Reflecting in the present paper on the legitimacy of a work to collect together the ideas, concepts, and terms of Sándor Ferenczi, the author will explore, through a series of questions and answers, the following points: why it is so clear-cut that Ferenczi should be included in the company of those great psychoanalytic authors who might be deemed entitled to such a study; whether Ferenczi possessed his own language, and if this was the case, when and how he acquired it; what we mean when we refer to Ferenczi’s idiomatic language, and how we can profitably identify this language and bring it into focus; how, in practice, such a text should be organized; what its audience and function would be; and how it would be used by readers and students of Ferenczi.
This paper follows up Bion’s development, focusing its attention on Cogitations in particular and suggesting that it can be read as a sort of new >Clinical Diary< à la Ferenczi. The authors, showing us both the link between the writings of the London Bion and those of the American one, stress the dramatic change that took place in his theoretical and technical position around about 1967, when he crossed the Atlantic for working and teaching in North and Latin America, and gradually arrived to formulate a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.
Recalling his own participation in a daily group seminar with Rosenfeld and taking this experience as his starting point, the Author describes and discusses the later Rosenfeld’s approach to working with severely disturbed narcissistic patients. Through a detailed analysis of a supervision of a session with a psychotic patient, this paper essentially highlights how important it is to construct a (cognitive and affective) basic common ground in order to subsequently proceed to interpretations of transference. In particular, the paper brings to light those elements allowing the creation of that basic cognitive-affective ground that is necessary to profitably (in a manner useful to the patient) connect the relational events narrated and acted by the patient with the hic et nunc of analytic interaction.
Interpretation in a >personal< field perspective (https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2023.2210270)
(2023)
This is a revision and expansion of a classic paper that was first delivered as a speech, in October 1994, for the 10th National Conference of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, and then published as a chapter of the seminal book >Emozione e Interpretazione. Psicoanalisi del campo emotivo< [Emotion and interpretation. Psychoanalysis of the emotional field], edited in 1997 by Eugenio Gaburri.
Editorial
(2010)
>Who?, where?, what?, in which way?, to whom?< – besides being the questions Paula Heimann suggested that any analyst should ask him- or herself while exploring the patient's communications, these are also the main issues the authors addressed through the results of their survey on the present state of the relationship between psychoanalysis and universities in Europe. This is a pilot study that tries to chart a map of European psychoanalysts (for the moment including only members of the International Psychoanalytic Society) working at various levels in universities. The aim is to set up a network between them for starting a debate on shared problems, hopes, and anxieties relating to the future of psychoanalysis in academia.