Tormenti di anime. Passioni, sintomi, sogni [Souls in torment: Passions, symptoms, dreams] (review)

Carolyn: Why won't you talk to the doctors? Lisbeth: Because they don't listen to what I say.

—Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

I want to introduce my remarks about Antonino Ferro's latest book by using this quotation from his own preface, since this short dialogue from the second novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series refers to an essential theme running through all Ferro's books. Ferro is a "doctor," an analyst, who does listen to his patients. He lays out a theory of psychoanalysis with the fellow travelers he converses with in these pages, who include his "best colleagues"—the patients. This psychoanalytic theory creatively seeks to "hear the soul's torments" and register when they are hidden and cannot be expressed. Bion (1963) recommends that when one gives an "interpretation it must be possible for the analyst and analysand to see that what he is talking about is something that is either audible, visible, palpable or odoriferous at the time" (12). Between the lines of Ferro's book we can breathe this conceptual atmosphere.

The title, as the author states at the outset, was inspired by G. W. Pabst's film Secrets of a Soul (1926), produced in collaboration with Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs and aimed at giving an accurate picture of psychoanalysis-the title of which was translated into Italian as I tormenti di un'anima (Torments of a soul). In Souls in Torment, Ferro tells us what psychoanalysis is for him nowadays, where it is, and how it can be a point of departure for possible new openings.

The author, as is his custom, but perhaps more than usual, reveals himself to the reader both as an analyst and as a person in the confidence of being understood. Ferro takes up the main points of his technique and his work as an analyst, expanding them to give us fresh food for thought. The inquiry into dream thoughts in a waking state, reveries, transformation in dreams, the functioning of the mind in the analytic field created by the analyst's mind meeting the patient's: all these bring us to a new model of the mind. The model Ferro proposes is a creative extension of Bion's lesson on being able to consider dreams as a way of thinking in the waking state:

The dream world has long been relegated to enquiries into patients' dreams, a truly royal road into the Unconscious-to-be-revealed. James Grotstein (2007) in his extraordinary work A Beam of Intense Darkness talks about a dreaming ensemble or all the oneiric aspects present in the mind. This phrase can also be read, though, as the activity of analyst and patient dreaming ensemble, together. Thus the oneiric spectrum expands in a way unheard of before. What is more, psychoanalysis has been moving toward giving equal weight to the mental activity of both the analyst and the patient in session.

(130)

A new identity, the analytic field, is formed from the mental activity of both participants, which makes it possible to work on complex, nonlinear phenomena in a much more radical way.

So besides oscillating between ♂ ↔ ♀, PS ↔ D (Paranoid-Schizoid ↔ Depressive), NC ↔ SF (Negative Capability ↔ Selected Fact), C ↔ T (Creativity ↔ Technique), the formation of the unconscious is conceived by Ferro as the result of reverie meeting projective identification and the activity of all the oneiric aspects present in the mind. The activation of the "dreaming ensemble" through a continual coming and going between the minds of the analytic couple leads to transformations that promote thinkability, the development of which is one of the aims of analysis. In his impassioned final chapter, "Bion in My Consulting Room," Ferro writes: "From my point of view, what the patient recounts is a dream, and what I answer after interpreting is a dream (and it is often a dream partly based on my interpretation), and what...