmitting his present difficulty in communicating what he is holding back, malgré soi?

Or if, as soon as the rule has been communicated, a patient tells his dream of a terrifying wolf behind him, which he is afraid will sink its fangs into him – is this the opening scenario that would have unfolded in any case, starting off his analysis, or is it the description of how he has experienced that communication, as threatening, dangerous, lacerating?

But what do I mean by calling it a question of models?

In a model inspired by Freud, it will be a matter of working on resistances, repressions, memories, and traumatic events, and the characters will to a great extent refer to the patient’s history. Attention to the historical reconstruction, to the collateral transferences, and to the analyst’s free-floating attention will be some of the main tools which will permit access to the unconscious, above all by means of improvised ideas (“Einfälle”). A model inspired by Bion will see things differently: turbulences, storms of sensoriality will be transformed by the alpha function (which is always at work) into sequences of pictograms (alpha elements) which will constitute the “waking dream thought”, and the aim of the analysis will, above all, be the development of this dream-thinking, and of yet more tools for generating it (alpha function and ♀♂); or else the dreaming ensemble (Grotstein, 2007) will be central, in the form of rêverie, of transformations in dream (Ferro, 2009), and of talking as dreaming (Ogden, 2007).

Viewed in this light, free associations will no longer be free, but will be obligatory associations (although with freedom in the choice of narrative genre) in terms of the formation of that particular waking dream sequence that is in itself unknowable, but whose derivatives, however distorted, are knowable (Ferro, 2002a; 2006a).

Another key point is to consider a unipersonal model or a relational model, or even a field in which every character, not necessarily anthropomorphic, describes the functioning in place between the minds of patient and analyst, or rather it is a fragment – it would be better to say, a derivative – of their dream-functioning.

In this sense, the session becomes a dream shared by the two minds, to which the analyst will contribute with rêverie and with negative rêverie (–R), broadening or restricting the field.

In conclusion, I believe that the “fundamental rule” of being in contact with one’s own unconscious and communicating it, must be a co-constructed destination, experienced to an ever greater degree session by session.

Clinical reflections

Between Barbie and nun

After a brief silence in the first session, Roberta says, “I don’t know what to talk about.” I nod, uttering one of those sounds which only a long analytic practice enables us to make with a particular affective colouring every time (in this case, a confirmation that I have heard and invite the patient to go on), and Roberta starts putting her first characters into the field, characters who, as I shall discover over time, will remain quite constant in the first phase of the analysis. So, she tells me about a fellow student on the Masters course in Economics at Bocconi University, a seductive personality who does everything with the aim of pleasing men, blonde, blue-eyed, plunging necklines, sportscar … I interject, merely saying, “A kind of Barbie”, and at this point my intervention, product of a visual rêverie, leads to another line of thought: “Yes, a real Barbie, and just think, I used to be forbidden to play with Barbies, so it was just as well that my granny once bought me one and allowed me to play with it, even though my mother didn’t seem to approve.” I say, “Something not really serious, futile.” She goes on, “Exactly, I had to study and study, and then publish and publish.” At this point (perhaps because of a possible intervention from me) the other possible character enters the scene, one who will be Barbie’s real opponent: “Yes, in my house all the admiration went to my grandmother who had nearly won the Nobel Prize, working in the USA with Montalcini, and later on founded a hospital in India, working with Mother Theresa of Calcutta.”

It is obvious how the theme of femininity has been set up straightaway, on a sliding superegoistic scale (as well as the possible worlds the analysis will open up) from Barbieland to Mother Theresa.

Between cypresses and tigers

In the first session (as soon as she has lain down) Claudia falls silent, and though she came into the room beaming, the climate darkens, like a cloud covering the sun, as is really happening – meteorologically – in the room.

Since her silence continues, I say to her, “It seems that your new position [on the couch] is making you sad, that the sun has disappeared as we have just seen, and this has cast a shadow over you.”

“Yes, because I think there are more sad things to talk about than the other kind” (big sigh), and then she starts telling me, one after the other, about the boyfriends she has had, each of whom has gone on to show dark sides which have led to the relationship being broken off.

I say, “These are all really sad stories.”

“Yes, but at least work is going well, although what I didn’t tell you in our first conversations is that the main reason I’m here is because of my psychosomatic problems.”

“And what are they?”

“I’m allergic to cats and cypresses.” I wonder if it’s only cats, or other kinds of feline too, and then I think about the cypresses: an allergy to bereavement, and this alarms me more. Claudia goes on, “And I have chronic haemorrhoids which make me bleed” – I silently wonder what it is that must be evacuated and causes bleeding. Tigers? Bereavements? Lacerating emotions? – and she goes on to say, “And lastly I also suffer from dietary intolerances” (so take care with the interpretative diet!).

I say, “And you were afraid it would scare me off if I knew these things, but now that you are officially a resident of the couch, you aren’t afraid to tell me.”

“That’s the word,” she goes on, “‘afraid’ is the right word. As a child I always had nightmares about monsters, where animals with claws and teeth were tearing into me …” (She continues telling me about things that suggest the relationship between evacuation/possibility of containing lacerating emotions.) Perhaps this does not need much commentary.

Luisa’s turbulences

Luisa comes to her first session like a frightened fawn, gentle-looking and very pretty.

She dissolves into tears as soon as she lies down. Like a river in full spate which I find myself trying to dam, she tells me about her separation from two previous boyfriends, in a tone of great pain even now. Then about holidays in the Kinderheim in Switzerland, where she felt exiled. Then about a sister with leukaemia, receiving chemotherapy.

The account seems to be entirely centred on separations and abandonments which we could call “protagonists” and key points of the story.

The narrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Swimming to the fundamental rule
• 2. Denial, negative capabilities and creativity
• 3. Making the best of a bad job: Research in the consulting room
• 4. What’s hard to talk about and often gets said in whispers
• 5. Evacuative and psychosomatic pathologies: In the light of a post-Bionian model of the mind
• 6. Weaving thoughts and images in my own way
• 7. On the subject of supervisions
• 8. Theorising through practice
• 9. Gradients of alphabetisation
• 10. Random thoughts on technique and other matters
• References
• Index