The Post-Bionian Field Theory of Antonino Ferro

Theoretical Analysis and Clinical Application

Howard B. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367766733
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000505764
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This exciting and original collection explores Antonino Ferro's post-Bionian Field Theory, expanding upon the analytic work of Wilfred Bion to focus on the intersubjective development of psychic regulatory processes.

Written by members of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies who have maintained a close and fruitful collaboration with Ferro and his colleagues, the book centers on understanding, engaging and treating primitive mental states. Ferro's Field Theory operationalizes Bion's concept of an analyst who is not the repository of 'the truth', but is instead one who has the capacity to listen, to dwell in doubt, to utilize reverie, humor and play, and facilitate the transformation of previously unthinkable aspects of the patient's experience into articulatable mental elements such as pictorial images, thoughts and dreams. Ferro's contributions and their analysis are especially relevant to working with primitive character disorders, the difficulties of which lie beyond neurosis and the comfortable reach of the precepts of classical analytic technique.

Each chapter features detailed clinical examples that explicate and apply post-Bionian Field Theory, making this book an interesting and useful read for analysts and analytic therapists of all orientations, who work with patients in all diagnostic categories.

Chapter 1

The transformational vision of Antonino Ferro¹

Howard B. Levine

DOI: 10.4324/9781003168034-1

I like to think of the analyst … as a great storyteller, who knows how to bring to life narremes and stories of the patient and of the field, and is free to detach himself from his psychoanalytic knowledge in order to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the psychoanalytically known, towards new worlds of unthought thinkability and the thoughts in search of a thinker that await us in the Americas of the mind.

(Ferro, 2006, p. 6)

Introduction

In 1979, at the conclusion of his Italian Seminars, Bion (2005) left his audience with an evocative image of uncertainty and poetic beauty, when he compared his contribution to the seminars to a leaf falling from a tree: ‘One never knows which side up it will land’ (p. 104). He then challenged his listeners by asking, ‘What is this group likely to give birth to? What thought or idea or action? And what relationship is likely to occur between it and some other group? Love or hate? Fight or flight? Dependence or freedom?’ (p. 104).

At the 2009 IPA Congress in Chicago, Parisi (2009) looked back over the preceding 30 years and suggested that Bion’s influence on Italian psychoanalysis has been both widespread and profound. In her view, in contrast to the then more established European analytic societies, Bion’s ideas, especially the more innovative thought of his later years, gained widespread acceptance ‘perhaps because [they] arrived at the right time to give space to call for authenticity in a group who had just recently formed, and who clearly needed to start feeling themselves freer from rigid elements of theory’ (Parisi, 2009).

Nowhere are the fruits of this influence and encouragement of freedom of thought more evident than in the work of Antonino Ferro. Although not present at Bion’s seminars in Rome, Ferro has proven to be among the most fertile, productive and creative of his descendants, the embodiment of Bion’s concept of

an analyst who was not the repository of the truth, but rather had the capacity to listen, to dwell on doubts, to utilize his own capacity for reverie to get in touch with his own unconscious [and that of the patient] and therefore transform the unthinkable aspects of the patient’s experience

(Parisi, 2009)

into articulatable mental elements: i.e. pictorial images, thoughts and dreams.

Like Bion, Ferro sees the work of analysis as facilitating patients’ capacities for being rather than just knowing about, a being that implies creativity in the understanding and construction of one’s identity and life trajectory. However, Ferro’s view of the analyst as catalyst and co-constructor of the patients’ narrative develops what is only implicit in Bion’s writings, in its formulation of the analyst’s role in helping patients ‘expand and develop their capacities to tolerate and represent thoughts and feelings and elaborate them into narrative sequences’ (Levine, 2006, p. 673). As they do so, patients enlarge their unconscious and organize and structure their psyches, as they increase their tolerance for and achieve closer contact with previously non-negotiable areas of their minds.

This is a catalytic, transformational vision of psychoanalysis, which Ferro could arrive at only after transcending what he experienced as a rigid and doctrinaire application of classical Kleinian training. In his view (Ferro, 2002a, especially pp. 13–32), the latter placed so much emphasis on the analyst’s attempting to know, decode and interpret the contents of the patient’s unconscious, that it risked creating a persecutory atmosphere within the analytic relationship. What helped Ferro move beyond its strictures was a deep appreciation of Bion’s emphasis on the receptivity of the analyst’s mind as a key component of an interactive, intersubjective analytic process and Bion’s subordination of the classical Freudian objectives of recovering psychic contents (e.g. repressed childhood memories and unacceptable (to the superego) wishes and desires) and reworking and resolving psychic conflict to the broader aim of helping catalyze the expansion and creation of the patient’s mind.² Thus, Ferro’s fondness for Bion’s (1970) emphasis on the here-and-now of the analytic moment and assertion that psychoanalysis is a probe that expands the very domain it seeks to explore.³

In addition to Bion, Ferro also drew upon the work of Winnicott (especially the Squiggle Game, developmental facilitation and the importance of non-interpretive therapeutic factors), Willi and Madeleine Baranger (2009) (intersubjectivity and the analytic Field), his training and experience as a child analyst, and Italian literary sources such as Luigi Pirandello (author of the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, who famously declared that ‘the truth is a blur in motion’) and Umberto Eco (narratology). The result is a vision of psychoanalysis that is playful, intuitive, spontaneous and, above all, transformational. Since many North American readers are still not easily conversant with Bion’s theory or comfortable with the language in which it is written, a ‘dialect’ that Ferro uses easily and fluently in his own writings, I will begin with a synopsis of Bion’s work presented with Ferro’s use of Bion in mind.

Bion

Bion favored the fostering of individual creativity over the indoctrination of disciples⁴ and insisted that he did not wish to have people try to analyze as he did. Rather, he tried to tell them something of how he believed that he did analysis, in the hopes that they might learn something more about how they believed that they did analysis. His interest was deeply rooted in the relationship that exists between the mind of the patient and the mind of the analyst and he is known, among other things, for his ‘theory of thinking’ (Bion, 1962a). He advanced the view that the only material for which the analyst has direct evidence is his or her subjective emotional experience of the analytic sessions (Bion, 1970). All the rest, the patient’s past history, descriptions of extra-analytic interactions, etc., he called ‘hearsay evidence’, which he felt was of limited value. Thus, for Bion, the here-and-now of the session, especially the state and functioning of the mind of the analyst and its degree of receptivity to the projections and needs of the patient, forms the fundamental reality of the psychoanalytic situation and serves as a central locus of analytic investigation.⁵

With these assumptions as his starting points, Bion tried in his writings and lectures to prepare the minds of analysts for their encounters with their patients. In particular, he sought to direct analysts’ attention to the immediate, emerging experience of the here-and-now, in the hopes that they might thereby discern the impact on the patient and the analytic relationship of an unknowable unconscious reality. Thus, Bion encouraged analysts to be receptive to their patient’s projections, with the latter viewed not only as defenses, evacuations and phantasied attempts at aggressive assault and omnipotent control as Freud and Klein had seen them, but also as primitive attempts at communication and covert appeals for containment and transformation of what was overwhelming and unmanageable for the patient.

For Bion, primitive mental states (often referred to as or associated with ‘the psychotic part of the mind’) did not lend themselves to expression through language and verbalization. Rather, they ‘announced their presence’ (communicated) by inducing emotions in the analyst, which were covert attempts for intersubjective assistance in containment and metabolization of otherwise uncontrollable and potentially traumatic affects and forces.

In order to absorb, recognize and therefore have a chance of being able to metabolize these projections, Bion felt that the analyst must encounter the patient at every moment without preconceptions (‘without memory or desire’), tolerate the frustration and ambiguity of not knowing while one waits for meaning to emerge (‘negative capability’) and allow for and cultivate a capacity for spontaneous and intuitive response. Eschewing the expectation of discovering and decoding pre-determined mental contents (e.g. derivatives of the Oedipus complex, childhood traumata or the defensive activity of the ego), he focused instead upon analysis as a process that was highly original, wide ranging, pair-specific, dialogic, creative and deeply intersubjective.

Central to Bion’s (1962b, 1970) thinking was the assumption that the mental activity that produces nighttime dreams also takes place while we are awake.⁶ In the latter instance, what the dream work produces is unconscious ‘waking dream thoughts’ made from the building blocks of representational mental life that Bion called ‘alpha elements’. This activity is seen as vital, omnipresent and essential for psychic homeostasis and therefore adaptation, because in Bion’s view, existence, in its raw, unprocessed, unrepresented and unrepresentable form, is overwhelming and potentially traumatic. Note that as Ferro (2002b) has described, Bion

turns Freud’s position on dreams upside down: whereas Freud used the term ‘dreamwork’ to mean that otherwise incomprehensible unconscious material was transformed into dreams and that the dreamwork had to be undone in order to make the incomprehensible dream comprehensible again (Freud, 1933), Bion thinks that conscious material has to be subjected to dreamwork to render it suitable for storing away and for thought.

(p. 598)

The term that Bion gave to raw, unprocessed data is ‘beta elements’. These are inchoate, ‘proto-psychic’ somatic and sensorial sensations that are registered somatically, but not psychically represented in any way that we ordinarily think of as ‘psychological’.⁷ The fact that beta elements are proto- or extra-psychic means that they cannot be recognized, articulated, used to form thoughts or to think with or think about, unless and until they are transformed and made into something psychological. The process through which this transformation occurs is called ‘alpha function’. It begins with the formation of visual ‘pictograms’⁸ (alpha elements) from vague visceral and perceptual sensations and is the constant activity through which the psyche transforms (‘metabolizes’) the raw data (beta elements) of internal and external sensation and perception into something that is discernible and usable by the mind as the building blocks of symbolically and emotionally invested thought.

Beta elements, like the drives in Freud’s theory, are analogous to sub-atomic particles in a cloud chamber. The impacts and disturbances caused by their presence can be noted, but they cannot be directly observed. Thus, while beta elements do register and create impacts, what we colloquially call ‘experience’ – something that is noticeable and capable of being reflected upon and understood in a cause-and-effect sequence or chain of events – may only come into being after beta elements have been transformed into alpha elements. Once alpha elements are created, either by the action of one’s own alpha function or the alter ego-like functioning of the alpha function of another (e.g. mother, analyst), they can then be linked into symbolic chains and strung together in narrative sequences in the psyche by additional mental processes that Bion calls ‘the apparatus for thinking thoughts’ and ‘the apparatus for dreaming dreams’ and Ferro calls ‘narrative function’.

Whether sensations arise from internal or external sources, i.e. originate as drives or perceptions, Bion assumed that they were inherently chaotic and potentially traumatic and so required processing and transformation (‘metabolization’), if one was to emotionally survive the turbulence that they produced. His description of the individual constantly bombarded by beta elements and faced with the problem of how to withstand the very act of perception is not dissimilar to how Freud viewed the problem of the psyche vis-à-vis the drives.

In his metapsychology papers, Freud (1911, 1915a, 1915b) hypothesized that the Unconscious – later the Id (Freud, 1923) – consisted in large part of unbound pressures and energies (‘thing presentations’) that had to be ‘tamed’ by language – (given content and limited in meaning by being united with ‘word presentations’) – in order to prevent traumatic disruption of mental processes and reach articulation and potential consciousness. Thus, Freud said the drives make a demand upon the psyche for work – i.e. the psyche must expend energy and do work on the drive derivatives in order to give them form and content and help them achieve representation in the mind. Freud’s emphasis on the importance of ‘taming’ the drives raised the problems of representation and non-representation to the center of metapsychological and clinical importance.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. The transformational vision of Antonino Ferro
• 2. The logic of the Field
• 3. Post-Bionian Field Theory: An illustration
• 4. Dreaming upstream: Pictograms and the Field
• 5. An invitation to think: Trauma, aporia and the intersubjective Field – A clinical example
• 6. The hallucinated Field
• 7. E pluribus unum: Origins of the analytic Field
• 8. Field Theory and child work: Playing on separate and overlapping Fields
• 9. Coda: The Field of the future, the future of the Field
• Index