The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (review)

Giuseppe Civitarese's first book opens before the adventurous reader many doors leading into warm, intimate rooms that one is invited to explore. "Intimate," of course, is what the analyst's consulting room is by definition, and Civitarese embodies the promise of some recent developments of psychoanalytic theory and practice that have shown the relationship between patient and analyst to be warmer and more intimate than it has frequently been considered to be in the past.

It is not by chance that the first chapter makes use of Freud's metaphor of a fire at the theater to describe those situations in which an emotion suddenly bursting forth in the transference or the analyst's internal setting—which Civitarese defines as "the capacity to hold oneself at a level of listening specifically directed towards understanding the patient's unconscious" (14)—has a disruptive effect, causing a surprising change of scenery, a potentially transformative discontinuity.

In the first chapter, with a similarly disruptive vigor, Civitarese tackles two themes at the core of contemporary psychoanalytic debate: the reality or unreality of the transference, and the interplay between internal and external worlds. These themes run through the whole book, and each chapter functions as a nodal point from which to view them in all their luminosity.

The theoretical hypothesis from which the author starts is that

the rigorous adoption of the dream paradigm in the session [i.e., the idea that the session can be considered as a dream] . . . succeeds in combining the radical antirealism expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications concern the transference-as displacement and projection of the patient's psychic elements-with the "reality" of the transference and with the conviction that the facts of the analysis are codetermined by the patient-analyst dyad. It is moreover misleading to think of being able to separate the phantastic component from the real component in the analytic relationship. . . .

[T]he perspective pertaining to a model of the analytic field-adopted in this chapter-considers on principle any element of the patient's discourse as potentially "transfigured" by the dreamwork and by the rhetoric of the dream; in short by psychic reality and by the transference.

(3; italics added)

At the center of Civitarese's book is the field model, introduced by Willy and Madeleine Baranger in the 1960s, "a Copernican revolution in the observational vertex of psychoanalysis" (Ferro and Basile, 2009, 1). Adopting this model, according to which every analytic session can be seen as a continuous retelling of the emotional facts of the field, enables patient and analyst, in the words of Anna Scansani's review of Antonino Ferro's Souls in Torment (included in this issue of American Imago), "to work on complex, nonlinear phenomena in a much more radical way."

The usefulness of the field model is clearly shown by Civitarese, because the situations he analyzes are complex, multifaceted, and paradoxical. As indeed are the "facts" of analysis, something of which Alberto, one of the patients whose case is described by Civitarese, is fully aware. Alberto starts his long story of a childhood memory by saying, "I'm ready to tell the facts. Pure facts" (4), and then moves on to give an "extremely vivid, overbright" (5) account of the traumatic beginning of his insomnia. Civitarese makes us reflect on how those facts are happening live, in the here-and-now of the transference and the setting; thus "the patient's insomnia is also for long stretches the insomnia of the analysis, ensnared in a dizzying, immobile vigil of intelligence and reflective logic, lacking—except in some rare moments—imagination, playfulness and humor" (5).

The way in which Civitarese proceeds in his clinical work recalls Bion's words in one of his 1976 Los Angeles seminars: "What matters is whether the person can have enough respect for the reality, for facts, to allow himself to observe them. . . . [I]f...