Antonino Ferro - Psychoanalysis As Therapy and Storytelling (The New Library of Psychoanalysis) PDF

Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling
Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling examines psychoanalysis from two

perspectives - as a cure for psychic suffering, and as a series of stories between
patient and analyst.
Antonino Ferro uses numerous clinical examples to investigate how narration
and interpretation are interconnected in the analytic session. He draws on and
develops Bion's theories to present a novel perspective on subj ects such as:
• Psychoanalysis as a particular form of literature

• Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect in the analyst's consulting room
• Delusion and hallucination
• Acting out, the countertransference and the transgenerational field
• Play: characters, narrations and interpretations
Psychoanalytic clinicians and theoreticians alike will find the innovative approach
to the analytic session described here of great interest.
Antonino Ferro is Full Member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association

and the IPA. He is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst and is especially
concerned with adults with serious pathologies. His previous publications with
Routledge include Seeds oj fllness, Seeds oj Recovery, In the Analyst's Consulting
Room and The Bi-personal Field.
THE NEW LIBRARY OF PS YCHOANALYSIS
General Editor Dana Birksted-Breen
The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in assoClatlOn with

the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. It took over from the International
Psychoanalytical Library, which published many of the early translations of the
works of Freud and the writings of most of the leading British and Continental
psychoanalysts.
The purpose of the New Library of Psychoanalysis is to facilitate a greater
and more widespread appreciation of psychoanalysis and to provide a forum for
increasmg mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in
other disciplines such as the sOClal sciences, medic me, philosophy, history,
linguistics, literature and the arts. It aims to represent different trends both in
British psychoanalysis and m psychoanalysIs generally. The New Library of
PsychoanalysIs IS well placed to make available to the English-speaking world
psychoanalytIc wntings from other European countnes and to increase the
interchange of ideas between Bntish and American psychoanalysts.
The InstItute, together wIth the Bntish Psychoanalytical Society, runs a low
fee psychoanalytlC clinic, organizes lectures and SCIentific events concerned with
psychoanalysis and publishes the In ternational Journal oj Psychoanalysis. It also
runs the only UK trammg course in psychoanalysis that leads to membership
of the International Psychoanalytical Association - the body which preserves
internatIOnally agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of
professional ethics and practice for psychoanalySlS as initiated and developed by
Sigmund Freud. Distmgulshed members of the Institute have included Michael
Balint,Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbalrn,Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein,
John Rickman and Donald Winnicott.
Previous General Editors include David Tuckett, Elizabeth Spillius and Susan
Budd. Previous and current Members of the Advisory Board include
Chnstopher Bollas, Ronald Britton, Donald Campbell, Stephen Grosz, John
Keene, Egle Laufer, Juliet Mitchell, Michael Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg,
David Taylor, Mary Target, Catalina Bronstein, Sara Flanders and Richard
Rusbridger.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahony
The Suppressed Madness oj Sane Men Marion Milner
The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith
Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte-Blanco
The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik
Melanie Klein Today: volume 1, Mainly Theory Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Melanie Klein Today: volume 2, Mainly Practice Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph Edited by
Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius
About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942-80 Paula
Heimann. Edited by Margret Tonnesmann
The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45 Edited by Pearl King and Riccardo
Steiner
Dream, Phantasy and Art Hanna Segal
Psychic Experience and Problems ofTechnique Harold Stewart
Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion Edited by Robin Anderson
From Fetus to Child Alessandra Piontelli
A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience: Conceptual and Clinical Rqlections
E Gaddini. Edited by Adam Limentani
The Dream Discourse Today Edited and introduced by Sara Flanders
The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity
and Masculinity Edited and introduced by Dana Breen
Psychic Retreats John Steiner
The Taming oj Solitude: Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
Unconscious Logic.·An Introduction to Matte-Blanco's Bi-logic and Its Uses Eric
Rayner
Understanding Mental Objects Meir Perlow
Life, Sex and Death: Selected Writings of William Gillespie Edited and introduced
by Michael Sinason
What Do Psychoanalysts Wilnt? The Problem ojAims in Psychoanalytic Therapy
Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher
Michael Balint: Object Relations, Pure and Applied Harold Stewart
Hope:A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States Anna Potarnianou
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Wilr: Papers 1972-1995 Hanna Segal
Emotional vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure Danielle Quinodoz
Early Freud and Late Freud Ilse Grubrich-Sirnitis
A History oj Child Psychoanalysis Claudine and Pierre Geissmann
Beliif and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis Ronald Britton
A Mind of One 's Own:A Kleinian View if Self and Object Robert A. Caper
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide Edited by Rosine Jozef
Perelberg
On Bearing Unbearable States of Mind Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm
Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work ofjoseph Sandler Edited by Peter Fonagy,
Arnold M. Cooper and Robert S. Wallerstein
The Dead Mother: The Work ofAndre Green Edited by Gregorio Kohon
The Fabric ofAffect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse Andre Green
The Bi-Personal Field: Experiences of ChildAnalysis Antonino Ferro
The Dove that Returns, the Dove that vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in
Psychoanalysis Michael Parsons
Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections:A Post-KieinianApproach to the
Treatment of Primitive Mental States Judith Mitrani
The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement Piera Aulagnier
The Importance of Fathers:A Psychoanalytic Re-Evaluation Judith Trowell and
Alicia Etchegoyen
Dreams That Turn Over a Page: Paradoxical Dreams in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema
Edited and introduced by Andrea Sabbadini
In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty joseph Workshop Edited by Edith
Hargreaves and Arturo Varchevker
The Quiet Revolution inAmerican Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers ofArnold M.
Cooper Arnold M. Cooper. Edited and introduced by Elizabeth L.
Auchincloss
Seeds of Illness, Seeds if Recovery: The Genesis if Suffering and the Role of
Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro
The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation Cesar
Botella and Sara Botella
Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the
Unconscious Andre Green
The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic LinksBetween
Generations Hayde Faimberg
Glacial Times:A journey Through the World of Madness Salomon Resnik
ThisArt of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries
T homas H. Ogden
Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling AntOnIO Ferro
Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? Edited by
David M. Black
THE NEW L IBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
General Editor: Dana Birksted-Breen
Psychoanalysis as Therapy
and Storytelling
Antonino Ferro
Translated by Philip Slotkin
The translation of this work has been part-funded by SEPS

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First pubhshed 1999 as La psicoanalisi come letteratura e terapia by
Raffaello Cortma Editore, Milan
English language edinon fmt published 2006 by Routledge

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English translatIon © 2006 Antonmo Ferro
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Bnnsh Library Catalogumg m Pubhcanon Dara

A catalogue record for this book IS available from the BritIsh Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ferro, Antonmo, 1947-
[Pslcoanalisi come letteratura e terapla EnglIsh]
Psychoanalym as therapy and storytelhng / AntonIno Ferro ,
translated by Philip Slotkin.
p. em -- (The new lIbrary of psychoanalysIs)
Includes bIblIographIcal references and mdex
ISBN-13. 978-0-� 15-37204-6 (hbk)
ISBN-l0 0-415-37204-6 (hbk)
ISBN-13. 978-0-415-37205-3 (pbk )
ISBN-l0. 0-415-37205-4 (pbk.)
1. PsychoanalysIs. 2. PsychotherapIst and patIent. 3. PsychoanalYSIS
and lIterature. I Title. II. Senes: New library of psychoanalySIS
(Unnumbered)
[DNLM: 1 Psychoanalytic Therapy--methods. 2. Narration.
3. Psychoanalync InterpretatIOn. 4. ProfeSSIOnal-Patient RelatIOns.
5. Medicme m Literature. WM 460.6 F395p 2006a]
RC504.F52713 2006
616.89'17--dc22
2006001875
ISBN13: 978-0-415-37204-6 (hbk)

ISBNI3: 978-0-415-37205-3 (Pbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-37204-6 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-37205-4 (pbk)
Translated by Philip Slotkin
English translation © 2005 Antonino Ferro

T itle of original Italian edition: La psicoanalisi come letteratura e terapia
© 1999 Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milan
riverrum, past Eve and

Adam's . . . brings us . . .
back to Howth Castle and Environs.
James Joyce
Contents
1 Narrations and interpretations 1

A seeming digression: towards a clinical model 2
T he analyst's narcissism and interpretation 6
Taking a broader view 7
2 Tellmg ourselves stories with, perhaps, a grain of truth 17

Schnitzler's 'Riches' 25
3 In praIse of Row C: psychoanalysis as a particular for m of literature 27

Narration in the analyst's consulting room 33
4 Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect in the analyst's

consulting room: a radical vertex 37
Characters in the analyst's consulting room 39
5 T he waking dream: theoretical and clinical aspects 51

I n search of the a-element (the protovisual element
of thought) 52
Free associations 61
Does the container hold fast or does it tear open? 62
A place for dreams 63
6 Delusion and hallucination 67

Delusion 67
Hallucination 73
7 Characters in literature and in the analyst's consulting room 81

A little history 82
xi
Contents
8 Notes on actmg out, the countertransference and the

transgenerational field 97
Acting out 97
The place of the 'countertransference' in a field theory 99
The present field and the transgenerational field 102
9 Child and adolescent analysis: similarities and differences that

mask an underlymg umty 105
How does an analysis work? 106
Formal sinularities and differences 1 10
Substantive similarities and differences 1 13
10 Play: characters, narrations and mterpretations 1 19
Notes 127
References 13 1
Index 143
xu
1
Narrations and
interpretations
The term 'narration', as used in psychoanalysis, is highly ambiguous, because its

semantic halo is either excessively predefined or too wide-ranging. The following
possibilities may be considered: (a) 'Narration' can be understood as the stories
told by patients during analysis in relation to their family romance or, if you
will, their internal world. (b) It can be understood symmetrically as the
interventions in which, say, the analyst undertakes an extension into the world
of'myth' (Bion 1 963),1 when he recounts something meaningful from a position
on Row C of the Grid.2 (c) It can be understood as referr ing to a particular
quality of the analyst's interpretations, when they are especially open and
unsaturated, and instead of closing off the sense allow for its further expansion
(narrative interpretations - Ferro 1 996a). (d) It can be understood as the use, outside
the sessions, of a story or play particularly suited to the illustration of psycho
analytic-type implications - for example, Freud's use of the story of the sinister
Sand-Man or the theme of the three caskets. (e) Finally, it can be understood as
the construction of a narrative truth (Spence 1 982) instead of an unknowable
historical truth.
Although my own use of the term may, to some extent and at certain points,
marginally overlap the above possibilities, for me it denotes something quite
different: by narration I mean a way of being in the session whereby the analyst shares
with the patient in the 'construction of a meaning' on a strongly dialogic basis, without
particular interpretative caesuras. It is as if analyst and patient were together con
structing a drama within which the various plots increase in complexity, intersect
and develop, sometimes even in ways that are unpredictable and unthinkable for
the two co-narrators, neither of whom is a 'strong' holder of a preconstituted
truth. Within this mode of proceeding, co-narrative transformation or indeed
transformational co-narration takes the place of interpretation (Ferro 1997 c).3
For me it is an open question whether a sense-saturating interpretation may
be useful at a certain point. My analytic superego or ego ideal often says yes,
Narrations and interpretations
while 'taste' and respect for creativIty suggest a negative answer, because this
decoding of a 'true truth' reminds me of the kind of Interpretations given by
certaIn CrItics who claim to reveal the true meanIng of a work of art.
Co-narratIve transformation, and to an even greater extent transformational
co-narration, resultIng from genuIne dialogic cooperatIon between patIent and
analyst are therefore the offsprIng of the minds of both; they generate new
and open senses, and do not impose an excessive burden on the parts or modes
of functIOning of the patIent that are not yet capable of full receptIvity and
dependence (DI Chiara 1992).
There IS a well-knownJewish anecdote about a boy from a poor family who
IS sent to school by his parents at great financIal sacrifice. After a few days, he
categorically proclaims that he does not wIsh to contInue. Questioned about
this decIsion by his astonished father, he eventually replies: 'Because at school
they teach me things I don't know.'This In my vIew illustrates the level of the
problem, which not only can be avoided by recourse to a co-narration, but
also must be avoided because in analysis there is no one holder ofpreconstituted truths
about the patient (if there were, we should be in -K and Column 2),4 but instead
a sense that can be developed only by con-sensus (development of �O", of �
and of 0").
The characters of narrations have a status (indeed, so too does the entire
discourse) that extends from a very high degree of real, historical referentiality
(as in a psychologistlC reading of the characters of, say, Manzoni's The Betrothed),
via characters centred on themselves as aspects and parts of an internal dialogue
(e.g. James Joyce's Ulysses), to a complexity of semantic articulations, trans
formations and open senses in a state of continuous becoming, as inJoyce's other
literary miracle , Finnegans Wake.
Co-narration is the form in which analyst and patIent 'dance' along Row C
of the Grid until they are able - where this proves possible - to move on from
C to D, and so on.
A seeming digression: towards a clinical model
I use the term 'model' as a provlSlonal truth, validating it to a greater or lesser

extent according to the number of problems it helps me to solve. In other words,
I regard it as a provisIOnal, unsaturated narratIOn: I do not ask myself whether I
am In the presence of �-elements, an a-functIon or a-elements, but see this as
a way of narrating mental functIOning that I find useful for ar riving at a
satisfactory solution to problems on the mental and emotional level. However,
I am prepared to use any other model that may ultimately prove SUItable, or more
suitable, for this purpose.
In Bion's model, the most serious pathologies can be associated with a dearth
(or even a total absence) of a-function and a hyperpresence of �-elements
2
which, finding no possibility of transformation, are continuously evacuated in

various ways.
The focal point is therefore not so much the accumulation of� as the lack
of an a-function, due to the very early failure of 'social' relations that has
precluded the introjection of the a-function, the primordial constituent of any
kind of mental life.
The disturbance in the formation of a is not always complete; there is a
gradient of possibilities. If the a-function is minimally operational, the patient
may exhibit panic attack syndromes (Ferro 1996a). I call this the 'Krakatoa
syndrome',5 because it results from a sudden eruption of�-elements - proto
emotions - which, in the absence of a 'stream-bed' as represented by an
a-function capable of receiving and transforming them, flood the mind to
devastating effect.
Such patients require a maximum degree of constancy of the setting,because
any change activates the agglutinated nuclei (Bleger 1966) which are stratified
in the setting itself (pockets of �-elements) and which may once again burst
on to the scene. These patients are constantly on the look-out for any change
in the analyst's mental life,which to them is like a semi-permeable dam against
the agglutinated nuclei,and which can transform them by means of the· system
of sluices (progressive alphabetizations) into building blocks of thought (a
elements). If the 'dam' shows signs of malfunctioning,the result downstream is
of course panic,because this foreshadows the possibility of a flood.
In intrapsychic terms, we have a marginally adequate a-function, which,
however, being inefficient, is periodically overwhelmed by conglomerates of
�-elements. These conglomerates, which have previously been described as
'betalomas' (Barale and Ferro 1992),may be likened on the visual level to the
eponymous blob of jelly in Irvin S. Yeaworth ]r's extraordinary 1958 film The
Blob, an entity that falls to earth from an asteroidal fragment and starts devouring
everything, assuming more and more dimensions as it goes: nothing can stop
the blob until it is discovered that cold can freeze it solid. The number of possible
psychoanalytic exercises on this subject, and of possible interpretations of the
blob,IS infinite.
I would invoke a similar mechanism,albeit less drastic,for hypochondriacal
disturbances. Here the 'fever','tumour' or 'infarction' as it were constitutes a
narrator-cum-signaller of the constant danger of the barely adequate a-function's
being overwhelmed by the arrival of emotional fevers, agglomerations of�
elements (betalomas) or emotional blows. It is as if there constantly existed
another scene with Jurassic Park-type proto-emotions that periodically threaten
to burst into day-to-day reality:6 in this case, thermometers, medical analyses,
X-rays and tests of various kinds are 'merely' (although that is not insignificant)
an inquiry into the proximity and dangerousness of this other emotional scene,
whose sudden irruption on to the stage of everyday life was feared.
3
Similar consideratIons could be applied to obsessional syndromes, in which

the pillars of the dam are reinforced and the looming masses of 'undigested
facts' are kept under constant control; or to phobic pathologIes, in which the
'undigested facts' are agglomerated and ultimately contained through the non
negotiability of the 'phobic lump ' , which is tantamount to a culture of
�-elements.
All pathologies could thus be redescribed on the basis of this model of the
mind. Useful as the model is as an aid to establishing the origin of the disturbance,
it IS particularly valuable In that It lends itself to being immediately placed within
a relatIOnal system in the analysis, which becomes the locus of the first-time
occurrence of unprecedented mental facts. These constitute the initial big-bang
represented by the kindling of mental life, which can occur only if there is a
relationship with another mind, thus trIggering the relevant mechanism: instead
of being evacuated, �-elements are taken in and returned transformed into
a-elements - in particular enriched with quanta of 'alphaness' that will subse
quently permit the kindlIng of an autonomous a-function (Bion 1 962) .
The aIm will therefore be to set this sequentiality of primordial psychic events
in motIon. In more favourable cases, on the other hand, It will be a matter of
conferring 'digestibility' on the undigested facts that have accumulated over time
in the form of quantities of �-elements that have not attained transformability
and been transformed into a-elements (Gaburri and Ferro 1 988) .
For these events to occur, the 'disease' borne by the patient must infect the
.field: the field must to some extent contract the very disease from which the
patient is sufferIng, which thus becomes a disease of the field, and the field must
then be transformed by itself undergOIng a healing process. Once this has taken
place, the healing can be introj ected by the patIent into his internal world and
reaccommodated in his history - which will in a way be a new history, along
the lines illustrated in Figure 1 .
All this is possible only by way of narratIons - the ongoing narrative
transformations that constitute the fabric of the analytic field.
A patIent says: 'I 've got a terrIble sore throat; the doctor tells me It'S an old
deep wound in a tonsil and it's full of pus again. It hurts and I can't swallow.' If
this patient is at an advanced stage of analysis and his ajunction is in perfect order,
we might - perhaps - use one of our interpretative codes and suggest a 'different'
reading of his communication: there is something - an old wound that has been
reopened - that he thought was healed but is hurting again, so he is talking about
some emotional suffering, although he has chosen a bodily register in which to
narrate it to us.
However, if the patient is only just begInning his analysis, or a fortiori if his
a-function, or his apparatus for thinking thoughts (Ps H D; S? d) is not fully
operational, then I believe we must try a different approach. We must enter into
his world of tonsils, old wounds and pus, using his narremes to make the �
elements of the field less toxic, and thus provide him with quanta of alphaness
4
... BUT I WON'T DO IT ... BECAUSE EVERYTHING

YOU'VE DONE WAS WRITTEN AND WAS
BOUND TO HAPPEN
Figure 1 Scene from a Corto Maltese story [Translator's note: Corto Maltese is the sailor and
adventurer hero of novels, comics and cartoons by the Italian writer Hugo Pratt (1927-95)]
that he can introject. Here, the first interpretation mentioned above, although
'true' (in terms of a psychoanalytic code of our own) , would constitute K -
because it would arise from our mind only (Riolo 1989); it would be a
persecutory primal scene, because we should in effect be engaged in coitus with
a theory of our own and ultimately - partly through the activation ofjealousy
and envy - be overtaxing not only his apparatus for thinking though!:S but also
his inadequate a-function.
We should be doing what a patient of mine told me after I had given him an
excessively saturated and exhaustive interpretation: he responded by mentioning
a scene from Wim Wenders' 1987 film Der Himmel aber Berlin, in which the angels
took the essence of a feather, leaving the weight of materiality to people.
Although we must not be anorexic angels who leave the 'materiality' and its
weight with the patient, we must be able to let ourselves be contaminated with
the 'material' of their narrations and to go where it takes us. Eventually we shall
be able to teach the patient to conceive of the mind in thought, by way of all
the signals conveyed to us in a thousand dialects by the mind about itself and its
functioning and dysfunctioning (de Leon de Bernardi 1988,1991).
However, you cannot teach a child to ride a bicycle by showing him a video
of a winning sprint by Fausto Coppi.7you have to be there, behind him, holding
5
him, making sure he keeps his balance, watching out for potholes and stones,
and helpmg him if he falls, until he learns to maintain his 'own' equilibrium.
Agam, if the field fails to contract the patient's disease, anything not expressed
in a disease of the field cannot be treated and will stay like the patient's
'undigested fact' . Having said that, however, I believe there is always a gradient
of impermeability of the field that is directly proportional to the unanalysed or
unanalysable residues.
Another by no means negligible problem is the analyst's possible phobia about
'contracting a disease' , which is also a constituent of the field. He will use this
phobia as a criterion of analysability, and will thus exclude patients whose ill n ess
he does not wish to be infected by. This may also apply to certain aspects of the
patIents he does accept for analysis: for instance, he may be happy to work with
the neurotic parts but not with the psychotic or, afortiori, the autistic parts.
Another question again arises here: are there times when it is necessary to
impose a strong, radical interpretative caesura, negating the patient's manifest
communication and revealing a profoundly different sense? I sometimes find
myself doing this, and then it often becomes an engine of the analysis, because,
even if the patient responds with rage or frustration, that imparts motion to the
field. As Bleger (1 966) writes, breaches of the setting by the analyst may
ultImately be useful and mevItable, but can by no means be perpetrated on
purpose.
However, this In my vIew is a function of the analyst's own emotional needs:
I like to think of the analyst as a Michelangelo, with his powerful technique of
the unfinished, and as a great storyteller, who knows how to bring to life
narremes and stones 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 ofunthought thinka
bility and the thoughts in search of a thinker that await us in the Amencas of
the mind.
The analyst'S narcissism and interpretation
At the 1 977 EPF [European PsychoanalytIcal Federation] Congress in Estoril,

Eric Brenman presented a fine paper (Brenman 1 977) on the narcissism of the
analyst, in which he clearly illustrates the various forms in which the analyst's
narcissism can interfere with the analytic work, as well as the various ways in
which the patient signals such interference.
My own approach to this subject is to consider whether the analyst perhaps
assumes a narcissistic position whenever he sets himself up strongly and univocally
as the interpreter of what is happening to the patient. This vision of a 'strong
interpreter' of another's truth is already to some extent diluted in the field concep
tualizations ofWilly and Madeleine Baranger (Baranger, W 1 960; Baranger, M.
6
and Baranger, W 1961-2, 1964, 1969; Baranger, M. et al. 1983,1988;Baranger,

M.1992; Baranger,W et al.1994).Here the analyst,using his 'second look' while
admittedly acting as an interpreter, interprets only what happens to the analytic
'couple' whenever a 'crossed' resistance (a bulwark) forms.
Moreover, in my view, even in a field context (in which the excessive
asymmetry between analyst and patient is already diluted),'strong and univocal'
interpretative activity by the analyst may constitute anti-knowledge (-K), which
thus belongs in Column 2 ofBion's Grid.
An analyst whose approach is to 'decode' the patient's text is like the boy I
have mentioned in an earlier contribution (Ferro 1992), who responded to a
transference interpretation of mine that prematurely saturated the sense by
saying: 'I saw some scientists on TV slicing up an egg to see what it was like
inside: what a pity, because that stopped the chick from hatching.'
ought to adopt a similar approach to that of Alda Merini in Sogno e poesia
['Dreams and poetry'], in which the meaning of pictures is brought out by a
poem.8
Yet the analytic situation necessarily involves a degree oj asymmetry, because the
analyst is responsible Jor the progress cif the analysis and Jor the therapy, as Di Chiara
(1979) points out in his exemplary article on the analytic status of patients.
Taking a broader view
At this point a digression on interpretation is called for. The theme of

interpretation in psychoanalysis (Freud 1924, 1937; Etchegoyen 1986, 1996;
Eizirik 1993,1996; Kernberg 1993, 1996; Ferro 1995a) is necessarily bound up
with that of interpretation in narratology, of which it must indeed be seen as a
sub-theme, albeit with characteristics all of its own (Eco 1962; Eco et al.1992).
Moreover, 'interpretation' was not invented by twentieth-century literary
studies theorists: its origins in western thought date back to the medieval disputes
over the meaning of the Word of God (Collini 1995).
However, in more recent times, interest has centred on the nature of sense
and the possibilities and limits of interpretation (Eco 1990), in a gradient that
directs attention to the role of the reader in the process of the production of
sense, and reaching its extreme form in the theses of the deconstructionists (De
Man 1971,1986; Derrida 1977; Miller 1980; Culler 1982;Arrigoni and Barbieri
1998), which allow the reader to produce 'drifts' with increasing levels of
meaning, extending even to the point of uncontrolled and unlimited readings.
In this approach with its infinitely divergent possibilities, a fundamentally
important position is adopted by Eco (1990) with regard to the 'limit' of possible
interpretations: by emphasizing that certain readings are 'overinterpretations' , he
is raising the problem of the dialectic between the rights of the texts and those
of their interpreters. Eco also holds that, if it is claimed that a text has virtually
7
no limits, this does not mean that every interpretative act can have a happy
existence: in his view, between the author's intention and that sought by the
interpreter, there exists the intention of the text. The criteria for ascertaining this
ongmal intention of the text are stated to be as follows: (a) coherence (identi
fication of the topic, allowing the relevant isotopies to be established) , and
(b) economy (the interpreter should not go too far in astonishment and wonder
by pursuing details that cannot be assembled into a unitary whole) .
However, let us return to the specificity of interpretation in psychoanalysis.
It is characteristic of psychoanalytic interpretation that it enters into a relation
ship and co-determines a text subject to ongoing transformation, m accordance
with the interpreter's approach. Yet this has not always been so: the structural
approach (Arlow 1 985) postulates the existence of neutrality on the part of an
interpreter-analyst, whose task is to reveal a text that already exists and has been
lost, as in the archaeological metaphor, even if a 'living archaeology' (Green 1 973)
is involved.
Yet even an approach directed more to the patient's mternal objects ultimately
leads to a belief in the possibility of a neutral reading of the patient's mternal
reality and - precisely - of his internal objects and fantasies.
The notion of co-constructIOn and co-determination of what comes to life
in analysis arose only with the introduction of fi eld theories. Already in the
thought of the Barangers, and to an even greater extent following that of Corrao
( 1 986, 1 987 , 1 992) , Bezoari and Ferro ( 1 990a, 1 990b, 1 99 1 a, 1 99 1 b, 1 992a,
1 992b) and Ferro ( 1992, 1 996a) , as well as, I would say, in the entire field-derived
Italian school, the text is actually a function of the present interaction between
analyst and patient and of the emotional field, to which analyst and patient
impart life within an analytic setting. From this point of view, I regard the field
(Baranger and Baranger 1961-2, 1 964, 1 969; Ferro 1 993c, 1 994b, 1 994d) as the
matrix of possible stories.
Here, there is a continuous oscillation between the ' negative capability' of the
analyst (Bion 1 970) , i.e. his capacity to remain in doubt, in Ps (a very special Ps,
as Bion points out, in that it is devoid of persecution) , allowing the opening up
of infinite stories (or infinite senses) , on the one hand, and, on the other, the
chOice of the 'selected fact'. That is the strong choice of an interpretative
hypothesis which arises from an emotion that aggregates what was dispersed in
Ps into a gestalt that closes the possible senses in favour of a prevalent sense,
which m turn univocally reorganizes from a given vertex what has formed in
the field. This is an operation that takes place in D and entails mourning for that
which is not.
This is equivalent to the narratological concepts of an 'open work' and of the
' narcotizatIOn' of possible stories in order to allow the development ofjust one
story, as effectively demonstrated by Diderot ( 1796) in Jacques the Fatalist (see
Ferro 1 992) . This book tells 'the story of the love ofJacques for Demse' , which
the valet, at his master's request, begms to recount on the second page, but never
8
finishes .. . Every time he resumes his account, he is interrupted by an incident

or a digression resulting from a request by his master, or else an interlocutor
comes on to the scene and speaks in his place. After a meeting with a new female
character, the author interrupts the narration and addresses the reader:
What couldn't this adventure become in my hands, if I took it into my head

to tease you! I should make that woman an important character - the niece
of the neighboring village curate. I should stir up the peasants of that village;
I should prepare all sorts of combats and love affairs, for, actually, this peasant
woman was beautiful beneath her petticoats. Jacques and his master had
noticed that. Love has not always awaited such an attractive situation. Why
couldn't Jacques fall in love a second time?Why couldn't he be a second time
the rival, and the preferred rival at that, of his master? - You mean that had
already happened once.What? More questions! Don't you want Jacques to
get on with his love story? For the last time, make yourself clear:would you
like him to, or wouldn't you? If you would, then let's put our peasant girl
back on the horse behind her companion, let them go and we'll get back to
our two voyagers.
(Diderot 1796:31f)
In other words, the author is forgoing all the possible stories in favour of the story
that is pressing to be told, which involves the loss of other narrative possibilities;
even so, the novel ends with three possible conclusions, which the reader can
choose according to his taste.
That is to say, there must be a constant oscillation between the opening and
the closure of sense, as with Ps H D in Bion's theory (Bion 1962, 1963, 1965,
1966, 1975, 1980).
So Jacques the Fatalist appears as a navigable channel between the Charybdis
of infinite openings of sense and the Scylla of total saturation, predetermination
and predictability.
An infinite opening of sense would lead to the situation described by Borges
(1941a) in his extraordinary short story 'The garden of forking paths' , which
cannot fail, at the beginning, to give rise to a loss of bearings and to agoraphobic
anxiety at the absence of limits:
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the
expense of others. In [ .. . J Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of
them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that
will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. [ . . . J Fang [ . . . J
has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill
him.Naturally there are various possible outcomes.Fang can kill the intruder,
the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so
on.In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the
9
point of departure for other bifurcatIOns [that determine] an infinite series

of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging
and parallel times.
(Borges 1 9 4 1 a:75 and 77)
In certaIn respects, this story suggests the possibility of exercises that we could
undertake outside our analytIc sessIons on Bion's Grid, which remains indefimtely
open and usable, in the same way as the exercises of a musician between concerts.
Yet Borges's story 'closes' at a certaIn point: 'This web of time - the strands
of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through
the centunes - embraces every possibility' (Borges 1 94 1 a: 77) . Here, we seem
to fall into the very rmrror image of what the story seemed to be promising -
that is, into totally foreseen claustrophobia. This IS what Borges, once again quite
admirably, offers us in another story, 'The library of Babel '. This is a 'total' library,
whose
shelves contain all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic

symbols [ . . . ]; that is, everything which can be expressed, in all languages
[including] the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of
false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a
demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, [ . . . ] the interpolations of
every book In all books.
(Borges 1 941 b: 61)
This is a perfect description of the claustrophobic, sterile circle of already

saturated theones - 'as already propounded by Freud' - or, as it were, of a text
that merely awaits decoding in the form of a transliteration, along the lines of a
Kleinian unconscious bodily fantasy.
But let us return to the field and the need for it to have 'unpredictable
openings' and 'necessary closures' of sense (Bion Talamo 1 987; Rocha Barros
1 994) . From this point of view, the concatenation of ' selected facts' entails the
development of the story of the couple in one of its dialects - that of the story,
of the internal world, of the relationship or of the field.
The limIt of the possible stories (Ferro 1 996a) is that they should as far as
possible arise from the transference (understood as repetition and the projectIOn
of fantasies) and from the patIent's emotions (or proto-emotIOns) or p-elements,
and that they should proceed in the direction P � a and should not therefore
serve for confirmation of the analyst's theories.
On the baSIS of earlier publIcatIOns of mIne, let me now summanze what
seem to me to be the particular characterIStics of the field according to this
conception.
10
Fluidity of the field
Except when afflicted by serious pathology, the field possesses the characteristic
of continuous variation, because it is traversed (and constituted) by emotional
lines of force, turbulences and proto-emotions in statu nascendi that belong to
the couple and are constantly transformed into fluid narrations, with ongoing
formation of a-elements. In Cavazzoni's novel The ViJice of the Moon (1987), on
which the Fellini film of the same name is based, a prefect asks a geographer to
map his province. Although the geographer tries, the factual reality of the
province is constantly changing, so that, after attempting to draw maps, which
gradually become easier to update by superimposition, even using tissue paper,
he concludes that a 'water atlas' would be appropriate, given the wavering nature
of the region's borders, in line with reality. I quote:
'And then, if there were currents inside the atlas, the ink of the printing could
flow and spread, like clouds when there is wind. And where we've printed
words on the water, or colours, to indicate the mountains and the grasslands
where the native tribes feed their flocks, and where we've printed shading or
cross-hatching to indicate foggy valleys, [ . . . ] gradually, due to the nature
of water, all these words and patterns will dissolve and turn streaky; or they
may turn into a rainbow, which would give great pleasure to look at.' [The
prefect] could see in his mind's eye the printed lines and letterings swimming
in this liquid atlas, and dissolving and coming together again, in such a way
as to suggest a geography that changed before your very eyes, and had the
visual quality of iridescent cloth.
(Cavazzoni 1987: 156).
So the field coincides with the narration that is made of it (Rocha Barros 1992),
which is already out of date at the very moment when it is completed, because
new characters and emotional forces are constantly 'in search of an author' (Ferro
1993d) or, as the Barangers put it, there is a continuous oscillation between the
constitution of bulwarks and their dissolution through the 'analyst's second look'.
Destructuring ofprevious configurations
The very moment of constitution of the field coincides with the destructuring
of the identities and emotional lines of force of every one of its constituents.
The gestalt that takes shape is something absolutely new, which can be described
only a posteriori (Ferro 1994a).A fine tale by Woody Allen - 'The Kugelmass
episode', which I have cited before (Ferro 1992) - tellingly exemplifies the
narrative deconstructlOn of the textual configuration prior to a meeting.
11
in front of a doorway in which Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf are
standing; she is told: 'Sorry, madam, you've got the wrong fairy-tale.'This indicates
that narrative inconsistency imposes a limitation on the drift into possible worlds.
As Baranger et al. (1988: 124) point out, as'analysts we cannot propose to anyone
any history that is not his own'.
Non-saturation
The concept of the field imparts vastly greater breadth to the 'narrow' concept
of relationship, enabling us to think of'emotional facts' or 'proto-emotions' as
present 'in the room' before they can be conveyed through the relationship. They
can then be regarded as existing in a kind of intermediate area, in which scenes
and characters that would otherwise remain confined within the strailjacket of
a premature explicit relational formulation can live and take shape. Considered
in these terms, relationship is one of the functions of the field.
I recall a patient who responded to a saturated transference interpretation of
mine that blocked off the commu nication by saying: 'I saw some shamans tearing
an antelope to pieces with their bare hands to look inside it and read the f\lture;
they didn't seem to care that they were killing a living being.'
Traniformations
In accordance with developments that take more account of traniformations in

the session, as the ongoing production and construction of sense, than of
interpretations as instances of decoding of meaning, the field can be conceived
not as something that constantly needs to be made explicit in the here and now,
but as the 'medium' that permits operations of transformation, as well as
subsequent narratives and small insights, which do not require interpretation but
presage further changes: it is precisely the field which, in proportion as it is
explored, constantly expands (Bion 1970), becoming the matrix of possible
stories, many of which are left 'in store' pending the possibility of development.
This entails constant attention to the patient's capacity for taking new insights
on board, and not taxing his a-function and 'apparatus for thinking thoughts'
(Ps H D; S? 0") beyond the limit of tolerability - otherwise the result will be
only persecution, which will immediately be signalled in the text of the session.
The patient is not'under investigation', and is indeed our 'best colleague' (Bion
1978, 1985, 1997), with whom unforeseeable journeys can be constructed;
moreover, even what is not immediately interpreted 'remains' as the warp and
weft of the field itself (Robutti 1992a, 1992b).
13
Characters
The status of the characters of an analytic session differs according to one's

model. The gradient extends from characters understood in a historico
referential sense to characters as internal objects, who are thus citizens of the
patient's internal world, as well as to characters understood as 'names' that
describe a quality of the functioning of the couple in a place in the field ( Ferro
1 992, 1 996a, 1 996f; Bezoari and Ferro 1 990a, 1 99 1 b, 1 992b); the whole of
Chapter 7 will be devoted to this subject.
The first session after the summer holidays allows us to reflect on the
'apparatus for thinking thoughts' (Bion 1 962) and on how communications 'in'
the field should be understood. I regard the first session after the holiday period
as particularly important, not only for the patient's account of how It was
experienced, but also, and In partIcular, for gleaning the 'seeds' that may
subsequently sprout in the field.
Returning after the summer holidays, Rosa told me that 'in spite of all the points' she had
accumu lated, she had not been able to obtain a transfer to Pavia ... that after a long journey
to a place where the 'heather was i n flower', she had had the problem of finding a lettino for
the night, 10 as there were three people in a double room and an additional/ettino was needed
. . . then she told me about the Castellana caves . . . how a friend had d ied in a motorcycle
acc ident . . . this had been a very painful loss for his wife, who, however, l i ke all widows.
would eventually come to terms with it and form other relationships - as well as for the mother,
who had looked after her son ... then she mentioned an arid, emotion-denying character .
. . and finally an intense, living relationship with a woman friend and her daughter ...
In my view, i nterpretation of these i ntroductions to possible narrations would h ave
prevented them from developing: the seeds are there, but need time to ripen - the theme of
'all the points' and hence of the deep wounds; the theme of something flowering even in a
faraway place, like long ing; the problem of the lettino (as the analytic couch); the theme of
depth (the caves); the theme of loss and the various degrees to which it can be worked
throug h ; . . . and the theme of the qual ity of the soil (arid or fertile) . ..
This is illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 3: if S represents the 'white light'

of the field, SI to So are the rays of their spectrum of narration and renarration
as refracted through the prism Ps H D / S2 cJ (apparatus for thinking thoughts) .
That is to say, the separatIOn is renarrated through its constitutive threads.
S SI + S + S + . So represents the function ofthe apparatus for thinking
3
= . .
2
thoughts; this must be radically distInguished from the image-generating u
functIOn, which has worked well in this case, yielding appropriate images.
14
Sn
Figure 3 Narratability spectrum of an emotional experience
15
2
Telling ourselves stories with,

perhaps, a grain of truth
The following clinical examples demonstrate how a shared narration takes shape
in the session - a narration that necessarily draws on the emotional genomes of
patient and analyst, and is therefore the legitimate child of both. The whole
of this chapter is thus a narration of the previous chapter in the form of images.
Marcella
The functioning of this young analysand, a brilliant mathematician, has for a long time been
flat and two-dimensional; her desk is full of long strings of theorems and equations which
she uses to construct a defensive barrier against any kind of contact. My immediate fantasy
is of being in the presence of one of those big cephalopods that squirt out jets of ink when
they sense danger. Any attempt at a closer approach or at interpretation, however cautious,
merely intensifies the 'ink jets'. I feel that patience is aliican rely on.
My caution pays off: little by little, there appear on the 'desktop' not only what Marcella
calls 'official' relationships but also affective ones.
In a session in which I am able to help bring about the creation of a good, non-persecutory
climate, 'infantile memories' begin to appear, including one in which - she does not know if
she actually recalls this or if it was told to her by her mother - using a baby-walker she was
moving along a corridor on to which three rooms opened (Marcella, of course, has three
sessions per week); she went faster and faster until eventually she bumped violently into the
basin in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. The session ends in this way, leaving me
pleased at the emergence of this deeper, more personal level.
During the ten minutes which I allow between patients in my usual setting,1 I become
aware of a sudden, intense headache. I wonder why this is happening, because it is very
unusual for me. I worry about the next session: how will I be able to work with the 'new
patient'?
17
Telling ourselves stories
I sense that it has something to do with M arcella - and at this point I understand my
headache, the concern about the next session and the 'new patient' . A change has occurred,
connected not with an identification of mine with the patient, but with the budding, some
where in the field, of a powerful emotion, or rather of an attack of mental pain or psychic
suffering which confirms that a leap in mental growth is at hand . All that can be seen of it at
this stage is its precursor in the field - but once something comes alive in the field, it is not
long before it can also be taken stably on board by the patient.
What do I mean by my helping to bring about a good climate, as mentIoned

above? Is it a spurious acqUIescence on the part of the analyst, or a pretence that
nothing IS afoot? By no means; nor does It have anything to do wIth the careful
dosing of the temperature and distance of interpretations (Meltzer 1 976) . It is
in my view essential to respect the patIent's threshold of tolerability, or rather
that of his apparatus for thinking thoughts, or mdeed of his apparatus for
generating thoughts (the a-functIOn) , on the assumptIon that persecution
feelings in the seSSIOn are substantially a signal of excessive stress: the a-function,
� cJ and Ps H D emit a signal when they are overtaxed. If this signal goes
unheeded, 'thoughts' (or �-elements) are evacuated as �-elements, giving rise to
'waking-dream snapshots' , to acting out, to basic assumption behaviour and
to psychosomatic manifestations in the patient's body or in that of the setting
(arriving late for sessions, or skipping them altogether) . In the session reported
here, the 'pain' appears as a response to the 'stoppage' represented by the weekend
and to the 'stoppage' resulting from my tellmg the patIent the dates of the
summer holidays.
A few sessions later, Marcella arrives about a quarter of an hour late; this is very unusual for
her, even though she comes from another town. She tells me that she' is late because the
train inspector saw a drug addict getting into a carriage and locking himself in the toilet, and
did h is best to persuade him to get off the train . He succeeded, but then the boy got back
on to the train, and the inspector had to have all the train's doors locked so as to get him off
again . The whole episode lasted, precisely, a quarter of an hour.
I could easily give an academic interpretation ('a part of you acted as an inspector to
make sure you did not get to the session . . . because you feel you need analysis so
badly . . . '), but I feel that it would be too one-sidedly mine (- K!) ,2 and that it would not be
accepted by the patient and produce insight, but might cause only persecution and loss of
contact.
I make neutral comments about this situation. When I ask how it felt to her, my question
triggers an account of some 'childhood memories' about her father's job as a railwayman3
. . . she recalls a whole family vocabulary, as wel l as the fact that railwaymen have to pay for
any delays for which they are responsible . . . that serious difficulties arise if someone tries
to commit suicide by jumping under a train .. . and goes on to discuss the occupational risks
facing other workers, like a physiotherapist friend of hers who was violently attacked by a
patient. The narration continues, until I ask: 'Might there be any connection between these
18
dramatic stories - suicides, attempted murders, the drug addict - and my telling you the
holiday dates last time?'
Marcella laughs in relief and (to my surprise) says: 'If we don't have just an official
relationship any more, but also an emotional one . . . well, then some of the emotions are
violent, and they can't always be controlled by the inspector . . :
'So, ' I comment, 'the inspector might as well not have caused this delay by trying to hold
back the mixture of despair and rage that you call the drug addict:
I make no distinction between the different forms of a patient's communications

- dreams, narrations, childhood memories, anecdotes, etc. - but merely try
to make contact with the a-element, the narrative sequence of a-elements,
or the narrative derivatives of the a-element. The patient constantly selects
narrative derivatives of a-elements for us, in order to assign meaning for us to
the field's emotional pictogram, or its emotional pictographic chain. An a
element is simply the pictographed synthesis of the resultant of the patient's
emotional-relational situation, in a given space-time of the field. It is like the
Giorgio Forattini cartoon featured on the front page of the Italian newspaper
La Repubblica. Constantly and frame by frame, the patient films his own extero
ceptions, proprioceptions and proto-emotions, and stores them as a-elements.
Of these, we may perceive only the narrative derivatives, except in a few rare
cases of waking-dream flashes, which are projected and seen externally.
Patients' narrations stem from their a-elements, and are for us perceptual
emotional afferences that activate, or ought to activate, a-elements, as the fruit
of reverie, or less sophisticated elaborations if they already reach us in the form
of thoughts that will either commit us to the 'selected fact' or engage our
attention in terms of their composition and structure (�d' and Ps H D) .
Similarly, a 'childhood memory' is merely a syncretic account (the narrative
derivative of the a-element) whose sense is clarified in relation to the present,
even if it is not necessarily made explicit as such.
Stifania
My first sight of the patient is impressive. I open the door in a dismal mood, of the kind that
often assails me on a foggy Saturday morning at nine, and am confronted with a gorgeous
young woman with a vertiginously plunging neckline and carrying an enormous suitcase. I
need not dwell on the fantasies inspired by this viSion, which lights up the gloom of that April
moming. She sits down and tells me that she has come because of an interview with me on
'infantile seductions and the memory of them' that she read in L 'Unitil.4 She has a tormenting
memory of an episode in her childhood when, at the age of 1 0, she went for a catechism
lesson for her communion and the sacristan tried to put his hands inside her blouse. I am
struck by the coincidence with my own instant fantasies, and try to widen the conversation
to her suitcase and all the things she must be carrying around with her.
19
7111ing ourselves stories
She tells me a long story of a d ifficult adolescence, with a remote mother and father, who
were separated and in conflict with each other . . . and goes on to say that she would l i ke to
have a relationshi p of 'deep spiritual communion' with her boyfriend, whereas all he can think
of is sex.
So the 'childhood memory' is nothing other than a snapshot of Stefania's current problem:
how to reconcile her need for tenderness and intense emotional closeness (comm u nion)
with an explosive sensuality that she has not been able to i ntegrate. She has come to me
with a view to u nifying these aspects (L 'Unitil - i . e . unity) . Here we have a particularly
successful oneiric cartoon (a-elements) featured on the front page as a token of the
unresolved subject-matter - the undigested fact - that calls for a narrative transformation to
allow new developments.
Marina
M arina is a g i rl who suffers from panic attacks, but is now otherwise q u ite well integrated.
On arriving for her session, she tells me that she has finally realized that she is on another
planet, i n habited by metal androids, and that her own mother is a robot. I am overcome
with fear bordering on panic; I think she must have had a psychotic breakdown and that I
must find a colleague to g ive her the tranquillizer Serenase.5 Then I stop to think what could
have happened . I run my mind back over the recent period. I had told Marina that we would
have to change next week's Friday session to Thursday. I know that this puts her out
very much, because for her the sessions are l ike Tom Thumb's pebbles , but I also remember
that last week we were able for the first time to miss out a session altogether without
rescheduling it.
She had had some d reams: a l ittle girl was left by herself in a house in the mountains, and
it wasn't clear if she had enough food and firewood; there was a woman who was widowed,
but then news arrived that her husband was perhaps not dead after all. These dreams had
hel ped us to fill the gap left by the missed session and to understand the emotions activated.
In another d ream , she had run trustingly to her father who was waiting for her on the other
side of a l ittle bridge . . . but then I had been ill and had to cancel the next two sessions, so
the meeting had not happened .
She had coped with all this . . . but the new commun ication about the rescheduled session
had been the last straw . . . it had made her feel as if she was in a weird world with affectless
metal people . . .
I tell her all this i n simple terms, going back over the story of the last two weeks. She
responds with relief, telling me a dream in which a mad surgeon was transplanting kidneys
instead of hearts . . . and so on . . . just as I was doing with the sessions . . .
The possibility of a transformational narration and of selected facts, appropriately l i n ked
together, banishes from the scene the persecution which the a-function was now scarcely
able to represent by a 'tranqu i l ' pictograph;6 hence my fantasy of the tranquillizer - something
to lighten the burden on the a-function and the apparatus for thinking thoughts.
20
On another occasion when one of Marina's sessions has to be rescheduled, she dreams
that her own father, a cardiologist, is very ill; the ward sister, to whom she gives a prescription
to help her father, but who takes no notice of it, says that 'the little bears are fine . . . it's nice
to go on holiday' . . . I interpret the dream as being about the patient's separation anxieties
. . . on hearing the telephone ring in the room next door, she thinks it is a woman patient she
saw arriving, who was in tears and seemed to her to be desperate. Then she recalls a TV
movie, Gamma, in which someone was perform ing a brain transplant (instal ling cassettes to
recondition the new brain with the right memories), but a criminal switched the cassettes and
turned the patient into a killer. Then she tells me about a woman friend of hers who is always
furious, and goes around with a knife in her bag .
If I fail to realize the crisis that afflicts me, li ke the cardiologist father, whenever the setting
is modified , and I interpret in Column 2 instead of picking u p the most i mmediate anxieties,
and if I am not prepared to look i nto her prescription, the climate gets worse and worse,
ultimately inducing fury on her part and again dehumanizing the analysis, while the pain is
split off i nto 'the patient she saw arriving' .
There i s always a great temptation for the analyst t o operate i n Column 2 (the
column of lies). In this case it was simpler for me to interpret the anxiety as being
connected with the holidays, for which I was basically not so responsible, than
to accept the burden of the patient's ill-being as due to my breach of the setting.
Bion in fact draws attention to this risk repeatedly - most clearly in the Italian
seminars (Bion 1985).
Martina
For a long time Martina has been afraid of ' being a vegetable'. After a few months of analysis,
she dreams of a heart-shaped ' big red radish', and then of a l ittle bird 's heart developing and
beating.
Certain narrations can sometimes be construed i n a relational sense: if my interpretation
touches her too closely, there appears 'Tinto Brass',1 or, on occasion, 'barbecued meat' o n
an i ron grill (F).8
But all of a sudden, just before the holidays, an emotional field with a large number of focal
pOints i s activated, and has to be respected over a long period, in the fabulae it brings to l ife.
The first concerns a couple separating owing to a crisis of jealousy . . . with m utual rage and
i l l -feel ing . . . with affective d issatisfaction in one partner and sexual dissatisfaction i n the
other. The second is the drama of a l ittle girl who constantly hears her parents tell i ng each
other that they are not going to l ive together any more. The third is about her falling i n love
with a workmate and waiting for him trustingly until the holidays are over. M i nimal
i nterpretative h ints are tolerable, but the field must remain the c ustodian of other
interpretations.
21
Rosa
Rosa, now at an advanced stage of her analysis, dreams of a studious l ittle man aged about
50, to whom she feels attracted: although he is with a woman, she wants to seduce him and
succeeds in making love to him.
I do not know how to take the dream; certain possibilities that I feel to be academic occur
to me, and I say only that it seems to me that she is not holding back on her wish to seduce
somebody, contrary to her long-held theory that she herself has always been the victim of
seductions.
I n the next session, she tells me she felt disturbed because J udge Salamone acquitted a
little g i rl's father accused of having seduced his daug hter. Then she is anxious at having
conceived her second child while the first, a g i rl of 6, was present in the bedroom, albeit
sleeping peacefully. This too seems to her to be a perversion - a successful seduction of her
husband . At this point I am bound to remind her that for a long time she was afraid that she
had seduced me, on account of the way I looked at her, and her i nterpretation of my
supposed sexual fantasies about her, and that, when she was small, she had thought her
father harboured seductive i ntentions towards her . . .
Now, after the dream and my intervention, the judge's verdict is clear: the father had not
been the seducer, but it was she who had wanted to seduce the father (forgetting the woman)
and myself (forgetting the analysis). Moreover, this fear of seduction also entered into the
fear that the decision - shared with me - to terminate the analysis (the second daughter) was
the result of a successful seduction of myself, which had taken place in the presence of the
first daughter, the now 6-year-old analysis.
She is astonished to realize that she really did think this.
In my View, the chapters of Elements of Psycho-Analysis ( 1 963) in which Bion

considers In depth the viCissitudes of S? d and Ps H D deserve particularly close
attention, together With the fine pages of Learning from Experience (Bion 1 962)
on the development of S? , d and S? d .
I t i s once again Rosa who brings a dream i n which she wanted to make love t o a n old
boyfriend who had abandoned her, but this would have ruined her present happiness, even
though it might have helped her to overcome her anxiety at the abandonment. This fol lows
the account of a difficult weekend with her l ittle girl, who had fits of jealousy and excitement
about her expected new l ittle sister. The excitement of making love to the old boyfriend is
felt to be a corrective to the abandonment.
Then she mentions a little g irl who told her therapist that her father had touched her 'twinkie'
and a supervisor who had said that glue spilt from the tin might be a reference to her father's
semen .
I notice that I have lately been excitedly giving transference interpretations, and suggest
to her that there is precisely an excitement - it is immaterial whether it stems from her and
is then activated in myself, or whether I am its source, and I then discharge it - that acts as
a corrective to the forthcoming mouming for the termination, which is feared as an
abandonment, and to the associated feelings of jealousy.
22
The fur coat and the sandals
Luisa. is a. patient who envelops me in a. blanket of words, which smother me and prevent me
from identifying any meaningful thread, however fine, in what she tells me. I could of course
interpret all this jabbering as a protective smoke screen, as this seems fairly clear to me, but
I decide to wait because I feel that she would not have a place for this interpretation.
She then unexpectedly brings a dream: she was wearing a long, heavy fur coat that
completely covered her, but with sandals that left her feet and ankles bare. She then
associates to a woman friend's dream in which the friend was afraid because a light suddenly
appeared in a dark wood and she was terrified of being attacked . I could easily give an
exhaustive interpretation: the patient is signalling that although she covers herself all over
with a thick layer of words, something is beginning to show through, as in the dream itself
but suddenly she is afraid of giving away her position, of being discovered, and of being
attacked by gunshot-interpretations. I say: 'The dreams are telling us something about
covering and uncovering oneself: 9 so what are the dangers to be uncovered? ' She answers:
'Well , it's like when I was a teenager: I was accosted by one of those randy old men, who
made an obscene suggestion to me, and didn't let me experience my wish for adolescence
and discovery.'
Ifthe analyst gives excessively direct, saturated interpretations, he is experien� ed

by the patient as being full of uncontainable sexual/relational desires; he must
therefore forgo such interpretations and leave the patient enough time to acquire
trust and to discover herself, by doing his best to establish an emotional climate
appropriate to discovery. One is inevitably reminded of Winnicott's ( 1 97 1 )
comment about the amount o f deep change h e prevented by his personal need
to interpret, and how he later came to enjoy facilitating the patient's creativity
more than the sense of having been clever in his interpretations.
In the iguana 's belly
For two of Giovanna's sessions, I am more silent and rather less present than usual , because
I am still feeling disturbed by the violent psychotic transference of the previous patient.
In the third session, Giovanna brings three dreams. In the first, she was ticked off by a
woman friend for being indifferent to everything; in the second, her boyfriend told her that
he was going away for six or seven years and a television set was broken and not showing
programmes any more; while in the third , she was eaten up by a huge iguana, and although
she was protected in its belly, she was also shut in and could not get out until ' it opened its
mouth' . She associates to Pinocchio, who, when he and his father are swallowed by a whale,
manages to escape by lighting a fire inside its belly.
Together we are able to develop the idea that if she feels that I am less present, she is
swallowed up by indifference. It is as if her boyfriend were to go away and leave her alone:
the programme is interrupted and she is protected - but she is also a prisoner, imprisoned
23
by indifference inside the cold-blooded iguana, until I start tal king again and im part to the
relationship the fiery heat that will enable her to emerge 'from the whale's belly.
The organless little girl
Manuela dreams of a l ittle girl with no l iver, no heart and perhaps no other organs either.
' H ow are we to take this dream? ' asks the patient, whose analysis is at an advanced stage.
Who will take on this little girl? Is the analyst the one who is 'heartless' and 'lacking in courage'
(because he is going on holiday and has suggested an adjustment to her session times to
make his schedule more convenient), or is it the patient, who will lack the organs needed
to survive if she is without her analysis? But, she adds, the little girl in the dream is in a sort
of scientific analytical laboratory, and there's no one there . . . no parents . . . no doctors
. . . and no nurses. Wel l then, could it be the lack of these maternal or paternal 'functions',
of a heart, that deprives the little girl of the corresponding organs? This hypothesis excites
Manuela.
Carlo 's wild goat
On beginning to get back in touch with his manhood and autonomy, Carlo has the following
d ream: he is in an operating theatre where a wild goat has been anaesthetized for brain
surgery . . . the operation is in progress . . . but then the anaesthetic wears off. Instead of
interpreting that 'the wild goat is the part which . . . ' , I ask what happened to the goat. It had
to be anaesthetized because there was no grass . . . only ice . . . That was the only way it
could survive . . . hunger had driven it mad . . . hence the operation . . .
The gardeners and the danger offire
A little boy's parents ask me for advice. In the first two interviews, I fail to understand anything:
there do not seem to be any particular problems either with the boy or with them . Yet they
are worried. I cannot see what is worrying them. Gradually, metaphors of raising emerge -
for instance, 'gardeners looking after young plants' . . . The mother then tel ls me that her
'h usband has a brother who flares up l ike a match ' . . . then they suddenly 'catch fire' in front
of me over some utterly trivial problem . . . they quarrel . . . they get heated . . . they are quite
inflamed . . . and - finally - at the third interview, I become aware of their fear of gardeners,
however solicitous they may be, in case the pyromaniac ' brothers' . . . set fire to what they
are lovingly caring for. It is now necessary to clarify the problem in terms of their concerns
to inform them of the need for 'foresters' who are aware of this incendiary tendency, which,
after all, is indicative of passion and love, but which sometimes risks burning what they love
most.
24
It is in my view absolutely inevitable that the analyst will 'soil' the field with his
mental presence (it could not be otherwise); that is the only way to effect the
vital graft that will allow genuine creative mingling of the analyst's and patient's
emotional genomes, thus breaking the suffocating vicious circle of the
compulsion to repeat.
A short story by Arthur Schnitzler, 'Reichtum' ['Riches'] in my view tellingly
'
illustrates this situation.
Schnitzler's 'Riches'
The title of this story could equally well be 'Remembering and repeating
without ever working through' (Ferro 1995b). Its hero, a failed artist who ekes
out a living as a house-painter, rises one morning and finds himself smartly
dressed in tails.Herr Weldein, as he is called, gradually remembers what happened
to him the night before. Having gambled and won at a tavern, he had been joined
by some dissolute noblemen who, for amusement, had dressed him in their smart
clothes and taken him to a gambling club, where he won a fortune. But now, as
he wakes, where is the money? He remembers having been afraid that they might
take it away from him, so he did not take it home; he remembers certain small
clues . . . others emerge tortuously in the next few days . . . he remembers bending
down . . . he remembers the sound ofwater . . . so he combs the entire town trying
to find what he so carefully hid.
To no avail. He despairs for his family, who must go on living in poverty, and
for his son Franz:'Poor Franz, my poor little boy.'
The years go by. Franz has meanwhile become a well-known painter,
although the only subjects he can portray successfully are gamblers and gambling
dens.
On his deathbed, Weldein suddenly remembers where he hid his treasure,
and informs his son of its location. Incredulous, the son goes to the river bank,
beside a bridge, where he follows his father's instructions and finds the treasure.
The son looks forward to a life of luxury and riches. But he has a painting
to finish. It depicts a gambling hall with gamblers, but seems to him to be lacking
in passion, so he decides to get someone to take him to the club - the one where
his father won the money - to experience the intoxication of gambling, so that
he can portray it in his picture. Of course, he loses every penny at the gaming
table.
So he goes back to the river bank, digs, fills his pockets with stones and earth,
and tells himself that these are his father's fortune. But this does not work: it is
not long before he realizes that his pockets are full of stones. At this point his
face becomes contorted, virtually assuming the physical features of his father,
and he says: 'The money, where did I hide the money . . . ?' Now totally
25
identified with the father when he was unable to find the treasure, he says: 'Poor
Franz, my poor little boy.'
Let me add that in the background there IS a character, a nobleman, who could
have contributed, in the story both of the father (he was one of the nobles who
took him to the gambling club) and of the son (it was he who commissioned
the picture from him) , to a different outcome : although he could have traniformed
the story, he always merely 'looked on', adopting a neutral, distant stance.
It IS of course Impossible to overlook the parallel with the 'position of the
analyst In the sessIon' (Luzes 1 995) , who may get Involved or remain aloof,
watching, but not Interacting with, the patient's need for passion and the
accumulatIOn of transgeneratlOnal fantasies which, if not transformed, will make
for an eternal compulsIOn to repeat (Falmberg 1 988) .
26
3
In prais e of Row C:
psychoanalysis as a particular form of
literature
Let me begin this chapter with a briefnote on a-elements and their derivatives,
so that we can gradually move on from Row B of Bion's Grid (the formation
of a-elements) to Row C, in which they are placed in sequence, and to the
formation of narrative derivatives.
To obviate any misunderstanding of the basic structure of my theoretical and
clinical model, I shall outline it again in slightly different terms in the chapters
on sexuality and on waking dream thought. Despite the risk of repetition, I hope
that this will make for greater clarity.
Bion (1 962) postulates that the activity of metabolization which we apply to
every perceptual afference is of central importance.This activity consists in the
formation, from afferences, of a pictogram, or visual ideogram, which is a poetic
image that syncretizes the emotional resultant of the relevant afference or set of
afferences - namely, the a-element.These a-elements are not directly accessible
in waking life except through the phenomena of'reverie' and 'oneiric flashes' .
They are the way i n which every sensory, exteroceptive and proprioceptive
experience is pictographed in real time. Each emotional-sensory pictogram is
thus placed in a sequence with other a-elements.The sequence of a-elements
IS unknowable except through their narrative derivatives.
The analyst interprets. The manner in which the patient 'hears' his
mterpretation is pictographed in an a-element and in a sequence of a-elements.
These a-elements are not directly accessible, but are rendered to some extent
knowable by their 'narrative derivatives' - that is, by what the patient says
immediately after the interpretation. While the patient's words draw on his history
and internal world, they surely also draw on what the mind is pictographing at
every relational instant. .
The 'narrative derivative' is like a literary genre.That is to say, it is independent
of the quality and seriation of a-elements. One and the same sequence of
27
In praise of Row C
a-elements can be narrated by, for example, a childhood memory; an account

of ' external' life; a report of a film; a diaristIc genre; an mtImate-type genre; or
an infinite number of other possible modes . However, they all signify the same
experience of a sequence of a-elements.
If an interpretatIon has resulted m the pictographing of a-elements that have
to do with pain, violence or oppression, the narrative derivative might be ' I
remember once, when I was small, how my father gave m e a very painful
inj ection, and then humiliated me in front of everybody because I cned' or ' I
saw a film on television in which a girl was assaulted and raped by a hitch-hiker
she had given a lift to' or 'Something very unpleasant happened to my aunt the
other day: some immigrants tried to mug her because she wouldn't give them
what they wanted' or 'A friend of mine came to me in tears because her husband
forces her to have violent sex with him with absolutely no tenderness' or ' I
dreamt o f a Greek god who was pursuing m e with spears and wanted t o run
me through.'
However, what determines the choice of narrative genre? In my view, the choice
aims to achieve a maximum of correspondence between the a-element and
what the subject wishes to express: on each occasion, the 'fact', 'memory', 'story',
'dream' or 'anecdote' most suitable for narrating the particular sequence of a
elements IS selected, chosen and 'broadcast' . Moreover, each mind will have its
own preference for a particular genre, which it uses because it is most suitable
for the purpose.
I include dreams in my enumeration because a dream, when brought in a
session, is an event of the relational mstant m which It is narrated, while in turn
being a narrative denvative of other a-sequences at the time of ItS narration (this
is not so at the time of dreaming) .
These 'narrative derivatives' thus also constitute continuous 'signals' of the
linguistIc and emotional text of the session.
From this point of view, the characters of the session can also be seen as
'functIonal aggregates' that express the resultant of a partIcular form of oneiric
functioning of the couple (Ferro 1 992; Bezoari and Ferro 1 992a) .
The most common 'narrative denvatives' occurring m adult analyses may also
be expressed in other forms (in each case as narratIons of a-elements) - for
mstance, play derivatives (e.g. a child analysand's play after an interpretation) ;
graphic denvatlves (drawmgs made m the sessIOn) ; sensory derivatIves (e.g.
stomach rumbles, sneezes or coughs) ; motor denvatives (as signs of actmg-in as
commumcatlOn); or onemc derivatlves.The oneiric derivatIves are of fundamental
Importance because they indicate what is m my opmlOn the vital possibility of
usmg dreams to narrate the here and now - that IS, as a story that expresses the
quality of the a-element 'kindled' at the relevant moment. This applies in
partICular to the kind of dreams brought by patIents at a certain point in the
session, when they say: 'A dream occurs to me . . .' , or to dreams m response to
an mterpretation.That is why patients should not be trained to tell their dreams;
28
In praise of Row C
instead, the analyst should try to encourage their possible emergence at times
when they are meaningful.
Ultimately, then, the a-element is to the narrative derivative as poetry is to the prose
of its paraphrase - or as an original Chinese ideogram is to its graphic derivatives
(Figure 4) .
Figure 4 shows the following sequence: first, the drawing representing the
origin of the relevant character, and then its development in various calligraphic
sryles: (a) incisions on tortoiseshell, (b) inscription on bronze, (c) small - seal
characters, (d) scribe sryle, (e) standard sryle and (f) cursive sryle.
As readers of earlier contributions of mine will know, my interest in
narratology stems from the concept of the ' characters of a text'. This notion
extends from psychologistic theories of characters, via the theories of the Propp
school and of structuralism, to the more recent theories of character construction
by way of the intersection of text and reader on the basis of the reading time
(Eco 1 979) , as exemplified by Calvino's novel lf on a Winter's Night a Traveler
(1979) and, to an even greater extent, by Joyce's Finnegans liVtlke (1939) .The focus
of my interest later shifted to the construction not only of characters but also of
the narrative text - in particular, that of the 'analytic session' .
Row C ofBion's Grid (Figure 5 ) i s the row o f dreams, myths, narrations with
visual characteristics - and, in my view, also of , poetry' . Here, the sequence of
a-elements takes on a compositional structure, whether it relates to a dream,
to myth, or to the private myth of the analytic couple or of the patient. It is the
row in which the a-element is not isolated, but in harness with other a
elements.
Its main characteristic is the 'sensory' (visual) reference, but from other
vertices, it could also refer to an auditory or coenaesthetic sensorialiry; it is thus
connected with music or dance. For the sake of simpliciry, I shall consider only
the visual aspect.
Another characteristic is non-saturation - precisely because the visual sense,
together with its narrative derivatives, opens the way to an infinite number of
possible senses.
Bemg with the patient in Row C means refraining from operations of
interpretative translation, or transliteration from one dialect to another, and
instead working constantly in the original and creative area of the encounter, of
the joining of the �-element to the a-function, until it is linked up with other
a-elements. It is thus the locus of Image creation and hence of the contact
barrier. Beta-elements - undigested facts - press urgently to enter the field and
to be traniformed there into a-elements and dreams.
Interpretative decoding is a diametrically opposite operation, which at best
takes the form of a 'simultaneous translation' into a dialect more consonant with
ourselves. In the worst case, however, it is -K (which is an attack on the patient's
a-function and on the creativiry of the couple's primal scene, at the place and
time of the encounter between � and the a-function) .
29
In praise if Row C
An arrow is speeding towards a man's
��
chest and is about to wound him . The
character has two meanings : 'wo und'
or ' disease ' , when referring to the
effect of the attack with the arrow; or
' swift ' , where the speed of the arrow is
�
considered.
In modern Chinese, it appears rarely, CD
in expressions such as :
�
� ji bing (disease, disease) :
disease (2)
�� j i fei meng jin (swift,
flying, violent, moving forward) :
��
swift and impetuous
@
I.� Ii j i (dysentery, disease) :
dysentery
"
�
*'
niie ji (malaria, disease) :
malaria ®
@ �
@ It
Figure 4 DiSCUSSIOn of a Chinese character [translated from Yuan Huagmg (1998) LA scrittura
cinese, Milan: A VaUardi]
30
In praise of Row C
Definitory til Notation . Attention Inquiry Action

hypotheses
1 2 3 4 5 6 ••.n
A
�-elements Al A2 A6
B
a-elements Bl B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 ... Bn
C
Dream Cl C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 ... Cn
thoughts.
dreams, myths
D
DI D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 ... Dn
Pre-conception
E
El E2 E3 E4 E5 E6 ...En
Conception
F
FI F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 ... Fn
Concept
G
Scientific
deductive
G2
system
H
Algebraic
calculus
Figure 5 Bion's Grid
31
In praise oj Row C
The analyst performs a narrative traniformation whenever he takes �-elements

upon himself and succeeds in giving them an original interpretative construction,
in which he confers narrative status on the pressing emotional turbulence or
evacuation of �-elements, according to the relevant genre. The analyst, together
with the patient, must breathe life into a theatrical scene representing the
emotions of the field, thereby opening up increasing and unsaturated levels of
sense; as Luzes ( 1 995) puts it, he must impart life to the 'feuilleton'.
In great anger, a very anxious woman patient offers a n immediate answer to her own question:
'The boy I saw coming down the stairs as I went up: was he Qui [here)?' 'He was not Qua
[here)!' 'Thank goodness he was not Quo ! ' , 1 adds the patient, smiling, thus paving the way
for a good start to the session, compared with the extremely bad one that could have ensued .
The visual image resultIng from the auditory-to-visual transformatIOn Qui �

Qu a revealed the Infantile root of the patient's question - namely, a reference to
Donald Duck - and the meaninglessness of the question on the adult level: there
is no distInctIOn between Qui, Quo and Qua.
That is not all. The patient is also provided with an opportunity for a creative
step forward with her reply 'Thank goodness he was not Quo!' The result is the
creation of a Walt Disney comic strip, which is also the begInning of a fabric of
emotions that allow the development of � and IS thus a prerequisite for that
of d' . It IS in a culture of ' negative capabiliry' that the possibiliry of a narrative
content capable of transforming � anses.
Carlo
After a session I had had to cancel, Carlo arrives for his next session in great anger. He cannot
tolerate direct transference interpretations, which literally make him bleed . He at once tells
me about something nasty that was done to his son by a spiteful schoolmate, who 'threw
his pen [penna)2 across the room'. The son made a terrible fuss about the incident, but the
patient's wife pooh-poohed it, making the boy cry even more.
My immediate reverie is of a feather being plucked from a chick. With another patient,
I feel that I could have used this image, connecting it with the session I had 'plucked out',
but I sense that, although this interpretation is the fruit of reverie and supplies an a
element, it would make Carlo bleed . So I must resort to a construction on Row C, diluting
the impact of the a-element in a less vivid narrative sequence, and I therefore tell him that
his account sugges.ts to me a scene in which a boy happily playing at being an I ndian and
proud of his feathers has his fun spoilt by a spiteful playmate who has ripped out one of his
feathers: one can well imagine that the boy made a fuss about it, as it was after all a nasty
thing to do!
After a moment's pause, the patient says:
32
In praise of Row C
But then, you know, my wife put on a cartoon for the boy. Marco calmed down and , that
evening, at a party with friends, something happened that I hadn't in the least been
expecting: my wife got me dancing in a way that rekindled all my passion for her.
In my view, this narrative function sterns from the synergetic operation of the
a-function (which creates the emotional pictogram - i.e. the image) and the
apparatus for thinking thoughts (d' � and Ps H D) (which weaves the narration).
I believe, too, that the ultimate aim of analysis is the stabilized introjection of a
narrator of this kind, in such a way as to permit emotional transformations from
� to a notwithstanding all emotional vicissitudes.
A male patient approaching the end of his analysis had got into the habit,
whenever something worried him or made him anxious, of writing an account
of the situation, as an extreme way of articulating the cause of the anxiety. This
enabled him to make the disturbing element thinkable and then to stand back
from what he had written, which he then no longer considered realistic, or to
attempt a deeper interpretation of the possible meaning of the original fear.
It will be seen that my conception of the unconscious, as exemplified in this
book, differs profoundly from Freud's or Klein's. I subscribe to the idea of the
unconscious (due of course to Bion) as an entity downstream of the encounter
between �-elements and the a-function, in a state of constant formation and
transformation, which calls not for decoding but for ongoing transformation
and enrichment, by working on the accumulations of ' undigested facts' (Bion
1 962) that are the real promoters of every narration.
I am not concerned here with the capacity of literature to narrate 'psycho
analytic facts' to us in a form often superior to any psychoanalytic theory. In
other words, I shall not be considering in depth how literature may lend itself
to a categorization of psychoanalytic facts in Row C; after all, the entire subject
matter of psychoanalytic theory finds in Row C a more open, creative and
unsaturated form of expression than any other possible exemplification.
However, as stated, that is not the main intention of my approach. My basic
vertex is the need for the analyst to function in the session as a co-narrator so as
to allow constant development of the field under investigation.
Narration in the analyst's consulting room
In the Clinical Seminars, Bion (1 987) states that his response to a patient's
communications is to ask himself what story could be told to the patient to
facilitate understanding; he adds that the interpretation must be consistent with
the patient's capacity for assumption and digestion, as if the patient were a
newborn baby. In other words, the need is to find the right way of talking to
the patient.
33
In praise of Row C
Succesiful narration
Emilio 's architectural barriers
Patrizia is not an easy patient, yet she fits in well with Sion ' s idea of the patient as 'one's
best colleag ue'. She suffers from panic attacks and I have given her the key to the main
entrance of the building where I have my consulting room, for use in 'emergency' only. At
the beginning of a session (in which she has finally agreed to lie down on the couch) , she
i nsists on being able to open the main entrance door with the key every time. Referring to
something that came up in the previous session, I tell her that, whereas on the one hand she
is prepared to lie down on the couc h , on the other the 'rebellious adolescent' in her wants
the keys to the house. Not at all, she says: o pen ing the entrance door helps her to avoid
the bad feeling and embarrassment that afflicts her when waiting below and destroys the
possibility of a good and constructive session. Then she asks me whether I smoke in sessions
with other patients.3 The question 'demands' an answer; I feel that we are embarking on a
session of total incomprehension , which w i l l make her anxious, so that I too will feel
d i sappointed, frustrated and 'fuming' with rage.
I ask myself: 'Sup pose I were to try to change this vertex, with its possible elements of
decoding and the su perego (perhaps -K) , and maybe meet her half-way?' I say: 'I think you
might be asking me to demolish the architectural barriers that exist between us before we
get together.'
It is only after formulating this interpretation that I recall that in the previous session she
showed me a photograph of a friend of hers i n a wheelchair, who had a brain tumour: in the
past, his suffering had horrified and terrified her, but now she could cope with it. So I add that
perhaps the demolition of the architectural barriers would allow ' Emilio' (the friend ' s name) to
enter the room, without the bottleneck of waiting or of my silence in response to her questions.
I n reply, she says she is afraid that she too might have a brain tumour. This, I tell her, proves
that ' Emilio, a paralysed aspect of herself' , has really entered the analysis, even if for the time
being he needs special arrangements in order to reach us.
Carletta
Carletto comes to his consultation with a box and an exercise book. After a friendly greeting,
h e takes out some d iscs ('pogs ' , which have a picture on the front and a grey back), stacks
them up and beg ins to strike them with other, heavier discs ('slammers'). Whenever a disc
turns over, the coloured side is revealed, showing mainly fleas, skulls and a crocodile ( ' I 've
got two of these ,' he adds). I realize that he is telling me he wou ld like to be hel ped to lay his
cards on the table, revealing them in the same way as he is revealing the pictures on the
d iscs, and it occurs to me that many of my q uestions might be the slammers, which, on
striking the other d iscs, reveal what is hidden beneath. So I ask him (putting on the same
thoug htful air as he seems to be exhibiting): 'Are there lots of things worrying you ? ' ' Yes,
school and my schoolmates . '
34
In praise of Row C
'What happens at school?' (Meanwhile he has switched games and is drawing a map of
a town, which, he tells me, is Mousetown.) 'The other kids are terrible - especially Albertini,
who always thinks people are pinching things from him; he's an absolute bully - and his
enemy. '
' H e sou nds like a Big Bad Pete to me, ' I tell him. He smiles at me, and I add: 'And there
doesn't seem to be any Chief O'Hara to stop h i m . ' 'That's just how it is,' he answers, and
goes on to describe all the evil deeds in which 'Big Bad Pete' would l i ke to involve him, but
now he is able to resist - something he could not do when he was small .
I say t o h i m : 'Well , you ' re a b i t like Mickey Mouse, always fighting against B i g Bad Pete
and his gan g . ' ' Let me draw you a picture . ' With great precision, he then draws a house, a
meadow and mountains (Fig ure 6).
I suddenly have a vision of a landscape seen through the mouth of a crocod ile, with teeth
in the middle . . . I now imagine Carletto in part fighting with the Big-Bad-Pete-crocodile,
from whom he is gradually becoming able to distance himself so that he can enter a world
with less greed and less need for appropriation.
I tell him that this landscape, with the meadow and the mountains, is very beautifu l . He
replies: 'J ust imagine: this is the job I want when I grow u p . . . working in the woods . . . as
a forest ranger . . . feeding the animals and protecting them from poachers . '
At this pOint I imag ine that h e has w e l l a n d tru ly 'exited ' t h e crocodile's stomach, en route
for the new world in which he will be able to take care of his own affects and needs, and to
protect them from his intemal gang of characteropaths.
Figure 6 A landscape drawn by Carletto
35
In praise of Row C
One final comment. Carletto is an adopted c h i l d , with problems of u n ruly behaviour at

school and, in the past, of stealing; however, he has become increasingly integ rated i nto the
affective reality of his family, through his adoptive parents' loving care. When they originally
took h i m home from the orphanage, he had been d iagnosed as autistic. He did not speak,
look anyo ne in the face, or draw pictures. They asked me to mon itor him periodically, and to
wait for them to be able to take Carletto in before contem plating the possibility of therapy.
The failure of narration and -K
Often the hoped-for transformation fails to materialize, oWing either to

congestion of narrative capacIty by a plethora of emotions that ultimately block
the fIeld, or to the emotIOnal unavailability of the analyst (Bolognini 1 997) . For
instance, I notice that when I am tired I tend much more to 'interpret' the
patIent's communications, Instead of being able to play with them in such a way
as to bring about transformation. Whereas some patients are relatIvely tolerant
of such an attitude over a long period (or of situatIOns that demand it) , others
cannot endure anything about them that stems from one mind only (Riolo
1 989) .
Stifano
Working with Stefano at such a time, I decode his commun ications on the transference level.
H e arrives for the next session in g l oomy, downcast mood : he has quarrelled i ncessantly
with his wife, he doesn't want to know anything more about her, she is an i mpossible woman,
who always wants to have the last word . At home, she told off her daughter, who shut herself
i n her room sobbing; he would have l i ked to come to the daughter's aid, but only 'she' can
help her, and he even thought of beating his wife . . .
However, I do not for a moment think it appropriate to interpret all this as a response to
the overd ose I had administered in the previous session, so I introd uce a buffer solution
i nto the field, to d il ute its acid ity with unsaturated, narrative comments that grasp the trouble
he m ust have with a 'wife' who is sometimes so u nbearable. The climate improves, and he
tells me that he made it u p with his wife that evening, and that she had then even cooked
h i m his favourite dish.
36
4
Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect

in the analyst's consulting room:
a radical vertex
Psychoanalysis has made an enormous contribution to our knowledge of human

sexuality since Freud's earliest works, and he himself must take the credit for
having introduced the concept of psychosexuality (Freud 1 905; Green 1 995) .
The notion of 'sexual states of mind' (Meltzer 1 973) has been equally
fundamental. The input of psychoanalysis to theories of infantile sexual
development, with the associated fantasies, sexology and the psychogenesis of
sexual pathologies has become a shared heritage (Zac de Goldstein 1 984; Britton
1 989; Eva 1 995; McDougall 1 995; Sapienza 1 995; Rocha Barros 1 997; Eizirik
1 998; Faria 1 998) .
This chapter, which is a further development of ideas outlined in earlier
contributions of mine (Ferro 1 996a, 1 998d) , is not about sexuality as such, but
about the use of communications concerning sexuality as a means of in-depth
investigation of the functioning of the human mind. I therefore focus my
attention on the 'analyst's consulting room' , given that almost always we have to
do here with stories involving sexuality - that is, with narrations of, or about,
sexuality. 1
Let u s consider the problem of'what the patient and the analyst talk about' .
They could be seen as talking about dislocations in time (the 'before' of Freud's
theories on infantile trauma and infantile sexuality) or in space (the ' elsewhere'
of theories that invoke dynamics with objects) . Such theories differ radically
from those in which the unconscious is regarded as something in a state of
ongoing formation through processes of continuous alphabetization in the
present - that is, the transformation of �-elements into a-elements.Alternatively,
from my preferred vertex (which I regard as more likely to bring about
trans!ormation) , 'analyst and patient' are also constantly talking about the present
modes of functioning of the minds in the field which they constitute, which is
37
constantly replemshed by the vanous emotional turbulences, transferences and

fantasies of the here and now (Bion 1 962) .
My strong assumption in this book IS that patients come into analysis because
they have something 'undigested' (ibid.) that must be transformed Into a
elements. At any rate, this is so in favourable sItuations, but there may in addition
be an insufficiency of the 'apparatus for thinking thoughts' (Ps H D; � d') (ibid.)
or, in even more serious cases, a deficient a-function (Bion 1 962, 1 963, 1 965,
1 992) .
The way in which this 'work' is done is continuously renarrated. In the first
case (undigested facts) , this operation comprises the transformation of these
�-elements - or 'betalomas' (Barale and Ferro 1 992) - into a-elements, which
are effectively emotional pictograms; in the second case (insufficiency of the
apparatus for thinking thoughts) , it is the development of � d' and Ps H D; and
in the third and most serious case (defective a-function) , it entails the progressive
introj ection of a sounder a-function.
The patient of course chooses a narrative genre of his own, which may be a
'chromcle' , a 'diaristic genre', or, in perhaps the most fortunate cases, an 'intimate
diary' , and so on. From the very first meetIng with the analyst, and indeed even
before it (Baranger and Baranger 1 9 6 1 -2), the patient's history and fantasies
undergo narrative deconstructIOn. This results from the proj ective identifications
that begin to circulate in the field, from the emotional turbulences activated
within it. from the analyst's availability and 'mental space' , and from his capacity
for reverie and for transforming � into a.
This last process immediately becomes the engIne of the analytic encounter
(regardless of the analyst's chosen dialect - e.g. historical reconstructIon, the
internal world and Internal obj ects, the relationship in the present, or the field)
(Ferro 1 996d) .
The quality of functIOning of the � � a process, as stated, is constantly
signalled and renarrated by the patient 'In real time' . It is not difficult to
understand why this should be so, both In practice and theoretically, as I shall
explain below.
An a-element ariSIng - which may also be produced by the patient's
a-function - is not directly knowable except in the case of 'visual flashes'
(Meltzer 1 982a, 1982b, 1 982c, 1 984, 1 986; Ferro 1 992, 1 993e, 1 996a; Bezoari
and Ferro 1 992a, 1 994b) . Conversely, its narrative derivatives (Ferro 1996b, 1 996d,
1 996e) are knowable - like a picture covered by a cloth, the outline of which
mIght be suggested through a narration (Parthenope Bion Talamo, personal
commumcation, 1 997) .
38
Characters in the analyst's consulting room
The patient possesses a virtually infinite range of possible stories, given that
he can draw on memories, fantasies, dreams, events in the real external world,
what happens to himself and others, and so on. In the consulting room, we
postulate that the patient's narration is not a matter of chance, but in some way
unfolds with a view to communicating 'something' . This 'something' has been
conceptualized in a number of different ways (Ferro 199 1a, 1993b, 1993c, 1996a) :
(a) the facts of infancy and the family romance, (b) the facts o fth e internal world,
and (c) relationally significant facts.
In my view, in a psychoanalytic session each of the two minds present signals
to the other in addition the quality of their mutual interaction and functioning,
as well as the degree of success of the proj ect to transform 'undigested facts' into
'a-elements' and approximations into '0'.
These communications are mediated by the use of characters, such as 'my
father' , 'my uncle' or 'my cat' , which, according to the chosen vertex, are
understood predominantly as (a) historical-referential characters that refer to
a 'before and a now'; (b) internal-obj ect characters that refer to an 'inside' of
the patient, which may sometimes be proj ected 'on to' or 'into' the analyst; or
(c) affective-hologram characters, which refer to modes offunctioning assumed
by the field in each of its sectors - characters constituting the three-dimensional
fruit of the encounter between the 'waking dream thoughts' of each member of
the analytic couple, in the infinite possible combinations of the characters that
inhabit the couple.
From this point of view, 'my cat', for example, might signal a relational vector
or sector of the field in which 'felinity' rules.
From this last vertex, each analytic session can be seen as an ongoing
renarration of the emotional facts of the field (Corrao 1 986) . This may occur in
various dialects e.g. the patient's 'job' , 'a love relationship' or 'a travel chronicle' .
-
S o the boy who responded t o a saturated transference interpretation by saying:

'I saw some scientists on television slicing up an egg to see how it was made
inside; what a pity that stopped the chick from hatching' is thereby narrating
how his a-function (or 'apparatus for thinking thoughts') 'visualized' our
previous interpretation; in other words, his communication is the narrative
derivative of a sequence of a-elements which are in themselves unknowable (but
which have to do with pictograms of violence and an attack on life) .
One could discuss whether we should interpret this communication directly,
or 'alternatively' find a way of transforming our interpretative style so as to make
it less persecutory and allow the 'chick' to hatch, while bearing in mind Bion's
comment in the Clinical Seminars ( 1987 : 20) that 'you can't launch out into a
great explanation of the biology of the alimentary canal to a baby'.
What matters is the 'transformation' we succeed in bringing about in the field:
the narrations of the field can be thought of as a Rorschach test of the couple,
39
in which we need to pick up the 'W' , 2 that is, the emotion present at that
-
moment, in accordance with what Bion ( 1 963: 1 1) sees as the essential quality
of a psychoanalytic interpretation: 'Extension in the domain of sense [, . . . ] myth
[, and] passion' .
For example, we could draw attention to the 'stupidity of the scientists' , the
uselessness of their work, or the atrocities perpetrated on the chick. In this case
we should be taking up a position on Row C of the Grid, rather than giving
a sterile, decoding type of interpretation in our compulsive dialect, such as:
'You're telling me that what I said to you . . .' (at the same time formulating a
saturated interpretative hypothesis within ourselves, if we really need one) .
Instead, we should be using the patient's own dialect to proceed towards ' 0 ' and
unison with him.
Similar comments could be made about any communication of'sexuality' in
an analytic session. In other words, 'sexuality' is a character, or linkage between
characters, that can be thought of as something connected with (a) a 'before'
(infantile sexuality) and an 'elsewhere' (real external sexuality) , as with Freud's
Wolf Man; (b) an ' mside' (real internal sexuality, or sexuality of internal objects) ,
as in Klein and her school; or (c) a narratlOn in and of the field in one of the
many 'possIble dialects' of the narrative denvatives of the a-element - that is, a
literary genre, which is no more, but also no less, meaningful than any other
genre.
In these terms, as I have stated elsewhere (Ferro 1 996a) , for 'me as the analyst'
sexuality in a session IS the mating of minds - the 'quality' and 'modality' of the
meeting of the �-element with the a-function, the handling of thoughts and
their communication through the Ps H D oscillation, the � d' interaction,
and the way in which all this is renarrated.
What constitutes sexuality is the mode of development of � which takes ,
place through the addition of emotions that constitute the threads of the fabnc
of an expanding network, and of the growth of d', whose model IS 'a medium
in which lie suspended the "contents'" which protrude from an unknown base
in an atmosphere of toleration of doubt (Bion 1 962: 92) .
Let us now consider the clinical implications of these ideas.
Martina 's phimosis
Martina, a young woman who has been in analysis for some months, has often claimed to
have always flown the flag of independence. One Monday, she begins her analytic week by
talking about her son 's ' phimosis', the concern to which it gives rise, and the operation he
might need , which cannot be put off any longer.
At this point I feel permitted to tell her that there might be something in the consulting room
too that remains hidden, imprisoned , and impossible to express, and that I am wondering
what it may be. Taking up my comment on the fly, Martina replies instantly: 'There are some
40
sexual things I haven't felt brave enough to bring out' - but now, however, she feels she
cannot avoid doing so. She tells me that, for the last few days, she has been very pleasurably
tumed on when making love with her husband if he ties her up and blindfolds her. She then
tells the story of Pedro Almod6var's film whose Italian title is Lt§gami, a word in which she is
not SLlre if the first or the second syllable should be stressed.3 It is about a man who physically
ties a woman to a bed: eventually she falls deeply in love with him, and the story of the pair
thereafter is of their living a life of untrammelled happiness together.
I reply that what she is telling me seems very much to call into question her idea of 'flying
the flag of independence', and that she is apparently saying that she would like a relationship
in which she u ltimately entrusts herself to the other person, basically with consent, gives up
all control of the situation, and as it were puts herself at the mercy of the ' bonds'; she hopes
that a story begun ' by force' might tum into a story - the story of the analysis - that is
important and alive for her.
She answers that, at this time, she feels her h usband to be very close to her and very
interested in her; she feels he understands her, but also recalls her profound unease during
their engagement when he more or less forced her to strip, even though afterwards it had
been very nice.
I am not concerned here with the subtle erotization present throughout this
sequence (that is another aspect of Martina's material: she uses either erotic or
intellectualistic excitation to avoid depressive experiences) . My point is that the
content relates - clearly, in my view - to the crisis of her (pseudo-)independence
and the explicit beginnings of a relational capacity.
The yokel and the mother
A woman patient tells me that on stopping her car when she thought she might have a
puncture, she felt an earth tremor; she describes some viSions, including ghost-like shadows,
and although she knew they originated from her own imagination, she really did see them.
Then she remembers a television programme about seances.
I remember that she feels direct interpretations to be intrusive, but, since I feel these to be
necessary, I say I am afraid her 'father-in-law will come along with one of his gifts', which
disturb her (in the language of the analysis, the father-in-law appears whenever I actively
present her with a meaning she accepts but finds intrusive). I remark that the puncture and
the earth tremor put me in mind of the session we are going to miss next Monday - the session
with a hole in it and the shaking up of our usual situation. I add that the ghosts suggest to
me the previous day's session, in which she recalled infantile situations with her mother,
'which you experienced yesterday very intensely in your fantasy, but as if they were real'.
She replies after a moment that she has suddenly thought of Guido, a country yokel, who,
when she was small, repeatedly tried to force his attentions on her too directly, to kiss her
and to touch her, and how her mother had never come to her defence. I imagine that 'Guido'
becomes incarnate in the field after my direct interpretations, by which she feels 'touched',
41
and i l l defended by an analyst-mother who does not prevent me, the i ntrusive Guido, from
touching her.
Instead of making this explicit by a transference interpretation, I merely say that it must
have been very painful to have a mother who did not protect her at difficult ti mes, and I reflect
that I m ust be more abstinent in my i nterpretations. After a silence on my part (resulting from
my previous reflections), the patient says: 'You don't feel very much l ike working today . '
M ight s h e b e afraid, I comment, that if I keep 'Guido' a t bay because h e is too m u c h on top
of her, touching her with over-explicit i nterpretations, I don't feel l i ke working?
Patient Because I'm not used to having a mother who protects me; I don't know what it's
l i ke.
Analyst And perhaps you ' re afraid that more respect is a sign of distance and indifference.
Patient But it's true I ' m beg i n ning to conceive of a mother who can also act as counsel for
the defence, and care for me instead of aCCUSing me.
VVho is this boy ?
That is the immediate questIOn a young colleague tells me she asked herself
on her very first meeting WIth Berto, a small boy who was brought along for
a consultation because he wanted to be a 'girl' (M . Marascutto, personal
communication, 1 996) .
The mother tells me that she has recently separated from her husband, with whom, at the
time of Berto's conception, she had been in the midst of a serious crisis: she had fallen in
love with another man, and become pregnant against her w ill, feeling that she had been
bullied i nto it. She had tried to abort with the moming-after pill, but it had not worked . Then
she had thought: ' I ' l l stick u p for the child and not for my h usban d . '
S h e describes B e rt a s unlikeable a n d as never having formed an attachment t o her; she
had once given him a finger and he had then calmed dow n. Already at the age of 3, he had
clearly proclaimed: 'I want to be a girl . '
In a later i nterview, t h e father says t h e boy wants a pink room: i f h e wants t o b e gay, well ,
that's a l l right b y h i m . He tells m e that, when they went t o b u y a costume for Carnival, Berto
at first wanted a girl's dress, but then, with some encouragement from the saleslady , opted
for a Power Ranger kit.
I respond by commenting that the boy seems to have fully espoused his mother's
programme. The mother, filled with rage and hate for her husband, had no space for all of
the boy, so that her husband 's emotional genetic heritage, the 'Y' , as it were remained outside
. . . To find a place i n his mother's mind , Berto had to act like a contortion ist, but the 'Y' -
what came from the father - remained outside, at least seemingly, in terms of masculine
identity as well as i n other respects.
There is no room for h i m . Even if he is helped, the Power Ranger comes out - with all the
rage and hate of the embryonic virile i dentity that basically succeeded in resisting the
abortion. This description is of course to be understood in mental terms.
42
Figure 7 Berto's drawing of a
My colleague now shows

of paper contains several very
a bed (Figure 7) and a paper
her mouth (Figure 8).
On l iftin g the lid of the chest (Figure 9), one immediately sees the outline of a boy, with
testicles, a penis and trousers; raising the blanket on the bed reveals a sheet and pillow that
had concealed an enormous penis; and the three-di mensional dummy is nothing other than
an enormous penis.
So there we have it: all the emotions, projective identifications, rage and hate tAat have
found no place in his mother's mind have remained there without being alphabetized, and
he must 'suck them himself' . The girl i s nothing other than the mask (and Berto also makes
a mask) of a Power Ranger, Khan, looking for the place
he is entitled to - as we may of a pirate's hat peeking out
of a masked face (Figure 1 0).
Lauretta is often embarrassed at the sexual material that occurs to her during her sessions.
She now has a problem: her husband would like to make love from beh ind, and he says that
she wants this too. But the idea terrifies her: she is afraid of ending u p torn apart and bleeding
at Accident & Emergency.
43
Figure 8 Drawing of a girl with a huge three-dimensional paper dummy (not visible in the
figure)
�" .' ".' .

.
:' /; : ' .. ' , .
Figure 9 Inside the chest, and underneath the blanket on the bed
44
which case they form the system of conSCIOusness, or down, formmg the
unconscious system.
In other words, the unconscious IS located not upstream but downstream of
the encounter between the �-element (proprioception-exteroceptlOn) and the
a-functIOn; that is to say - again using the Memory metaphor - it too is made
up of face-down a-elements. However, the unconscious may also be inhabited
by what Bion calls 'undigested facts', which are accumulations of emotional or
sensory-perceptual proto-tensIons that have not been transformed into visual
elements and thereby digested and made thinkable. These undigested facts are
not �-elements, but can be seen as partly digested and metabolized �s ('balpha
elements').7
The a-element, or sequence of a-elements flower-cherry-mosquito, is not
directly knowable except in two cases:
(a) When the a-element, a frame from the 'waking dream thought' film, escapes
from the apparatus that was supposed to contain it and is projected and seen
on the outside. In this case a patient might, say, see a flower, a cherry or a
mosqUIto, which syncretizes his mental state at that relational instant.
(b) When we can come into contact WIth, and directly 'visualize', the a-element
- that IS, when using our capacity for 'reverie', in which an image, which is
usually well protected, comes up and can be seen with the 'mind's eye ' ; this
is the maximum level of contact a mind can achIeve with ItSelf.
A characterIstic of the a-element IS that It is pictographed m real tIme, and

syncretized absolutely unpredictably; that is to say, It is not formed using
predeternuned symbols, but is on each occasion a unique and unrepeatable work
of poetry and pictorial art.
An example of the first SItuation is the alarmed response of one of my female
patIents to the announcement of an mcrease in my fees: 'I see a chicken being
plucked.' The a-element, or VIsual movIe frame, had slipped out and become
VIsible. If we watch out for these phenomena, described prevIously by Meltzer
( 1 982a, 1982b, 1984) , we find that they are much more frequent than we mIght
have l1nagmed.
The second SItuatIon can be exemplified by a sessIOn that seemed to me
incomprehensIbly banal, III which I 'saw' a cemetery WIth graves. This enabled
me to get m touch WIth a patient's deeply bUrIed depressive anxIetIes, and to
find the correct regIster to enable me to make contact WIth his suicidal intentions,
by linking the content of my reverie with what he was telling me.
The style, quality and pictorial genre of the a-element are specific to each
human individual; they constItute the mind's most fundamental nucleus of truth
in relation to one's emotIOns and perceptions. An a-element is always 'private' ,
and not i n any way generalizable.
46
Normally, however, patients do not project their a-elements, and analysts are
not always capable of reverie. So are a-elements inaccessible except through
these two narrow channels?
By no means: mental life, the root of thought, is made up of a-elements, of
which we can know the narrative derivatives that constantly bud forth in the stories
told in the consulting room by virtue of the narrative capaaty of minds in the waking
state (the apparatus for thinking thoughts) .
'Flower-cherry-mosquito' might lead to the patient's bringing material whose
'concentrate' or 'essence' (flower-cherry-mosquito) is dissolved in a narration.
If the here and now of the field is a pleasant experience that becomes tasty and
then vaguely irritating, that may be narrated in an infinity of possible genres:
(a) A memory if infancy: 'When I was small, I always looked forward to my

grandparents coming with sweets, but then I got angry because I always had
to wait till dinner time to eat them.'
(b) A seemingly external diaristic genre: 'Today my wife opened the door to me
with gusto and you could see she was happy, but then I got alarmed when
she told me about my sister-in-Iaw's phone call.'
(c) A sexual genre: 'Making love to Giulia used to be very satisfying; what a· pity
her aloofness irritated me.'
We could go on with (d) , (e) , (f) , (g) , (h) , . . . (y) , (z) , all of which are different
narrative embodiments of the same emotional experience: flower-cherry
mosquito.
From this point of view, 'sexuality ' is a choice of narrative genre and is to the
a-element as the plot is to the fabula.8 Furthermore, an a-element too can
pictograph an emotional experience sexually. So there are two loci of sexual
images: the a-element itself, and its associated narrative genre.
What is the origin of the sequence of a-elements? The answer is obvious: it
IS the here and now of the emotional field, of which it becomes an indicator. The
transferences and fantasies constituting the matrIX and engine of the analysis
flow together in it; hence it is the here and now of the emotional field that is
transformed into a and then narrated.
However, not everything proceeds so smoothly. The creative activity of the
analytic couple and of every mind is constantly put to the test by the arrival of
quantities of �- or balpha-elements (the latter, as stated earlier, being regurgitated,
partially digested elements) . As a result, a sequence becomes: flower-cherry
mosquito/� or balpha turbulence. Turbulences of �- or balpha-elements raise
the issue of the capacity of the minds in question to form other a-elements
consistent with these turbulences and capable of conferring meaning on them.
'Scimitar-lion-lake' , for example, might signify a relational mode that suggests
something cutting, which becomes dangerous and then calms down.
47
The situatIOn IS not always so favourable: mstead of the transformation �

(or balpha) � <x, the turbulence may persist, or even increase, giving rise to
evacuations.
The above remarks have to do with the field and its movements during
waking life.9 However, there is of course another channel of access to the <X
element - namely, the 'royal road' of night dreams and their narration. These
were addressed in Bezoari and Ferro ( 1 992a) and are also discussed in the next
chapter.
Concluding remarks
Communications in analysis have to do with the ' analytic field', and tell of this
and nothing else, even if the mode of analyst-patient interaction can be narrated
in an infinite number of dialects. Why, I wonder, should this 'analytic vertex' not
apply if a male patient mentions the 'dryness of his wife's vagina', or a female
patient her husband's 'premature ej aculation' that prevents her from having
passionate feelings when they make love, or a teenager a flasher 'displaymg his
wares' outside her school?
The assumption that these or Similar communications are of mterest to us in
relation only to 'actual sexuality' and not to the 'sexuality of the consulting room'
is m my view likely to kill off the specificity of the 'analytical laboratory' . By
the 'sexuality of the consultmg room' I mean, for example m the case of the 'dry
vagma', a possible dryness assumed by a particular area of the field, making the
relationship painful in the absence of appropnate lubncation; the premature
ej aculatIOn might suggest an over-hasty expliCit interpretatIOn of meanings
that takes away the taste for shanng - that IS, the presence in the field of an
'incontment part' that needs to be transformed so that It becomes capable of
contaming and hence of feeling and experiencing passion; and the flasher points
to the revelation of excessively raw contents that can only cause disorientation.
All these examples should be seen as mere ' exercises' , because in a field-based
approach it IS of course impossible to decode a communication, but only to
generate meanings that progressively develop and become interlinked (Borgogno
1 997 ; Gaburri 1 997;Vallino Maccio 1 997) .
I n these terms, in the consulting room 'we are constantly having sex and
nothing but sex'- in the sense, of course, that we relate to each other, and that
this relationship is sex, even if it follows from the necessary rules of abstinence
that we have 'chaste' sex. However, it is certainly not chaste with regard to the
emotions activated and experienced, and to the fantasizing, also in sexual terms,
of the continuous matings between minds - the sexuality of the vicissitudes of
S? d' and � � <X.
AnalYSIS, of course, is not an end in itself, but is intended to bring about far
reaching transformations in those who have recourse to it. In the case of the
48
lady whose 'husband' suffers from premature ejaculation, it could, for example,
serve to 'transform' the incontinent part of herself that forces her to marry
a premature ejaculator so as to find a way of experiencing her own problem of
incontinence (and in the appropriate circumstances narrating it) ; or, having once
acquired the capacity for containment, she may no longer be able to carry on
with her husband in such a way as to favour the occurrence of his symptom.
There is an infinite range of other possibilities, but the 'husband's' premature
ejaculation is treated in the analyst's consulting room, just as the symptom of
'being unable to keep one's flies in order at the office' would be treated there.
Once the problem is solved in the consulting room following transfor
mational operations there, these will necessarily reverberate outside, but this
outside, for us as analysts, is somewhere ' outside the field', to which we may have
access like anyone else, but no longer as 'analysts' - because, for us as analysts,
anywhere 'outside the field' is inevitably also 'out of play'.
To possess the status of an analyst, the analyst must be alive, and must have
both a patient who is alive and a functioning setting; outside this context, the
analyst is a man or woman who is entitled to express a view on anything, but
not specifically as an analyst.
This IS not to deny our common, shared history, to which I referred earlier,
and our gratitude for the theories and models that constitute our 'highest
common factors', on which we must never tlre of reflecting. However, this entails
using what we know - as suggested by the title of Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca's
fine book On the Shoulders of Freud ( 1 982), but I could also add the names of
Klein, Bion or any of our other masters - in order to see something that is highly
specific today with regard to the field that is constantly enlarged in the process
of psychoanalytic exploration (Bion) , a field in which other vertices, other
organizational possibilities, other models, and other theories always coexist.
To sum up, there are different clinical as well as theoretical models, and the
fundamental aspect of one of these is memory, with all its complex interlinkages
and vicissitudes. Remembering is an antidote to repeating. Repeating enables
us to open the door to memory: memory is the guarantor of the remembered
reality, although there may also be deeper-lying memories, alternating
dialectically with screen memories.
Another model focuses on the internal obj ects and their vicissitudes. I t is
vitally important to pick up the patient's anxiety and to uncover the fantasies
underlying the mutual relations between the internal obj ects, many of which
may gradually come to be projected on to the analyst.
The central aspect of yet another model is the interrelationship between the
patient's and the analyst's 'waking dream thought' . What is important here is the
constant construction and deconstruction of these dream thoughts, a process
that yields the figures of thefield whereby the 'field' is constantly narrated.
Readers will be familiar with my interest in the characters of the session.
It follows from the very structure of the models mentioned above that, in the
49
first, the characters will be understood predominantly as such and hence as

belonging to the patient's real external and past history, and that they will, if
anthropomorphic, refer to 'persons' . In the second model, the characters will be
manifestations of the 'internal obj ects' and therefore indicative of fantasies. In
the third model, the characters will be a token of the need for 'narrative nodes' ,
whereby the linking o f the narration o f the mutual functioning and interaction
of the patIent's and analyst's minds becomes possible; they will be what I have
called functIOnal aggregates or affective holograms.
Of course, these three models arise according to the analyst's chosen pOSItIOn;
in a field context, they may coexist and be linked to each other in an infinite
vanety of ways.
While all this IS obviously true of anthropomorphic characters, it applies
equally to any 'non-anthropomorphic character', however Illslgnificant, as well
as to the relatIons between characters.
The 'pems ' , 'making love to' , 'premature eJaculation' , and Illdeed also 'my
husband' , 'my son' or 'my cat', will lead different eXIstences III each of the three
models. In the first, the pems, or making love, will refer to the 'real penis' or to
acted-out sexuality; III the second they will relate to the relevant early fantaSIes;
and III the third they will be figures III the story who will renarrate places in or
modes of functioning of the field.
50
5
T he waking dre am: theoretic al

and clinic al aspects
In my view, we should be just as interested in oneiric manifestations in an analytic

session as we are in night dreams brought after the event like a recorded television
programme.Dream-like manifestations in the session are one of the pillars of
Bion's thought: in waking life as in sleep, there is a kind of'drearning', which is
what enables us to form a-elements, to establish the contact barrier arid to
distinguish conscious from unconscious (Bion 1962, 1963, 1965).
Before considering these matters in detail, let me say that this chapter
constitutes a continuation and deepening of the ideas put forward in an article
by Bezoari and myself that I consider to be still valid today (Bezoari and Ferro
1992a). In it, we examined in succession the main psychoanalytic conceptions of
'dreams' , starting with the famous dream of the Wolf Man (Freud 1914), which,
we said, we were tempted 'to see as a precise description, from the vertex assumed
by the patient at that time, of the nature of his experience of what was happening
in the analyst's consulting room' . We acknowledged Freud's extraordinary
capacity to tell the patient a story and, albeit without realizing the full extent of
'
the violence of the relationship in the here and now (from the patient's vertex),
to brmg about a narrative transformation (Corrao 1991) that conferred a credible,
digested and assimilable form to the patient's terror and panic at the wolf's claws
concealed behind the 'paw made white at the baker's' (Freud 1913: 286).
We then turned to the interpretative model we deduced from the work of
Abraham and Klein, drawing attention to the risk of establishment of a code or,
in narratological terms, of a 'rigid encyclopedia' . This led us to emphasize the
revolution brought about by Bion, for whom dreams are re-elaborated samples
of an ongoing process occurring throughout both sleep and waking life, and are
placed in a relational space, as in a mother's reverie with regard to her child's
projective identifications'o
We then considered the relational aspect of dreams and their narration, on
the basis of the work of Baranger and Baranger (1961-2) and Meltzer (1967,
51
The waking dream
1 984) .We went on to examine the problem of gradients of alphabetizatIOn, from

hallucination to transformations into hallucinosis, oneiric 'film frames' and
dreams (Ferro 1 993e) . A focal POInt of our Interest was the oneiric 'film frame'
and its auditory equivalent (and, I would now add, Its coenaesthetic eqUIvalent) ,
as well as, ImpliCItly, the 'narratIve derIvatives of the a-element'.
Our article ended with a consideratIon of the problem of the 'translatIOn' or
'constructIon' of dreams and the possibility of regarding them as 'open works'
par excellence.
The Issue I now wish to address, based on Bion's concept of the 'a-dream' ,
i s the OrIgIn of the patient's commUnIcations. These, o f course, draw on his
history, as brought into the present in the transference; equally obviously, they
have to do with his internal world and the aSSOCIated fantasies, and are projected
into the here and now of the analytIc sItuation. I should like to add a further
aspect to these clinical and theoretical certaInties of ours - namely, that from a
vertex different from but coexisting wIth the others, they may be regarded as
real-time responses derIved from the waking dream thought in continuous
formation (Ferro 1 99 1 b, 1 993b, 1 993c, 1 994c, 1 996a, 1 996d) .
In search of the a-element (the protovisual

element of thought)
As stated in the previous chapters, Bion ( 1 962, 1 992) postulates the continuous
formatIOn of a-elements in waking life. These visual elements, which arise
continuously and sequentially, are not directly knowable except in two situations:
the visual flash and reverie (as well as, of course, in night dreams) . Outside these
two situations, we can know the 'narrative derivatives of the a-elements' (Ferro
1 996c, 1 998c) .
From my present preferred vertex, it IS the here and now of the emotional field
that is transformed into a and hence narrated; these narrative derivatives thus
become indicators that signal, wIthin the field, the patient's mental functioning
and the progress of the ongoIng relational situation, enabling us to modulate our
interpretations continuously.
Before considerIng the narratIve derIvatives of the a-elements in detail, I
should like briefly to recapItulate the situatIOns in which direct contact with
them is possible.
Visualfiashes
As we know, these occur whenever an a-element - that IS, a frame from the film
of waking dream thought - escapes from the apparatus that was supposed to
52
The waking dream
contaIn It and is projected and seen outside. They thus constitute a hot line
to what is happening in the flasks of the mind's laboratory.
Reverie
As we have seen, we can sometimes come into contact with the a-element and
'visualize' it directly. In reverie, an image that is usually thoroughly protected
appears on the surface and can be seen with 'the mind's eye'; this is the maximum
level of contact a mind can make with itself.
Dreams
The foregoing relates to the field and its movements in waking life. However,
there is of course another channel of access to a-elements - namely, the 'royal
road' of night dreams and their telling in the analytic session (Freud 1900; Mancia
1 994a, 1 994b) . Night dreams differ greatly from a-elements in that the former
perform the function of sorting and filtering (redreaming - Catz de Katz 1996)
what has been constantly 'filmed', alphabetized and preserved during waking
life (Bianchedi 1 995) . At this point it is as if, at the end of each day, we possessed
myriads of a-elements stored in various ways.
There are then two possibilities. First, in the absence of significant sensory
afferences, there may be an a-metafunction which, in this situation, acts on the
a-elements to form a syncretic narrative mosaic of the emotionally salient facts.
Second, it may be hypothesized that, just as there is an 'apparatus for thinking
thoughts' (Bion 1962) that operates on thoughts in waking life once these have
been formed from a-elements (an 'apparatus' described by Bion as made up of
S? d and Ps � D) , so there is an 'apparatus for dreaming dreams' , which acts as
it were on a second level on all the stored a-elements to supply a figurative
narration that confers meaning on experiences on the basis of criteria of urgency.
I would describe this 'apparatus for dreaming dreams' , which necessarily draws
on the collected a-elements, as the 'narrative capacity of the dreaming mind'
- a kind of directorial function applied to the equally creative, but instant-by
instant, work of the cameraman who forms the a-elements.
It should now be clear that much of our work is done on highly creative
matenal produced by the patient: a-elements, narrative derivatives of a-elements
in waking life, and very sophisticated directorial sorting and assembly of a
elements (i.e. dreams) . We also work with emotional turbulences, p-elements,
lies and evacuated thoughts.
53
The waking dream
A seeming digression: an a-element?
For the sake of clanty, I have grossly ovefSlmplified my exemplificatIOn of a

elements . In reality, an a-element not only IS plctographed In real time and
syncretIzed absolutely unpredictably, but also poetIcally syncretIzes all ongOIng
emotIOnal expenence, Instant by instant.
At our first meeting, a borderline adolescent described to me certain images he was seeing
at that moment, and said he had tried to draw one of them for me (Fig ure 1 1 ) . This is the only
occasion when a patient has drawn me a 'visual flash ' , and it is the closest thing to an CJ.
element (or an agglomerate of CJ.-elements) I have been able to find. It seems to me to sum
up pictographically everything activated in him on our first meeting: the monster . . . the terror
of bei ng devoured . . . Zorro with his mask . . . an Arab archer . . . Cupid . . . something
mysterious and unknown . . . a nest . . . the devil . . . aggression . . . relief . . . hope (the little
Figure 1 1 Drawmg of a VIsual flash
54
The waking dream
man at the bottom saying 'I miss you') . . . castration anxiety . . . not knowing how to go on
. . . the foreshortened limbs . . . not knowing how to relate and what to expect . . . All these
aspects are 'syncretized ' in the single a-element, and will have to be correlated with the
patient's subsequent products and those of the analyst, so as g radually to allow the sharing
of what is initially still too dense and saturated, althoug h opening the way to an i nfinity of
meanings.
What I have sought to explain in terms ofBion's theory of a-elements and the
a-function is admirably exemplified by Robert Louis Stevenson's (1892)
attribution of his creative activity to 'Little People' dwelling inside him, who are
the authors of his artistic creations:they work away inside him in both sleep and
waking life, and thereafter regale him without his knowledge with the fruits of
their precious labours.
Narrative derivatives of a-elements:.film sets and screenplays in the process

of continuous transformation
However, as stated earlier, we do not normally have patients who proj ect their
a-elements, or analysts who are always capable of reverie - so are a-elements
unattainable except by way of these two narrow channels?
By no means: mental life, the root of thought, is made up of these a-elements,
and we can acquaint ourselves with their narrative derivatives, which constantly
bud forth in the tales told in the analyst's consulting room, through the narrative
capacity of our minds while awake (the apparatus for thinking thoughts).
The sequence 'fiower-cherry-mosquito' mentioned in the previous chapter
would thus be embodied in material in which the 'concentrate' or 'essence'
(fiower-cherry-mosquito) is dissolved in the patient's narration, as illustrated in
the following clinical vignettes.
The absence of Sollievo
Aware of how sensitively Marco reacts to any communication about separations, I tried to
find a suitable way of telling him my holiday dates and thoug ht I had succeeded.
Marco begins the next session by telling me how well he is getting on with his wife, and
conveys the sad news that Professor Sollievo has retired. A dream then follows: alone beside
a sea with mountainous waves, he is afraid there will be a flood; next he is with his brother
on a muddy, uphill country road; then he is with his parents in a house high above sea level
when a huge boulder comes crashing down; although at first he fears serious consequences,
luckily it falls some distance away without doing any damage.
I think of a possible interpretation about the holidays and about the absence of sollievo. 1
While I am wondering how to present to the patient the - at least to me - obvious contents
55
The waking dream
of the dream (the emotional wave and the feared collapse after my tel ling him my holiday
dates), a few moments pass before I am able to interpret, during which the patient says: ' M y
wife wants t o b e tu rned on; when w e make love, s h e wants not o n l y foreplay b u t fore
foreplay.' I feel that I can delay no longer, but, not yet having a well-cooked interpretation
ready, I try some interpretative approaches. In response to the patient's comment 'My wife
is sometimes too seductive and likes to play', I interpret the absence of sollievo (relief) and
the dreams as a response to the holiday communication. He answers: 'My friend Ferrazzo
always puts on airs; he's al most unbearable. '
The point I am making is that the patient 'responds' to every emotional move
ment of the analyst wIth real-time pictograms, and that the 'response' is therefore
a narrative derivative if waking dream thought that IS, of the sequence of a-elements
-
pICtographed in response to the interpretative stimulus.
The aunt's fall
Analyst (giving a reconstructive interpretation): The relationsh ip with your father, which left
you feeling abandoned and betrayed. echoes on in your other relationships.
Patient (after a moment's silence): My aunt fell down the stairs and bum ped her head . . .
I ' m wondering what to do about school; I feel that it's my work, that I like it and that it interests
me . . . The problem is the cost. (The patient misses the next session.)
In other words, the patIent has pictographed a-elements connected with not
being held, with feeling hurt, with pam, with wondering what to do, wIth the
acknowledgement of interest, and . . . with the emotional cost. The unknowable
a-elements have come on to the stage by way of a narratIon that parallels them:
'What you are telling me comes as a surprise; it IS like a blow on the head that
hurts . . . it interests me a l o t and really is the work I would like to do, but the
emotIOnal cost is high:
The injured puppy . . . and the knitting
I cancel Rita's Friday session . After missing her session on the following Monday, she comes
along for her Tuesday session. She says she had to miss the Monday session because she
was taking care of a puppy that had been run over. She took it to a vet for an operation,
which tumed out to be long and laborious, and in the end the vet told her he had no room
for the injured puppy, so she had to stay home and look after it, as it had to be fed every
three hours. She tried but failed to find someone to look after it for her.
She asks me not to be angry with her for not having come, as her boyfriend has already
told her off. I say only that there are situations in which the vet and a puppy's life are more
important than an analytic session. The patient is greatly reassured and continues her account
56
The waking dream
of the operation performed by the vet and the subsequent care of the puppy; she emerges
from the state of persecutory confusion she was in at the beginning of the session.
Towards the end, when I feel the patient is no longer persecuted, I tell her that perhaps,
looking at the situation from inside the analysis, I was the one who ran over the puppy, by
cancelling the session, and that her missing the Monday session had been the painful but
necessary 'operation' for treating a serious injury.
She begins the next session by telling me that she has had two dreams; in the first, she
makes a fine piece of embroidery, sells it and uses the proceeds to take care of some Indian
children, while in the second she receives an abusive telephone call.
I of course see the dreams as her way of pictorially syncretizing the emotional q uality of
the previous session: the long 'embroidery' and then my interpretation. I say only that it is
hard to produce a nice piece of embroidery if she then gets abusive telephone calls. I also
think the patient believes that it is better to lick one's own wounds, that she cannot yet trust
in the possibility of using me to help her make a better job her embroidery, and I ask: ' But
do you only embroider, or can you also crochet, or knit with ferri?'2 She bursts out laughing;
she has understood the meaning of my intervention, and launches into a long description of
the beauty and usefulness of working with ferri . . . she has bought lots of balls of wool . . .
and begun knitting a sweater.
The 'intoxicated' analyst
Following an apparently good session with a seriously disturbed woman patient, I feel
disorientated and confused. The next patient tells me of her memory of her 'father's death',
of experiences of loneliness and loss, and I suddenly realize how mentally absent I am. She
goes on to tell me about an acquaintance suffering from a/coho/-induced cirrhosis, and it is
only then that I become aware that I have come out of the previous session like a drunk. Even
though I have got in touch with my mental state, induced by the session with the seriously
disturbed woman, the next patient also tells me at one point about a friend she sometimes
finds drunk.
Now at last I succeed in absorbing all the 'alcohol' and resuming my normal
'trim': the stage fills with other characters who indicate to me that I have
recovered my normal level of mental functioning. It is obvious to me that,
through narrative derivatives, patients are constantly and unconsciously signalling
what they syncretize in a-elements, and continuously renarrating it through
characters and screenplays that tell us how the present-day relationship and their
internal worlds and history intersect in the field.
This process of continuous renarration of the emotional movements of the
couple in the analytic field can of course be mediated not only by the narrative
derivatives of a-elements during waking life but also through night dreams
narrated after the event in the session like the playback of a recorded TV
programme.
57
The waking dream
Anna 1 sweater and her open window
At the beginning of a session, a woman patient tells me a dream: she is i n a car with a female
friend , who d rops her (the patient's) sweater out of the window, so they have to turn back
laboriously and search for it among brambles, thorns and woods. She spontaneously
associates to a childhood memory of her sister holding a designer head scarf of hers (the
patient's) out of the car window and letting go of it; after a scene when they got home,
the sister said the scarf had got lost; the father then turned back to look for it and eventually
found it.
I ask the patient what it is, of all the things we discussed in the previous session, that has
flown away and got lost. Cryi n g , she calls herself a ' moaner' and childish. I can see how
l aborious it is to 'turn back'. I tel l her it seems to me i mportant to turn back and recover what
we have lost. After a long silence, she tells me through her tears that she felt I was not paying
equal attention to everything she was tel ling me, and that I was letting some things slip away
as if they were of no consequence, such as what she said about . . . she then enumerates
the things I had neglected to take up.
Robin Hood1 arrows
A woman patient dreams of a fight between Hercules and Robin Hood . H ercules thrusts a
javelin into Robin Hood ' s back, but Robin does not lose heart and goes on shooting arrows
at Hercules , wounding h i m .
T h i s dream c a n surely b e nothing other than a narration in images o f t h e previous session,
i n which I hurt the patient with an unexpected transference interpretation; she then took her
revenge by shooting lots of l ittle arrows at me and trying to i nflict some wo unds. My
interpretation to this effect gives rise to a number of expansions, extending out from the here
and now in unforeseeable directions. Hence interpretation of the here and now must be seen
not as a desti nation but as a point of departure for unknown expansions.
The unreliable nanny and the absent-minded surgeon
A patient tells me she had a terrible fit of anxiety while buying ricotta at the g rocer's. She
then brings two dreams. I n the first, her little girl , who had been entrusted to an unreliable
nanny, falls down the stairs, bumps her head after plunging down a few steps, and fractures
her foot. The patient rushes down to take her daug hter, now in a coma, i nto her arms, and
searches desperately for her own parents, who, when she finds them, listen to her but seem
not to see her. She then goes to a hospital , where some surgeons have left a threaded needle,
as one might do when making a sweater, on the edge of an enormous wound i n the little
girl's bel ly. In the second dream, she senses the presence of a thief in her house; on meeting
h im she is terrified, as he is a potential murderer who might kill her.
58
The waking dream
Licia is a patient who suffers from ' panic attacks', and the above sequence in my view tells
us a great deal: the manifest scene (buying the ricotta - going to analysis) is permeated with
emotions stemming from other levels on which the vicissitudes of the analysis are narrated.
The end of the session is l ike a violent plunge down the stairs, after which she discovers
herself with her own infantile part in a coma, with no one to help her. The analyst ends the
session indifferently, as one might leave off one's knitting with a view to resuming work on
it later, disregarding the pain thereby inflicted. He is at the same time the thief feared by the
patient, especially now the Easter holidays are approaching, when he will rob her of her
sessions - but he is also a potential m u rderer, killing her with his deeply disturbing
interpretations.
This last aspect emerges from the patient's associations to her terror of doctors and their
indifference to other people's pain, and to her fear that I might deprive her of sessions - as
well as the other constant fear that, if she exposes herself by telling me her most intimate
feelings, I might 'kill' her with my response.
If this deeper level of a seemingly good and simple relationship is not constantly
negotiated,emotions that are apparently meaningless and 'out of context' burst
on to the scene. However,if this deeper level is plumbed,the profound emotions,
pamc and terror are given a meaning and context,and may attain thinkability.
A homosexual relationship
A female patient has great difficulty in talking about things she feels are very intimate. In a
difficult and stormy session, after keeping these inside her for a long time, she manages with
great difficulty to express them i n a climate of increasing closeness.
Next day she brings two dreams. In the first, she has a homosexual relationship with a
woman friend, and in the second she is looking for a male friend, but then along comes his
present girlfriend and stops her from getting near him. Eventually, though, she succeeds in
getting rid of her and finding the male friend, with whom she has a very satisfying talk.
There are various ways of seeing these dreams. One might theorize a develop
ment from a symbiotic-perverse situation to a more adult, oedipal one - from
a relationship with a fusional mother to an oedipal conflictuality in which the
mother is also her rival.
However,there is also a more creative possibility: the dreams can instead be
seen as being about the emotions aroused by the previous day's session; from an
autoerotic, masturbatory situation in which the patient was able to tell her
personal things only to herself, she has been able to move on to one in which,
despite the difficulty,she has become able to communicate and narrate intimate
matters to another person.
59
The waking dream
A pair if hands stolen from the land
Rosanna, a psycholog ist from a university team, says she has had a d ream . By way of
i ntroduction, she tel ls me she h as dreamed of an impulsive patient, Tamone, who, being dim
witted but having a good pair of hands, gets himself accepted at ' Ruralia', a rehabilitation
centre where people work on the land. I n the dream , she goes to Ruralia to talk to the staff
in charge of Tamone, but is astonished to find Tamone hi mself there, dressed as a member
of the staff with a jacket and tie, quite u n l i ke his usual appearance. At this point she notices
need les of varying lengths stuck into her hand; they hurt and make her feel as if she has been
crucified . But Tamone h as really changed , you can be sure of that.
This dream fol lows a session in which the patient complained that I have g iven a trans
ference interpretation of some criticisms she expressed about her sister-i n-law, and I replied
that perhaps she was right to be irritated if I did not take sufficient account of what she told
me but instead immediately interpreted it as something i ntimately connected with me.
I am now able to interpret the dream without difficulty. The analyst (the dim-witted Tamone)
becomes someone who needs to be cared for and who does indeed need to work at Rura/ia,
but then Rosanna is i m p ressed by my acknowledgement of the legiti macy of her protest,
althou g h she wonders whether she can be sure of it, whether it really is a change i n me
that she can rely on . . . or whether I shall go on wounding her with the needl es of my inter
pretations, by which she sometimes feels crucified . I add that the protagonist's name is
significant, containing as it does the sequence arno [I love] , which is sti l l there even at difficult
moments.
I m pressed by this i nterpretation of the dream, Rosanna is now able to tell me more about
the 'sister-in-law' - that she fails to respond to real needs (I had j ust told her that I could not
accede to her request to change the time of a session) and is deaf to emotional demands
. . . unlike Aunt Linda, who, by contrast . . . I n other words, we are witnessing a return to the
stage of these 'characters' who stand for ' relational vectors' i n the fiel d , but this cannot yet
be explicitly i nterpreted in the field in relational terms, as that would be like ' sticking needles
i n her' instead of instilling trust and well-bei ng.
What IS not In the relationship is nevertheless there In the present field of the
emotions, and of their narrations and transformations in the analyst's consultIng
room. The aspect of contaInment/non-containment obvIously has to do with
Rosanna's psychic life, but emotions can be transformed only in the field, before
being reIntroJ ected Into the Internal world so that they can inhabit the patIent's
history.
Fabrizio � Chinese boxes
Fabrizio is a patient who brings his entire family to life in the consulting room . The characters
he brings over and over again immediately suggest modes of functioning (both his own and
m ine) that come alive i n the room , often mutually uni ntegrated.
60
The waking dream
With this patient, I find myself in the room with a jealous man, with a woman who is
'offended' by the slightest interpretation, with a teenage girl who does not speak (he won't
speak to me, misses sessions and acts out), and with a delicate boy who continues to suffer
from every trauma. My problem has been how to interpret in this context.
I work with characters as I would in a child analysis, using cows, sheep or lions . . . I try to
keep my interventions unsaturated and open, so as to allow the patient to contribute actively
. . . I take care 'not to wound him' in any way, and avoid upsetting or wounding him with the
traumas of my interpretations.
A patient who brings other people's dreams, adapting them to her own
expressive needs
In the last session before the holidays, Rossella, a patient at an advanced stage of her
analysis, brings some of her children's dreams: as Fernando is about to cross a road, a Tutsi
with a spear gets out of a car and tries to run him through with it, but then Uncle Bernardo
comes along and breaks the Tutsi's spear; Femando can then cross the road with his uncle
. . . Luigi dreams that he is being pursued by a lion; he has to keep on running and running,
and finally escapes when Uncle Bernardo comes along and saves him . . .
The persecution anxiety induced by the forthcoming holiday break encounters an analytic
function that has already been partially introjected and, in the manner of Saint Bernard
(Bernardo), protects her when crossing d ifficult and dangerous terrain.
Semi (1 998) likewise describes a patient's use of a friend's dream, reported in

her session.
Free associations
Free associations can be thought of as potential carriers enabling one to approach

and draw on elements of the dream work of the moment; this means that they are
actually obligatory associations derived from the (oneiric!) resultant of the
emotional climate of the moment.Hence Bion's view that we can be conscious
only of feelings in the present. That is why free associations reveal the meaning
of dreams, but they do so in the sense of making a further contribution in the
here and now to the sampling of the emotional-oneiric climate of the moment
(that is to say, they are the narrative derivatives of the a-elements produced in
the dream) .
The foregomg implies a blurring of the distinction between dreams and other
forms of communication, so that an entire gradient of oneiricity is present in
every communication (in a continuum from dreams to hallucinations).Whereas
an a-function is indeed at work, so too is dream thought during waking life
61
The waking dream
(except in situatIOns when the mind IS 'dismantled') - or, as Bion would say, (X
dreaming is active.
Does the container hold fast or does it tear open?
The mterpretatlOn of patients' waking matenal is often felt to be 'not all the
patient's own work' and as such gives rise to immune defences, whereas dreams
represent a more accessible pathway, preCisely because they are all the patient's
own work.
VVhat if the Ikeloid'fails?
In a session with Giovan ni , now in his tenth year of analysis, I have occasion to tell hi m
that m an y of h i s ways of relating, w hich are l i ke those o f a Mafia cla n, put me i n mind of
keloids, or extensive areas of scar tissue, which suggest the existence of a wound and of
a consequent deep sensitivity. Next time he brings a dream: he is in a jungle with wild animals
l i ke l ions or tigers; all of a sudden his gun is taken away from him, leaving him defenceless
and at the mercy of the animals' ferocity. Then, in another sequence, beside the label on
his letter- box, he finds another name - the name of an unknown person , which actually
frig htens him. I n yet another dream, he is first with a boy he is fond of, called Piero , then
with the film director Buiiuel whose plots are so perverse, and finally in a harem with the Shah
of Persia.
All these stories foreshadow a pOSSible 'catastrophic change' when the 'keloid' is
plunged into cnsis.
It is always a matter ofproportion
Following many years of analysis with El isa, it finally becomes possible for us to talk to each
other d i rectly and expl icitly. After one of these sessions, she dreams of being attacked by a
man who violently attacks her, as in a news item she has seen in which an Israeli breaks a
Palestinian's arm with a rock.
Words can hurt, but now she can see me explicitly not only as an Israeli, but also as a yokel
and a dwarf; we are able to talk about everything that has had to remain unsaid between us,
such as the old fear that compelled her, when going out with others, to take Reasec, a well
known antidiarrhoeal agent, i n case she became incontinent o f faeces - or rather, in case
she were to let slip some stupid remark - just as she had been ' contained ' in her sexual and
relational l ife too.
62
The waking dream
Interpretation and narration
Gustavo brings a dream of a girl he finds very attractive indeed, but two people prevent h i m
from getting close t o h e r . . . t h e n he compiles an expert's report on a palmar aponeurosis,
and finally there are lots of characteropaths, sociopaths, people who have committed every
crime in the book, especially m u rder, in a court room where the d isfigured, h i rsute judge
looks l i ke a cri m i nal h imself.
He also says it is in relating to other people that he becomes aware of difficulties, as violent
emotional storms soon arise in h i m .
I c o u l d interpret this i n terms of o u r relationship , telling h i m that he would l i ke to have a n
intense love relationship with me, b u t that something stops him: I c o u l d tell him that he not
only engages in a kind of masturbatory activity, but also relates to me as a criminal might
relate to an utterly harsh j udge, and that the terror of a mutual relationship m ade u p of
accusation, bullying and violence, in which I criminalize his 'staying in bed' and keep phoning
to cancel sessions, seems to prevail over the affectionate climate of a good relationship that
he would like. However, I feel it will be more profitable to let him develop lines of association
that will lead u s to new scripts, which could never be written if I were to g ive a saturated
interpretation of this kind (Guignard 1 998).
A place for dreams
I have mentioned elsewhere (Ferro 1 992) the need to construct a 'place for
thinking thoughts' before content can be fully conveyed, and the same applies
to dreams.
Violent dreams
For a long time the violent and terrible characters of Giulio's dreams were taken on board,
thought of and worked through as if they were mine. He now has a dream i n which affective
states (peace-loving men with umbrellas) risk being overwhelmed by emotional turbulences
(a madman, and children torn to pieces by criminals). He himself says that our attributing
these violent characters to my behaviour no longer feels right to h i m : he now t hi nks the
madman, the fire that burns the children, and the cri minals who tear children apart belong
to h i m - he understands that there is a burning personality inside h i m that sometimes tears
his affects to pieces . . .
I am able to tell him that mental health consists not so much i n not having these feelings,
which m ust after all be metabolized, as i n having a place inside oneself for them: the phobia
about what was outside his 'gate' would have no further reason to exist if all these things
could now be situated , as in the d ream, i n his own garden and house.
63
The waking dream
The cutting off of meanings and the uncle 's trophies
After a session in which I gave various interpretations, one of which was 'very deep' , Carla
brings a long dream, in which she goes to hospital and finds she has forgotten her papers,
but her mother brings them . The hospital is a hotel, and then there is a little room where she
l ies down and her uncle takes advantage of this to cut her hair (cutting off meanings . . .
cutting off the flow of thought?). He hangs u p the hair together with other trophies . . . plaits
. . . hair with a ribbon . . . all this offends her . . . then he takes the lift up to the 1 1 6th floor
. . . Perhaps a less 'deep' uncle would have done less damage . . .
The abattoir and suffering
Luigi has a dream: he is in charge of a big farm where he has to sort and find places for the
incoming animals - bulls, calves, cows, ferocious wild an imals, and fantasy animals - which
then go to an abattoir, after which they are processed into ham and salami . . . But people
too are slaughtered, and this makes him terribly anxious.
He is thus descri bing not only the work of 'processing' his own primitive mental states,
but also the way his 'human' parts are su bjected to the same process.
Harpo 's harp
J ust before the summer holidays, Si lvia, now in her fifth year of analysis, lau nches into a
long description that incl udes stories and feelings relating to an abandonment, accompanied
by intense rage and aggression. She also speaks of events from her daily life focusing on
her wish for independence and autonomy, and ultimately revealing powerful ambivalence
towards her mother, whom she loves, but from whom she would like to emancipate herself.
Feeling that an interpretation about the holidays would be academic and too ObVIOUS, I
decide that it might be useful to draw attention to Si lvia's availability (<.i) for taking in and
keeping inside her lots of complex feelings at a time, so I say: ' It sounds rather like a harp
with many strings, all of which can sound out and be understood . ' Silvia's response is ironic:
my comment puts her in mind of Harpo Marx: 'That's why he was called Harpo - because,
being dumb, he played the harp . '
I feel that t h i s is directed a t m e , a n d I point o u t t o Silvia how dissatisfied s h e is with me for
having said so little in response to her material : perhaps her feelings of abandonment, rage,
the wish for autonomy, and so on, can be explicitly connected with the forthcoming holidays,
as well as with getting in touch with thoughts about the terminability of the analysis.
After a moment's silence, she replies: ' M arisa told me about my cousin Andrea having
a homosexual relationship; wel l , I don't know why, but I am happy for him to be in love
and to wait for that person - but Marisa was over-intrusive and presumed too much
intimacy. '
64
The waking dream
The first interpretation, which emphasized the presence and availabi lity of the container
(�), was felt to be insufficient, while the explicit second interpretation (0') was experienced
as excessive and over-intimate. In effect there was a container wishing and waiting for
contents, i n love and interested in the prospect of receiving, but not yet elastic and avai lable
enough to be satisfied by receiving a content felt to be too penetrative - rather than the
situation described by Silvia on another occasion: 'The feminists say the vagina should wrap
itself round the penis instead of the penis penetrating i nto the vagina . . . even if Elvira Banotti
exaggerates somewhat. '3
Interpretation and the stitching together of a shared connection
G iorgio brings a dream in which a friend helps him to disinfest his house, which has been
invaded by a sea of ants. He is very pleased, and then gives a joumalist's sister a manure
spreader.
I am very struck, in a negative sense, by what seems to me to be an operation of (ethnic)
cleansing, and I interpret along the l ines of a process of excessive land i mprovement that
gets rid of everything black and d i rty, leaving behind an utterly clean situation that smacks
to me of apartheid. Giorgio is manifestly disorientated and anxious, and asks to go to the
toi let. After the session, partly because the holidays are approaching and I would rather not
place an excessive burden on him while he is by himself, I resolve to return to the subject at
a later date.
I n the next session he brings a d ream: his body is giving off a chemical su bstance, l i ke
phenol , to keep dangerous presences at bay. I ask h i m if he was worried by what I said to
h i m yesterday and if he thinks he needs to protect h imself from other polluting things I might
tell him today. Yes, he says, that is precisely what he has been thinking. I now say that we
can revisit yesterday's dreams and see if we can interpret them in a way that seems to him
more consonant with what he is feeling.
He says he felt yesterday's d reams to be an expression of good and positive things. I
suggest that the first dream might also be describing a nice piece of work carried out together,
with which he is pleased - a disinfestation operation undertaken with the analysis - while the
second dream is about his giving u p the ' m an ure s preader' now that he no longer feels
contempt for other people. He accepts this with relief and launches into a long chain of
associations about new relationships he is forming at this time.
On the basis of my knowledge of the patient and of the twists and turns of this
analysis, I still regard my first interpretation as more true (K) , but it elicits a
'chemical' , archaic, almost autistic defence, whereas the second, although less
true, is more syntonic (in '0') with the patient and for that reason more likely to
bring about transformations. The second will remain pending in my mind.
65
6
D elusion and hallucination
Delusion
Delusion is closely connected with hallucination (Resnik 1982, 1986; Fran<;:a 1996),
which constitutes a massive evacuation of �-elements. Considerable attention
has been devoted to the aspect of mental destruction of which hallucinations
are a token, but too little to their function of evacuating something that c.annot
be tolerated, and indeed to the fact that they also have a positive side, in that
� -elements can at least thereby be discharged.
I have described elsewhere (Ferro 1993a) the long analysis of a boy who
emerged from a situation in which he 'was not awake but also not asleep' : as
soon as the analysis began, a continuous hallucinatory evacuation commenced,
and at least enabled him to be awake. A similarly positive function is in my
opinion performed by dream-like flashes in waking life, to which I have many
times attempted to draw attention.
A similar argument can be applied to delusion, the self-containing function of
which has been emphasized too seldom. I myself am inclined to liken delusion
to phenomena of transformation into hallucinosis. It is something that, instead
of being experienced as a dream or fantasy, is projected outside and mistaken
for a reality, in so far as what is projected is then assumed to be true.
Delusion is mediated by a distortion of what is seen in the outside world, as is
graphically illustrated in the session presented here.
Maurizio
Patient I feel awful . . . I wanted to turn back . . I had a dream: I was with someone who
.
wanted to shove me into a precipice . . . or rather into an unknown world . . . then I saw a
horrible picture, a horrible picture of reality . . . but when I held up an opaque screen in front
of it, it looked much more beautiful, less true, but more exciting .. . then I had these sort of
67
Delusion and hallucination
insistent fantasies: Bacon 's painting The Scream of Innocent X, 1 and then Napoleon and the
retreat from Russia - I don't know why . . .
Analyst Perhaps you were so afraid of 'wanting to turn back' to your old ways . . . afraid of
the pain and of reality as it is.
Patient Yes, I was very disturbed by yesterday's dream: moving into a small ish apartment,
just 60 sq uare metres, with a fireplace and a fridge . . . it really did mean losing everything .
. . my grand expectations . . . leaving the palaces behind . . .
Analyst There's also the idea that reality is sad and dismal . . . that it's better to hold up a
screen between yourself and reality, a screen that may distort, but seems to make everything
look nicer - like the ideas of grandness, wealth and fame . . .
Patient I ' m just remembering another bit of a dream: a pig is slaughtered by a butcher . . .
then there's a pork products factory . . .
Analyst (I reflect that the first part of the dream resembles the very first dream of Maurizio's
analysis - 'A piglet has its throat cut by a butcher' - which I interpreted at the time as his
terror of being torn to pieces by my cutting words; it referred back to a sad istic primal scene
that had occupied us for a long time. It has now returned, years later, and could be interpreted
as the furious rage and desire to kill me aroused by my words. I gave this interpretation when
Maurizio began to display a capacity to recognize and contain his own rage . . . but now there
is a new element, the ' pork products factory ' .) So I say: Now we've had this dream before. I
wonder if we can think of it this time as the fear, if you were to give up the opaque screen,
of bei ng transformed by me into 'bacon' or 'salami ' . . . into some kind of man . . . if you
retreat all the way from Russia . . .
Patient What about the scream . . . ?
Analyst The scream of In nocent X - at this moment too - if the 'Cardinal' feels he is losing
the focus of his psychic life . . . you feel that g iving up the 'screen' would be a terri ble
impoverishment, which I want to force you into . . . shoving you into a new and unknown
world . . .
Patient I get it . . . I get it . . . The world of people who are all right and productive . . . the
world where the plough works the soil.
Analyst The world of work and fertility.
Patient It's agonizing to lose one's illusions . . . the expectations of glory . . . and simply be
a doctor . . . being aware of my age . . . of my limits, and working properly. But it's nice not
to be a Pharaoh any more . . . and to see that the mind really can be transformed . . . and
basically also to think that the analysis can come to an end . . . Yes, I am attracted by that
little house . . . it's as if a beautiful woman was waiting for me . . . one I really wanted to get
.
close to.
A few days later:
Patient I feel better today. I feel as if I have a silly sod of a father . . . he doesn't understand
anything . . . I 've already dreamt of my sister's boyfriend as absolutely ind ifferent . . . totally
uninterested in me . . . like when he was describing a bad-tempered workmate he was talking
to about J uventus to keep him qu iet . . . and then there was a woman in the birth position
68
who was giving birth to a stil l born baby girl . . . but with her I don't feel any rivalry . . . those
are my things . . . it's l i ke the Bermuda triangle . . . I ' m captured by it, caught i n it . . . either
I triumph or I g o under.
Analyst I wonder if you might be thinking that things go better when your father i s a silly
sod . . . or rather when your brother-in-law is indifferent, when you thi nk I ' m talking only to
keep you quiet, distracting you instead of delving into the roots of your anger . . . and giving
birth to things that seem meaningless to you.
Patient Well , yes, but my father isn't always a silly sod: sometimes he seems to say
i m portant things, things that strike home and make me afraid, so I feel as if I am in danger.
Analyst I wonder if perhaps there are two ways of seeing me: either I'm a silly sod, and then
you' re apparently safe, or else I say things that strike home, and then you 're i n danger - in
danger because I can make you see things l i ke the ' Bermuda triang le' , or the screen you put
between yourself and reality, which may be thrilling and exciting, but shelters you from reality
as it is - the reality of a triangle in Val Padana.2
Patient Yes, you' re right, I love to think about my relations with my father and mother, so
as to make up terrible stories about them; I ' m transported into this world and am sheltered
from illnesses, time and real needs . . . I ' m terrified that if you understand this you will take
away all the Dostoevsky books and put me in the Piero Chiara book instead3 • • • and also,
if my father is a silly sod , I apparently triumph, but actually I'm ruined .
Analyst The screen is l i ke a m i raculous Aladdi n ' s lamp that you only have to stroke to
produce exciting and thrilling stories . . . but they deprive you of the world as it i s . . . and
that only seems like a triumph.
Patient But how can I live without the Aladdin's lamp? . . . Today I saw ord inary people in
the street . . . how dismal . . . how awful . . . how painful . . . or perhaps I should tell myself
that that is real life . . . and that I ' m excluding myself from it. What i s better, a marvel lous
plate of food drawn by Salvador Dali or a common-or-garden meal prepared by my gi rlfriend
when we're hungry?
Analyst And it's that meal you risk losing u nless you accept the pain of losing you r Aladdin's
lamp.
Delusion performs a self-containing, protective function, through proj ection on

to the outside world not of �-elements, which are by their nature unknowable,
but of balpha-elements, which are projected like a fIlm that separates, protects
- and encloses - the patient inside a 'bubble' ; however, although it protects him,
it isolates him at the same time.
What is projected inside the bubble, forming its walls, is of course seen as
reality,4 as in the masterly description given in a story by Giorgio Scerbanenco,5
signifIcantly entitled 'Dreaming to live'.
One of the most painful and upsetting points in an analysis is the widowhood
resultingJrom the loss oj the patient's delusion - that is, when the patient reacquires
the capacity to emerge from the 'delusional bubble' and to contemplate external
reality without the interpolation of his own proj ective stratifIcations - of those
entities that resemble an insufficiently constructed and digested dream (which
69
I regard as leading a life Intermediate between �- and a-elements - that IS,

balpha-, or �/a-, elements) .
As stated, balpha-elements are partIally digested �-elements, not yet
suffiCIently processed to find a place in waking dream thought or in the contact
barner, which are proj ected on to the outside world and which, as serrufimshed
products, can become linked to each other; they are, qUIte literally, regurgItatIons
of dream materIal and are IndicatIve of a ruminative state of the mInd. This
rumInatIon contInues pending a profound restructurIng of the a-functIOn,
allowIng a resumption of the process of elaboratIon whereby the balpha
elements can be transformed into a-elements .
After many years of analysis, Maurizio emerged once and for all from a severe delusional
situation in which he was at first the son of a Pharaoh, then the Pharaoh hi mself, next
a Spanish nobleman, and finally a famous scientist. Emergence from delusion entai ls a
prolonged process of 'catastrophic change' (Resni k 1 982, 1 986, 1 998).
Maurizio went for many years to a psychiatrist who prescribed him massive doses of drugs
(in the past, although delusional , he had never needed them), to deaden his intolerable mental
pai n. Previously, any dimi nution of his delusions had been fol lowed by characteropathic
acting out, which had served as a relief valve for discharging excess �- or balpha-elements.
Now, however, although stil l in a state of anaesthesia or semianaesthesia, Maurizio is
confronting the mental pain involved in seeing the world without oneiric interpolations. The
loss of the delusion is experienced as so terri ble that, after he had come along to a number
of sessions with his clothes tom and his trousers and sweater full of holes, I told him that he
was l i ke a widower grieving for a beloved companion.
Giorgio
This aspect - that is, how delusion protects and makes one feel better - is illustrated by
Giorgio better than by any other patient. Emergence from his state of delusion terrified him
for a number of reasons, which he enumerated to me: (a) the discovery that he was mortal ,
with a finite time to l ive; (b) the discovery of himself as a person who could fall i l l ; (c) the
discovery of the illusory nature of the objectives he had set himself; and (d) the feeling
of bei ng like someone who had to make the joumey from ' being Ach illes to being a kind of
Demetrio Pianelli'.6
This joumey was accompanied by a large number of dreams. I n one of these, the Castle
of Femis fell down ;7 this was his first comment in a dream on the collapse of his delusion and
the invasion of reality. This is a nodal poi nt of suffering; in other words, there is a reversal of
the flow of projections (---» from the stratification of real ity by � and balpha to another
possibility ((-) .
The patient recalled Heinrich Mann's novel The Blue Angel (1 93 1 ) , and reflected that these
new acquisitions meant, for him, that he had to rewrite his entire way of ' being in the world ' .
However, h e was also able t o glimpse the first positive fruits o f this catastrophe: since he
70
was no longer the centre of everything, he no longer feared, as he had in the past, that if he
heard people laug hing, they must be laug hing about him; he had freed himself from the
nightmare of derision.
A second positive point was not long in making its appearance: he was no longer afraid
of being a usurper when he began to work, and was no longer the subject of envy, jealousy
and revenge, but could plan to help his 'forensic' cousin in the compilation of her many expert
reports.
The emphasis now shifted to the fact that the common element in the causes of his
suffering was fear, and that he was striving all the time to save himself from a 'terrible,
nameless fear' by regarding himself as the ' Prince of Fenis' with the power of life and death
over everything. He realized that he had never had 'vaginal' intercourse with the prostitutes
he had so long frequented, but only practised sodomy or fellatio. However, this was how he
related to the world in the position of the Prince of Fenis: everyone was at his service and
under his yoke, and he had never had a relationship of equality with anyone, not even with
me in the consulting room.
This realization helped him to become more conscious of the position he adopted in any
relationship.
However, if I said anything to him with which he disagreed, he would immediately explode:
'I wish I had a broom to stick up the arse of that disgusting black bastard I saw on the comer':
it was the anger of the Lord of Fenis that was aroused. What in fact terrified him was his own
anger.
Then he was afraid of having caught AIDS and of having no i mmune defences against the
violent emotions that had been kindled, while at the same time realizing how difficult it was
to experience a relationship without the absolute immunity enjoyed by the Lord of Fenis.
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, delusion can be regarded as a

transformation into hallucinosis (Bion 1965) carried out on reality, which is thus
coloured, or tinged, by everything proj ected on to it and then 'read' by way
of the perception of the now polluted reality. This of course places us squarely
in Column 2 of Bion's Grid, in the realm of lies and falsehood, but also of
protection from something that cannot be tolerated.
Maurizio
In Maurizio's case, what could not be tolerated was the feeling of not being understood or
taken into consideration - the fear of counting for nothing - all of which infl icted an intolerable
wound that was covered over with the 'keloid ' of delusion.
Emergence from the delusion, which had protected him for so long, exposed Maurizio to
a minefield of primitive emotions. This world of protoemotions was for Maurizio a terrifying
experience; for instance, whenever I said anything that did not correspond precisely to
what he felt withi n , a terrible contempt for me wou l d explode inside him - a contempt
which we immediately understood as constituting a 'painkiller' applied to the panic of not
71
being understood and loved . However, the contempt acted like an atomic bomb that razed
everything to the ground, thus leaving him alone and terrified. And the same was true of his
rage, which was tantamount to homicidal fury - 'I'd like to choke you with my bare hands
and then tear you to pieces' - on account of the jealousy and the whole range of possible
emotions aroused .
The route to be followed with Maurizio would entail making this volcanic, magmatic world
inhabitable, not only working in the direction of its contents (rage, jealousy, contempt, etc.),
but also, and in particular, 'imparting' to Maurizio the method (the a-function) of 'working'
on these mental states.
Roberta
For Roberta, too, after she had lived in a quite delusional state of 'symbiotic reality', the return
to a shared reality was painfu l in the extreme: ' Reality is like a cold knife blade that tears my
flesh apart, and each centimetre of the blade is l ike an exploding bomb that blows me to
pieces.' Reality is what is reconstructed in the transference in the course of a laborious and
painful journey, as the patient progressively gives up the erotized aspect of the transference.
However, transformation into hallucinosis that is, proj ection on to the outside
-
world of something that IS then seen as real - need not take the form of out
and-out deluslOn. but may also assume a more circumscribed gUlse, as in
narciSSlstic-rype pathologIes. Here, the most violent emotions, lacking as they
do a place for, or way of, being worked on, are projected to the outside and seen
there as belonging to others; this process may extend even to the formation of
a 'double' (Carels 1 998) .
However, let us return to Maurizio, whom we left tortured by his widowhood . Faced with new
waves of uncontai nable pain, he began to ' d rug' h imself, taking unimag inably high (self
prescribed) doses of psychopharmaceuticals. This was the only way he could achieve the
anaesthesia that enabled him to survive. He gradually came to accept that he could recover,
at least up to a point, but his life wou ld be marked by years of delusion. He said that his
suffering was now due to ' having become aware of "reality" , but not yet being capable of
handling it emotionally'.
At this point a further necessary but exceed ingly painful process of integration began : he
had not only to integ rate himself into reality, but also to integrate reality i nto his psychic l ife
- and he had to integ rate his own criminal parts, which for a long time had made him want,
when he was still a boy, to kill his father and mother, and also to kill his baby brother by giving
him 'massive doses of drugs'.
This was what he was doing to himself now: using drugs to blot out the tender, affectionate
parts that had begun to come alive inside him, of which he was terrified because they would
expose him to the horror of his own fantasies and possibly also to criminal acting out. So,
slowly but surely, he began to cut down on the intoxication of the psychopharmaceuticals,
72
discovering to his surprise 'the boy who read poetry', the 'quiet kindness of the newsstand
lady' and 'a nice boy' he had met on returning to the lake he had used to visit with his father
as a child.
Dreams of sometimes extreme violence - sodomizing the black man with a stick,
sodomizing all Albanians, or sodomizing the gardener's daughter (as well as his own needy,
tender parts) - alternated with others in which tender, affectionate relations with girls began
to appear. At this point he fell fondly in love - platonically - with two women, a 'waitress who
gave me milk' and a girl at a motorway service area where he had a 'cappuccino'. If I got
unduly close to his criminal aspects, the 'waitress's milk would be scorching hot' and the
cups of cappuccino became a scary Capuchin monk or hooded Ku Klux Klan fig ures
threatening him with death. B
His tender, affectionate parts gradually gained the upper hand. Although he said he felt
normal and cured, there remained a phobic area in his village. He had called himself the Czar
of that village, and had drawn up lists of proscribed persons, as well as catalogues of sexual
abuses to be perpetrated on the women. A dream put us in touch with 'Ulrich' , a Nazi who
had escaped after committing atrocities in the concentration camps, and who had to flee to
somewhere where he was neither known nor likely to be recognized.
So Maurizio felt safe in crowded places like supermarkets or department stores, which he
began to frequent, and where he started to forge relationships that could never get close
owing to his fear of being 'recognized' .
H e was now beginning to integrate the side of himself that had been represented b y 'Pierre
Clementi' in [Buiiuel's 1 967) film Belle de Jour - sadistic and violent aspects - dreaming that
his 'sister had pustules' , which he described as his own 'antisocial aspects, which disfigure
my capacity for affection' . Now, however, the road to integration was open, and Maurizio
was able to move through the streets of his village, albeit only in his car. ' Like in a safari park,'
he commented with a smile.
Everything else is too recent to be narrated without interference with the 'work in progress'.
Hallucination
Hallucination is actually more serious than delusion. In my view, many phenomena

described as hallucinations are in fact 'frames of a waking dream film' . The
distinction is fundamental, as it may be likened to the difference between a
tumour and an infection - however serious the infection.
Whereas a visual flash is indicative of a sound a-function and an inadequate
apparatus for thinking thoughts, 'true hallucination' betrays an extremely severe
deficiency of the a-function. I have given a full account of these matters
elsewhere (Ferro 1992), and should like here merely to recall the case history,
originally presented in more detail, of a preadolescent boy who, at the beginning
of his analysis, had 'true hallucinations' involving massive evacuations in bizarre
images that lacked a shareable meaning, and suffered from anxieties that were
still nameless (�-elements). In the course of these evacuations, which were
73
basically beneficial because they relieved his mind of an unbearable blockage

that plunged him into a confused, oneIric mental state, he was totally carried
away, as if abducted by what he saw, so that he lost all emotional contact with
me. As I gradually became the 'toilet breast' that he had never had sufficiently at
his disposal, the 'true hallucinations' came to an end, and were succeeded by
large-scale phenomena of traniformation into hallucinosis, in which he saw the
things that he had evacuated massIVely into me as belongmg to me wIthout the
slightest shadow of doubt. He discovered a whole series of aspects of myself -
behaviours, attitudes, facial expressions, the colour of my clothes - that plainly
betrayed, say, my Jealousy at the new things that were happening in him; and
this, moreover, was incontrovertible. After a long period of work, 'what he saw'
began to take on certain charactenstics of belonging to his internal world, which
he was projectmg; he was no longer detached from emotional contact with me,
and what he saw was, precisely, the image of a fragment ofwaking dream thought
(a-elements) that was bemg proj ected outside himself.
I shall now present a vIgnette from a stage in this patient's analysis when the
visual phenomena had VIrtually disappeared from the scene and which,
notwithstanding my interpretative madequacies, reveals the eXIstence of a mental
contamer that 'held fast' .
G.L.
,
For some time, the patient, G.L., had been wondering about the 'class G driving licence g -
the guarigione [cure] licence - while at the same time he was very afraid of his ' neighbours',
who, he feared, were intolerant and might have him thrown out if he was not perfect.
His demand to move into the adults' consulting room was becoming ever more insistent.
By mid-December an absolute catastrophe was already looming, due to the approaching
Christmas holiday separation, which he attempted to deal with by resorting to pornographic
magazines with sexual images. ' Mummy's going away - who will do the ironing and cleaning
and who will feed me?' He kept on inSisting on a 'meeting' with his people before the holidays.
Once again he suffered from repeated 'hallucinations' , in which he was attacked by terroni
- southern Italian yokels - who were actually frames from a waking dream fi lm, on which we
succeeded in working as if they were dreams. He was suffering from a terrible inner tension
that seemed to find an outlet in visual evacuations; this paralysed him and made him feel like
'someone in a wheelchair', and he discovered his need for a mother who was always there
(i.e. for an external a-function to help him to metabolize). Terrified and paralysed with fear,
he was even more afraid that these feelings might invade and infect me.
To get away from all this, he at times needed to say 'I don't want to come any more', to
exhibit rage and to show that he could do perfectly well without me. At other times, however,
not com ing because of the holidays was feared as if it were the end of the world.
Two kinds of functioning coexisted in the analytic field. On the one hand, he was afraid
that the mind of � is mother (and of myself as his mother) was clogged up and swamped ,
74
taken up with other presences, so that there was no place for him in it. On the other, the mind
of his father (and of myself as his father) was organized like his father's shop, on d ifferent
floors and different levels with separate places for armchairs, living rooms and kitchens. On
returning after the holidays, he complained of having been very anxious, even though he had
finally accepted his parents' suggestion of visiting his grandparents in France.
As previously agreed, in the third session after the holidays we changed rooms, moving
into the adults' consulting room.
He had a whole series of persecutory worries, about presumed dirty tricks by his mother,
father and neighbours. He was afraid that I was not understanding anything he was saying
to me. He was extremely confused.
At times, after certain interpretations, he would briefly feel 'de-confused' .
He declared himself unable t o distinguish between reality and imagination: a 'kind o f fog'
had built up inside him, and everything seemed 'misted up' .
Gradually, however, he seemed to be starting to find his way about the new room: 'the
armchair is made of wood; there's a couch that puts me in mind of "S" [semenJ, the ceiling
is made of cork, and there's a table.' Little by little he was able to metabolize the feelings
aroused by the move and by 'not having had the compass of the four sessions' missed during
the holidays.
He was often very frightened by what I told him, and was afraid of rebukes and criticism.
I felt it necessary not to be in a hurry, and to content myself with proceeding very softly and
a little at a time, otherwise he would be afraid that I was 'attacking and destroying' him.
Meanwhile, the visual flashes, which had become less frequent since the resumption of
sessions, had disappeared completely.
However, I realized the vital importance of exercising extreme caution in my interpretations,
and of often confining myself to acting as a 'containing jacket'.
I shall now present some material from this patient's sessions, accompanying it
with comments, in italics, reflecting my present standpoint, which differs greatly
from my position at the time.
G.L. I 've got to go to the barber's today; Anna Rita will be there, but, you know those
things that barbers put over your clothes - I'm afraid she won't put them on properly; some
barbers fit them properly, but others don't, and then you end up with a mess of hairs all
over you .
Analyst You're afraid of getting a careless barber who doesn't pay enough attention to you.
I still think this was a good response: the patient seems to be telling me what it feels like to
begin the session by entrusting his head to someone else - someone felt to be receptive,
even if he is unsure of how reliable that person is. How will mummy put on his bib? How much
trouble will the analyst take to perform metabolizing operations without being careless? Will
he succeed in this, or will the patient end up 'in a mess', caused by imprecise interpretations
that are too narrow or too broad?
Let us see how the patient responds.
75
G.L. Yes, up to a point, but I must say the barber is a bit careless about the details: she
understands the i mportant t�lings very well and knows exactly how I want my hair to be. I
don't know yet what to do about my hat, as it's an intimate thing of my own; so is my jacket,
but not so much. Never mind; at home too, I ' m afraid of finding the green bedspread soiled
with 'S' or that it's been changed .
The patient is broadly satisfied with my responses, but not at all with the details. My response
somehow passes muster; its 'cut' was on the mark. The patient now expresses his anxiety
about separating from his protective defences - taking off his hat, jacket and bedspread. What
is the analyst to do with these? Will he be able to respect them and not change them too
much - not get them in a mess for him? But this is not what I had in mind: contaminated by
the idea that the patient is telling me about a primal scene, I give him an interpretation which,
although unsaturated, he feels to be beside the point.
Analyst It seems to me that you are finding it hard to leave these things alone, to separate
from them, and perhaps even more to find them again after you have separated from them ,
in case they have got messed up, contaminated or even been changed .
He responds to this interpretation as follows:
G.L. Let me tell you something else. In the kitchen too, I ' m afraid of making a mess and
causing stains with oil, so I have to be very careful . I also have to be very careful when I close
the doors of the kitchen cupboard; I ' m not sure the door is properly closed , and then I ' m
afraid t o leave go o f i t - I ' m sort o f afraid that pieces o f the door will stick t o my hands.
My view today is that he is beginning to fear that, instead of 'cooking ' (with the oil), my words
might make a mess and cause stains; the door is of course myself, sitting in front of him - on
this occasion we are face to face - and he is afraid he will not be able to prevent himself from
being 'soaked' with what I have said to him. I fail to understand this, as my mind is filled with
the theory of separation, so I say something that does not fit in with what the patient is thinking:
Analyst I think you ' re telling me how d ifficult it is both to be in the kitchen and to go away
from the kitchen without worrying: you ' re afraid of the grease, of getting in a mess, and then
of not having closed the doors properly, and of separating in case the pieces of yourself and
the other person get mixed up. I also think all these problems apply to thi� kitchen - this
room - and to myself as your mother.
His response to this absolute interpretative crescendo of mine is:
G.L. You've really struck home there! I ' d l i ke to get myself some g l oves, l i ke Claudio's,
with studs like nightclub bouncers ' ; I go dancing at a d isco, but in the afternoon there are
young people and it's very q u iet; good ness knows what happens at nightclubs in the
evenings.
76
He experiences the explicit reference as something that really strikes home, and tells me·so
hypomanically; he would like to have defences 'with studs on' to get rid of something that
does him no good, but instead confuses him, and he cannot understand why a session
that began so quietly should turn into something so confusing and chaotic. Absolutely
unaware of this level, I defend myself by resorting once again to a saturated theory (separation
and the primal scene):
Analyst You come here in the afternoon too and it's a quiet place, but when you close the
doors, you are afraid that the kitchen might turn into a nightclub in the dark, and goodness
knows what might go on here at night - you're not allowed in, and the bouncer will keep you
out.
The patient replies:
G.L. (pointing to an old stethoscope that has been on tile bookshelf for ages) What's that?
For listening to people's hearts? What do you do with it? I 've got a pain here in the nape of
my neck, but I don't know what sort of pa.in it is.
His response to me is: What use is your listening capacity? How do you use it? If you don't
use it, you inflict an obscure, unknown pain on me. But, taken up with the (to me!) satisfying
theory of separation, I increase the dose:
Analyst If I am listening to your heart, it is because we must part, and we must wait until
Thursday to see each other again.
But what happens if too wide a gap opens up between what the patient needs to say and
have the analyst listen to, on the one hand, and the analyst's capacity to receive, on the other?
What transpires if the analyst's mind is preoccupied with his own theories, so that little space
is left for the patient? One session gives us the answer immediately. The patient arrives in a
state of uncontainable anxiety, so that the 'analyst's setting has to be breached': the patient's
father has to be present at the session to hold back the excess of anxiety generated when
the patient feels insufficiently understood and listened to. This session is presented below,
together with my curt interpretations, without further comment. What I still believe today is
that the setting can be adapted to the patient's needs in extreme situations; after all, so to
speak, anything is fair in love and war.
(The patient comes i n looking terrified, keeping his distance and remaining on h is feet.)
G.L. I feel awful. Can you see? My mother told me something terrible - no, I can't tell you
what it was; you can't make me.
Analyst If you feel like it, you ' l l be able to tell me; it's up to you .
G.L. Well then , I can say it: I had said I desperately needed to let off steam, and she said:
' If you want to let off steam, why don't you go with a prostitute?'
77
Analyst That doesn 't sound to me l i ke something you felt helped by; I wonder if you ' re
thinking not only of something your mother said, but also of something I said yesterday.
G.L. But my mother really did say it, and you said something along those lines too, it's true
- but enough of this: I'm afraid it might upset me, so just let me go. After all, my father is
angry with me too; my father doesn't understand me, and nor does my mother, and you do
a bit, but just a bit - please let me go.
Analyst I wonder if you ' re afraid that what I tel l you might make you feel bad - that you 'll
'have lost your bolts'.'o
G.L. Yes, I really am afraid of that - but let me go. Tal k to my dad . (He opens the door in
great anxiety, and is about to leave.)
Analyst You want to have a ' meeting'?"
G.L. Yes, yes.
Analyst But perhaps we could do it right away, and cal l your father.
G.L. Yes, OK.
(I call the father.) The father sits down; I am in my armchair, while G.L. stands.
G.L. But don't talk to me; you need to explain to my father what is happening.
Analyst I think I can tell you that your worry is that no one - neither your father nor your
mother nor myself - understands you .
G . L . W e can tal k about that, b u t not about the 'S' - those things are between ourselves.
Analyst Perhaps we can also say you are afraid that Mum and Dad won 't allow you to let
off steam, but perhaps you' re afraid of not being able to let off more steam here, considering
that you are in the adults' consulting room.
G.L. That's right. Now I feel 'de-confused' , I'm less afraid . I'd like to ask my father something:
Will he go for a little walk with me to do some window-shopping before going to work at the
office? ' 2
Father No problem, o f course, G.L., w e can do that.
Analyst But perhaps this is your way of asking Dad to be close to you, to show you that he
wants to take care of you, and perhaps you are also telling me that I mustn't immediately
dive into what you say, but should take a little wal k together with you first, to make you feel
close to me, and then, once the fear has been overcome, we can work.
G.L. That's right. But enough of that now. I ' m afraid . But I don't know whether to talk about
it. Th is business of the bolts.
Analyst Maybe you 're afraid that I might babble on at random, and ruin the bit of calm you
have achieved, plunging you into palazzo - into confusion.
G.L. Here, yes, but I want my father to tell my mother not to get angry, not to go off her
head .
Father I ' l l do what I can , G . L.
Analyst And perhaps you want me - mummy Ferro - to be more careful what I say.
G.L. But Dad, come with me to the young people's shops, the ones with the slightly weird
things, the ones that suit me.
Father G.L., no problem.
78
Analyst And perhaps you're asking me to make sure I can give you 'things that suit you,
things that are an exact fit'.
The patient skips the next session but comes along to the one after.
As he comes in he seems to be faintly smiling.
G.L. Are you angry with me?

Analyst Are you afraid I might be because you didn't come yesterday?
G.L. Yes, we tried to come, but the car was snowed in and we couldn't get away; did my
father phone to tell you?
A potential short circuit had to be cooled down by skipping the session.
Analyst No he didn't ring, and perhaps that's why you're afraid I might be angry.
G.L. Well , I am a bit, I'd rather he'd told you. Today I feel better; I think I can tell imagination
and reality apart better, and I'm not in a dream like the other times. I went with my dad to
Via Cavour - there were lots of shops for grown-ups, but none for boys of my age. I don't
know where to look - perhaps in the street near the police station, the one that leads from
the tunnel.
The 'cooling' has done its job: an effective contact barrier makes waking dream thought readily
distinguishable from reality, and the apparatus for thinking thoughts (S? d and Ps H D) is
working proper/yo
Analyst I think you are making me see that you ' re getting your bearings, getting your
bearings in Pavia, between imagination and reality, getting your bearings here, and that you'd
also like to "find things that suit you here, although you're afraid that, i n the adults' consulting
room, it might be hard for you to find boys' things.
G.L. The main thing is, today I feel 'de-confused' , but a bit worried about Saturday and
Sunday. Don't say anything, but I went dancing on Sunday and I was afraid: everything got
on top of me, and I was afraid of being robbed of all the things I have inside me, my intimate
things, money, keys, identity card - but today I feel that the confusion is getting less, and
that things are getting back to normal. If you keep quiet, I ' l l go on.
I ' m pleased to have so many jackets, and I think they are starting to suit me again. But one
thing frightens me: when I close things, I get worried, because it feels as if I don't really know
that the drawer will stay properly closed, so I have to make an effort to be sure.
The patient says he feels 'de-confused', instead of confused as before. What I still fail to
understand is the patient's fear of moments when he comes close to me, when we 'dance',
and are together, whereas he is less afraid of the days when we don 't see each other - or
rather, that when we are together I might pollute him, and confuse him with inappropriate
interpretative activity. He is still afraid that I might tum his internal world upside down by
depriving him of a defensive Gestalt of his that he needs in order to get his bearings. If a
79
patient is at risk of staying imprisoned in the world of dreams, the analyst's interventions must
safeguard his 'iackets ' and respect his closed drawers, as the most important think to respect
is the distinction between external and internal reality, which can be made only if the a
function is not stressed beyond its capacity for metabolization. Otherwise it is like giving
chocolate to a diabetic: he immediately falls into a coma due to the accumulation of ketone
bodies.
Analyst It's mainly when we are not together that things get on top of you, that you tend
to get confused and to lose the things that helped you get your bearings - but you're also
afraid that, when I am there, I might confuse you if I say anything disturbing. Perhaps you
are beginning to be satisfied again at feeling protected by all those session-jackets.
G.L. But today you seem to me to be right on target with the ' bolts'. My mother is calmer
too, and my father said he would go for a l ittle walk with me. Yesterday we were stopped by
a policeman, because there was a sign saying we were entering the old town, and then, once
we had stopped, we were blocking the way for everyone else.
The last things that were said are fine, but not the policeman who holds up the traffic, as in
the first part of the communication. I am again disorienting him with interpretations that are
still close to the subject of separation, but irrelevant to what the patient is trying to convey.
But, in spite of my inappropriate interventions, G.L. 'holds fast', partly because of my 'civil
defence '-type interpretations, and although the session ends with misunderstandings, the
jacket-dykes hold firm and the caesura between reality and waking dream thought remains
intact.
Analyst The policeman shuts you out of the old town, and we must shut up shop and see
each other again on Monday - so everyone is furious.
G.L. Everyone? There's only me. Am I thinking of your other patients . . . !?
Analyst Perhaps I upset you with what I said.
G.L. You did a bit, I thought of the other patients, but then I imagined you were thinking of
all the different sides of me.
Analyst But maybe jealousy can make you feel very bad, and cause you to fall apart.
G.L. Yes, but I understood that when you said 'everyone' you meant only me: the foal , the
boy G . L . , but the foal is not like G . L.'s dog that we talked about before - and then the boy,
the foal, is l ike that man 's hat, or his stick - it's always someone with different parts inside
him.
Analyst You were afraid I might be looking down on you, but then you got your bearings
again and were able to put all the pieces back together, even though it looked for a moment
as if they were getting scattered.
80
7
Characters in literature
and in the analyst's c onsulting room
In this chapter I shall develop some ideas on the concept of the ' character' which
I have already discussed, albeit not systematically, in earlier contributions (Ferro
1992, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d, 1994c, 1996a, 1996b); I shall also seek to demonstrate
a parallel evolution between the narratological conception of the character
(Marrone 1986) and the ways in which it is understood in the various psycho
analytic models.
In his fine short story 'The persons of the tale', Robert Louis Stevenson
(1902a: 1) reflects as follows on the status of'characters' in literature: 'After the
32nd chapter ofTreasure Island, two of the puppets strolled out to have a pipe
before business should begin again, and met in an open place not far from the
story.'This beginning already establishes that the characters exist in their own
nght independently of the text, with a status that places them outside and
alongside the narrative structure, as three-dimensional presences living lives of
their own.
There follows a sequence of exchanges between Long John Silver and
Captain Smollett, which goes on until, fearing the captain's rage, Silver quickly
hides behind his identity as a character: 'I'm on'y a chara'ter in a sea story. I don't
really eXlst' (Stevenson 1902a: i f.) . In this way he both paradoxically and
unequivocally demonstrates the reality of his existence. Next comes a discussion
about the author and, ultimately, the 'real' existence of characters, beyond the
actual paper on which the story is written: 'I can't understand how this story
comes about at all, can I? I can't understand how you and I, who don't exist,
should get to speaking here, and smoke our pipes for all the world like reality'
(ibid. : 4f.) .
Doubts are also expressed as to whether the story told in the tale will always
remain the same, or whether changes might be possible. In other words, many
of the current problems of narratology are stated, although all the implications
81
Characters in literature and consulting room
of the character-au thor-reader triangle cannot yet emerge. Their emergence

may be likened to the transition from plane to solid geometry.
But let us return to Stevenson's tale, m which a clash between virtuous and
bad characters is stated to be necessary: 'Now, where would a story go to if there
were no virtuous characters?' 'If you go to that,' replied Silver, 'where would a
story begin, if there wasn't no villains?' (ibid. : 6) . These notIOns anticipate the
work of Propp ( 1 928) and of the structuralists , down to Greimas ( 1 966, 1 970) ,
o n the need for every ' actor' to have as his c ounterpart a character who prevents
his action.
In the same volume of Fables, Stevenson includes a short story entitled 'The
reader' (Stevenson 1 902b) , thus taking the further step that is central to modern
narratology, as j ust stated. H ere we have a dialogue between the book and the
reader, in which the author is also mvolved; however, I shall not quote any more
from Stevenso n , although the Fables are certainly worth considering in depth.
My reason for citmg Stevenson's tale first IS to draw attention to the Importanc e
that has always attached to the study of characters in literature.
A psychoanalytic session, too, can be Imagmed as populated with c haracters,
and so mdeed It IS (except m the extremely prImitive situations when the
'character' has to be assembled and constructed m expressible for m from highly
mvasive, dispersed emotIOnal states - Ferro 1 99 8 a , 1 998b) . B u t what is the
significance of these 'characters' ;>
A little history
In an earlier contributIOn I wrote that m the Freudian model,
the characters of the session are understood pnmarily as knots In a network

of his ton cal, factual relatIOnships. Related facts, In this case, are occasIOns for
the expression of feelings, conflict and emotional strategies, which are always
connected with those characters. Alternatively, these facts , though considered
present and real within the I ntrapsychic dynamics, may almost acquire an
' autonomous' eXistence.
(Ferro 1 992: 2)
The same situation IS in fact reflected m studies ofliterary characters pnor to the
Propp revolution, when characters were equated In every respect with 'living
p ersons ' havmg well-defined psychological features and character traits.
In the Idealistic-romantic approach to nar rative texts, then, the ' fabula' is
regarded as a faithful reproduction of reality; I for this reason, c haracters are
assigned a highly realistic status. TheIr successful realization and credibility are
assessed on the baSIS of conformIty, or a gradient of consistency and mimesIs,
82
with the world. The logic of this decoding thus dictates that the attributes of a
character and the mutual relations between characters must be studied in
accordance with the parameters of reality.
A perspective that is in many respects similar is observed in Marxist and
sociological criticism (Lukacs 1946, 1948, 1955 and Goldmann 1964 respectively),
which studies literary texts as 'significant doubles' of the historical dynamic that
underlies them. Characters are seen as representatives, or incarnations, of a
contemporary trend (economic, ideological or social, etc.), and therefore as
mirrors of all or part of reality (G.L. Barbieri, personal communication, 1 998).
To return to psychoanalysis, it is always fascinating to reread passages from
Freud's writings, such as the following amusing example from the Addendum
to the case history of the Rat Man (Freud 1909: 276): after a reconstruction by
Freud, or rather after his insistence on the patient's accepting his precise recon
struction of an episode from infancy, the patient responds with a dream in which
Professor ' Grunhut' does not spare his 'students' a call on 'drafts payable at a
specified place' - demands for payment that cannot be evaded because they are
domiciled. Freud of course lacked a model for reading the dream as a response
to an interpretation (experienced by the patient as forced on him): nowadays,
the 'draft payable at a specified place' would be regarded as an interpretative
Imposition, and we should have no difficulty in assigning the role of the students
to the patient and that of the professor to Freud.
In dreams too, as stated in Chapter 5, Freud (1900, 1914) sought to reconstruct
a truth, as in the famous dream of the Wolf Man (see diSCUSSIOn in Bezoari and
Ferro 1992a) . The patient recalls that it was night and that he was lying in his
bed; it was winter, and on the walnut tree outside he could see some white
wolves with big tails and their ears pricked like dogs. Terrified of being eaten
up by the wolves, he screamed until his nurse came. He was 4 years old at the
time of the dream.
Certain elements of the chain of associations are emphasized:the white colour
of the wolves; the position of the wolves in the tree; the story of the tailor; the
pulling off of the tail of one of the wolves; the fairy tales of Little Red Riding
Hood and the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats (the wolf with the paw made
white with flour!); the immobility of the wolves; their strained attention; the
sudden opening of the window; the wish to receive a double ration of Christmas
presents, and the frustration at the few presents he actually got.
As we know, from this material Freud reconstructs the primal scene: the position
of the wolf recalls that of the father in this scene, while the tailless wolf is
reminiscent of post-coital emasculation. The dream thus refers to a real external
event that occurred at a past historical time. The key to the dream's interpretation
is as follows:the patient unexpectedly woke up and observed parental intercourse
a tergo; the child was terrified by the father; and the scene was experienced as
terribly violent. From this point of view, the hermeneutic end-point is reached
when the character to all intents and purposes becomes a person - that is, when
83
the narratIve fiction is torn asunder and, as in the well-known story, the king
finally appears in the altogether.
In the article mentioned above, Bezoari and I suggested an interpretative
approach whereby the dream is read on a different level, without displacing it to
another part of the same history, and without referring It to external characters,
but instead regarding it as a possible but precise description of the vertex assumed
by the patient at the relevant time - of what he is experiencmg in the consulting
room and of how he is experiencing it. So It is not necessarily a dream of the
patient's history, but can instead be mterpreted in the here and now: the patient,
lymg on his analytic couch at a difficult moment in the relationship, suddenly
becomes consCIous of a profound mner experience: he is terrified to find himself
m the consulting room wIth the shrewd analyst whose ears are pricked, and sees
these ears as bemgs lymg m wait and ready to pounce; his experience IS one of
persecutIOn, but then he loses contact wIth these deep emotIOns and finds
himself back m the reality of the analytic scene.
The central Issue, then, is the place to be assigned to the primal scene. In the
history? In the mternal world? Or m the present VIcissitudes of the mental
relatIonship between analyst and patient, even if these stem partly from the fIrSt
two aspects (Nosek 1 995))
However, what status does Freud confer on the characters of the dream? It
is a historical, external-referential and symbolic status - but that is not the only
possible response. Even if Freud is admittedly performmg an extremely modern
operation and handing us down a working method through his extraordinary
capacity to 'tell a story of the patient's', we disagree with him on the vIOlence
with which the patient may experience the analytic relationship in the present.
At any rate, though, Freud confers credible, digestible and assimilable form
on the patient's terror and panic when he senses the wolf's claws concealed
behind the floury-white paw.
The same narrative capacity, or rather the capacity for 'narrative transformation'
of emotIOns, IS evident in the dreams presented by Musattl ( 1 949) in his treatise.
The analyst's renarratlon - from the Freudian perspective - can be regarded
as a meta-narration, or a narration on the patient's primary narration, which also
contams within itself the interpretatIve moment, and whose effect for the patient
is the more effective the less the gap between the (meta-) narrative level and the
cntical-interpretative level of the analyst's new text.
This attempt to bring criticism closer to the object of ItS study, m stylistic as
well as other terms, can also be discerned in the field of literature: many pages
of Gadda ( 1 958, 1 982, 1 992) or Calvino ( 1 964, 1 979, 1 980, 1 988) are not mere
critical analyses but include in addition a substantial artistic and poetic element.
The language of criticism comes to resemble that of the object of its study. One
is remmded, too, of Sogno e poesia ['Dreams and poetry'] ( 1 995) by the Italian
poet AIda Merln!, who interprets figurative works of art in poems. From a
different but In some respects sirmlar perspective, Barthes ( 1 964) writes that the
84
semiologist is an artist who wants to convey the savour of the signs he studies,
and who paints instead of digging (G.L. Barbieri, personal communication, 1998) .
Musatti, whom I mentioned above, reports a patient's dream of a barber,
which can be summarized as follows: the patient is in front of a mirror . . . he
has a cut-throat razor which he does not know how to use . . . he stretches the
skin up towards his temples and begins to shave his right cheek . . . but as soon
as he starts on the left cheek, the razor slides down to his neck . . . he has a deep
cut which is bleeding . . . he takes fright and calls for help . . . the blood gushes
forth in torrents . . .
As an exercise, nowadays we could regard this dream as referring to two forms
of encounter in the consulting room, one of which proceeds smoothly while the
other inflicts deep wounds, perhaps on account of necessary but cutting words,
which might make us think about the element of expertise, or its absence, in
'shaving' operations (in relation to the neurotic or psychotic part of the personality
- as if the dream mcluded two different vertices?) . At any rate, the patient is
expressing caution about the relationship and fear of a deep relational encounter
owing to its possible consequences.
It is surprising to note that, usmg the classical rules of dream interpretation,
and thus having the patient associate to every narrative subunit - to the narreme
rather than the moneme, let us say - Musatti arrives at very similar conclusions,
although displaced exclusively from the present transference or field relationship
on to the patient's fear of and hostility towards women, and his phobia of
marriage, the dangers of sexuality and the wish not to enter into a binding
marital union.
In Musatti, the narration does not concern the two minds in the session and
the S? cJ' relationship involved in their mating, but is displaced on to external
characters. This in fact makes the analyst's interpretation truer and easier to accept
for the patient, and is achieved by way of ' free associations' leading from the
tragic love of Dante 's Paolo and Francesca to stories of throat cutting, of surgical
operations, and the like.
Bearing in mind Bion's ( 1962) concept of , dream-work-a' that operates
during waking life as well as sleep, I would invert the vertex for reading the 'free
associations' : rather than free associations affording an explanation of the manifest
text, they are obligatory associations that renarrate in a different way the problem
of the relational instant, which had already been expressed by the dream and is
being retold in different dialects and with a different plot (Bezoari and Ferro
1 992a) .
At this level a possible parallel between narratology and psychoanalysis may
be observed. As we know, narratology sought to identify a schema - a more or
less constant structure - beneath the changeable surface of the narrative plot of
an individual text. This afforded a fresh view of the romantic idea of the artist's
creative freedom, transforming it into the partial handling of a variable quantity
of freedom surveyed within a relatively inflexible structure. In a psychoanalytic
85
narration, apart from the binding structure, which may consist, for example, m
the fact of belongmg to a genre, there is another structure, which IS constant
although subj ect to continuous transformation: namely, the dynamic web of
the patient-analyst relationship. It IS this factor that compels us to reconsider
the 'freedom' of the associations considered above (G. L . Barbieri, personal
communication, 1 998) .
It is the emotional climate of the moment that is renarrated by the associations, which
draw on the dream bemg elaborated by the a-function at the specific relatIOnal
instant - but this m Itself seems to us to be a valuable process of narrative
transformation and retransformatlOn (Bezoari and Ferro 1 992a) .
Even recent work by attentive authors of great sensitiVity exhibits this
predommant approach to characters, which are seen in referential, histoncal
or external terms, and particularly in those of the family romance. From today's
vantage point, I wou ld call this a model based on a strongly realistic reading of
communications rather than a Freudian model.
A fine article by Owen Renik ( 1 998) presents a case history that displays a
rare degree of clinical mastery and countertransference sensibility, in which the
patient, a doctor, describes how, working m a hospital emergency room, he was
able to save the life of a woman patient undergomg a severe hypothyroid criSIS.
Without gomg mto details about the analyst's working through, his profound
capacity to cope with countertransference experiences, and the manner in which
he picks up the interaction m the present between his own personal history and
that of the patient, I should like only to emphasize that the characters constituted
by the ' emergency room', the 'patient' and the ' hypothyroid crisis' are seen by
the analyst as 'real' and referential, pertaming to an external event.2 They are not
regarded as emanations of internal obj ects or of current forms of functioning in
the analytic field, in which, say, the patient is mdicating that he is capable - even
in the absence of a thyroxine function of the analyst - of confronting a severe
'hypothyroid' , or comatose, crisis of a part of himself; nor do they relate to other
possible interpretations of functioning and dysfunctioning m the analytic field
through narrations that are significant in so far as they are events that narrate
the field Itself.
In the second major model, which I have preVIOusly described as Kleinian,
the characters are knots in a network of intrapsychic relationships. Related

facts are ultimately a way to communicate the patient's inner reality in disguise,
a reality, however, which IS seen as already 'given' . It awaits an interpreter to
clardy ItS functlOnmg by discovenng Its root m the patient's u nconscIOus
phantaSies.
(Ferro 1 992: 2)
An example can be found m a contributIOn by Heimann (1 955) , m which a

patient begms a sessIOn With a great deal of complaining and then fears that he
86
is being persecuted. The interpretation is that the patient's complaining is his way
of expressing in the present his unconsaous bodilyfantasy of making a urethral attack
with scalding urine, after which he feared the retaliation of the burnt object.
Nowadays I would prefer to call this a model with a strongfantasy-related stamp
thatJocuses on the patent's internal world and on its functioning and dysfunctioning.
In Segal's contribution on the Kleinian approach in Models of the Mind (Rothstein
1 985), there are frequent references to the underlying bodily fantasy, which is
confirmed as the true 'hero', in the narratological sense of the protagonist with
the greatest emotional prominence. From this point of view, the characters of the
session appear as susceptible to decoding as, and reduction to, expressions of
unconsclOUS fantasies. The fate of an unconscious fantasy is to be put into words
in transference interpretations: characters are 'masks' concealing fantasies that
belong to the patient and his internal world.
In the field of narratology, an interesting parallel may be drawn between
Freudian and Kleinian characters and the entities Hamon (1972: 121f.) calls
personnages-riferentiels and personnages-embrayeurs respectively. The former are the
historical, mythological, etc., figures that possess so high a coefficient of reality in
the narrative text that they appear as actual persons (as in the Freudian approach),
whereas the latter are reflections of their originator - tokens that betray the
author, his point of view and his ideas (rather as in the Kleinian perspective).
It also seems legitimate to compare the distinction made by Greimas (1966)
between 'actors' and 'actants' to the Kleinian distinction between the characters
of the patient's narration and the patient's unconscious fantasy (Klein 1929,
196 1 ).3 For Greimas, an individual character (actor) is the surface manifestation
of a deeper, structural and functional dimension (the actant), which, while
remaining constant, may assume a variety of external guises; the same is true of
Kleinian characters, which can be traced back to an actancy structure that can
indeed be identified with the patient's unconscious fantasy. From this point of
view, characters are 'doubles' to be reduced to a unity, and they partake of the
nature of the shadow in Andersen's eponymous tale (1847), of the many Harry
Hallers reflected in the mirror in Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927), of Dostoevsky's
The Double (1846) and of Conrad's The Secret Sharer (1910) (Arrigoni and
Barbieri 1998).
The characters of the session may prove to be internal objects of the patient
projected on to the analyst, who then serves as a screen for these projections and
as an interpreter for them on the basis of a highly consistent theory. The need
that gradually comes to be felt is not for the construction, together with the
patient, of a history, albeit external to the couple, and dating from the past, but
for a code that can be used with a high degree of generalization (Ferro 1997 a).
Abraham (1920: 3 1 8) presents a dream of a female patient in which she is
sittmg in a basket-chair beside a lake in which there are many swimmers, when
the arrival of a huge wave and a high wind overwhelms vessels and bathers.
Abraham's interpretation of the patient's fantasies has much in common with
87
the Kleinian reading: the wave and the wmd represent urethral and anal erotism,
while the chair is a water closet.
My own view is that the dream is about the analyst's words, which plunge
the patient into a state of confusion. However, the pomt at issue is not so much
the disregarding of a possible relatIonal aspect to the dream as the invoking of
partly preconstituted knowledge, which is then found to be present m the dream.
SiITlllarly, in the famous spider dream, Abraham ( 1 922) interprets m a manner
that antICipates Klem's part-obj ects and has to do with the patient's mternal
reality (De Simone and Fornari 1 988) .
I have drawn attention in previous contributions (Bezoari and Ferro 1 992a;
Ferro 1 992) to the fascination of Klein's ( 1 96 1 ) case history of her patient
Richard, which describes a constant counterpoint berween what the patient says
and the unconscious fantasies derived from it: what the young patient dreams
'means . . .', 'represents . . .' , 'is . . .' or 'stands for . . .' - in each case in accordance
with a saturated code. Richard's response to these interpretations is interesting:
for instance, he mentions 'people travelling in different directions' (Session 48,
p. 233) or comments, in relation to Drawing 1 4 : 'This is the worst of all' (p. 2 1 5) .
The bursting pipes featuring i n a dream, o r boiling water, are read as referring
to 'boiling urine' , or urethral fantaSies, rather than as emotional blockages or
signals of the premature forcing of hypersaturated, pressurized contents by the
analyst on to the patient. Here again, Richard rej ects the drawing.
This kind of interpretation can be found in many Kleinian-inspired develop
ments. For instance, in a richly original article, Norman ( 1995) reports on a little
girl who tells him m a session that she has heard a story about a grizzly bear that
was a mummy bear With young; it was a terrible story, in which the mother had
a fractured skull and the young bears disappeared. The analyst's response is to
interpret the negatIve transference (how her disappointment with the analyst
plunges her mto a terrifying world) and the unconscIOus fantasies about her
internal obj ects . He does not mentIon the real external world, but instead
qualitIes of the patient's internal world (Uchoa Junqueira 1 995) : fantasies of a
VIOlent primal scene and negatIve feelings towards the analyst. Nor does the
author consider another - mtratextual - level that concerns the girl's experience
of the analyst's interpretatIOns; in other words, no account IS taken of the fact
that the narratIOn is also the story of what IS co-generated in the field by the
analyst-patient encounter. The element of an unforeseeable narratIOn present in
Freud seems to have been lost (Bezoari and Ferro 1 992a) .
It is rather like the distinction berween a symbol and an allegory m western
culture : the former mcludes a degree of mtuitiveness, openness and unpre
dictability that IS sacrificed in the latter in favour of an inflexible code. The
former refers to a mysterious, obscure, contradictory and non-verbalizable reality,
while the latter entails the channelling of the obscurity, mystery and contradic
tonness into a schema that renders this magma expressible in words. Allegory
was the basis of the medieval compilation of encyclopedias such as the Physiologus,
88
which contain a coded catalogue of keys for the interpretation of reality

(Arrigoni and Barbieri 1998).
In this connection I formerly espoused an unsaturated relational model whose
roots in my view lay in the work of Madeleine andWilly Baranger and ofBion,
and in which ' characters [are presented] as knots in an interpersonal, or rather
intergroup, narrative network, which emerge as "holograms" of the current
emotional interrelationship between analyst and patient' (Ferro 1992: 2).4
In this model, the two minds in the session need to tell, or narrate, to each
other what is happening between them, and in particular what is happening
deep down in the constitution of a field of projective emotional turbulence. The
characters, which will not necessarily be anthropomorphized, permit the coming
into being of stories and tales, as developments of the holograms of the
protagonists' functioning as a couple. Nowadays I would describe this as a model
with a strongly narrative stamp whereby thefabric oj emotions existing in the currentfield
appears as the lo{Us oj all the historical and fantasy-related precipitates oj both patient
and analyst.
If this change of vertex is considered in accordance with the categories of
RomanJakobson (1963), some interesting observations emerge. In Freudian and
Kleinian terms, the addresser (the patient) sends a message to the addressee (the
analyst), who performs a predominantly referential function in the communicative
and interpretative dynamic, his role being concentrated on decoding signs in the
direction of reality. All other functions (emotional, oriented towards the addresser;
conative, centred on the addressee; poetic, directed towards the message; meta
linguistic, concerning the code; and phatic, based on the channel) are in fact
subordinated to the referential function, which consists in the need to seek and
interpret the 'real' meaning of the text (G.L. Barbieri, personal communication,
1998).
From a strongly relational perspective, the question arises in different terms,
first and foremost because patient and analyst are both simultaneously addressers
and addressees, so that the message is structured in accordance with a twofold
paternity, which, while as stated recalling a musical score for four hands, is on
the other hand also a piece whose author is at one and the same time audience,
performer and critic. This means that the five functions mentioned above need
not be subordinated to the referential function, which loses its priority, while at
the same time its status is transformed so that it absorbs all the other functions.
The referential function is productive and useful only if the other functions are
regarded as constituent parts of it - the emotional and conative functions (which
are interwoven and almost indistinguishable from each other owing to the
overlapping roles of the addresser and the addressee), the phatic function (because
even contact itself is susceptible to referentialization), and the metalinguistic and
poetic functions (because language and text in themselves are not mere materials
to be analy sed, but essential structural components of referential decoding
activity - G.L. Barbieri, personal communication, 1998).
89
In an analytic seSSlOn, the same thing happens as m Calvino's novel if on a

Winter5 Night a Traveler (1 979) , in which not only the reader and the author
effectively become characters, but also the narrative dynamic also includes the
relations established between the two poles of the narration; in this way,
the expectations, questions, hopes and uncertainties of reading (and of writing)
constitute the connective tissue of the narration.
That said, psychoanalytic characters take on a particular status. Whereas a
literary character is not only a construction present in the narration and endowed
with an essential structure of its own, but also a reconstruction by the reader
whereby it so to speak becomes actual instead ofjust potentia!, the psychoanalytic
character lacks a given, objective aspect, because it is articulated progressively by
way of the dialogic and projective interaction of patient and analyst: it is a
dynamic entity that IS never completely defined, of twofold paternity, subject to
constant additions and modifications, with a double genetic heritage in a state
of constant flux. Even more than in literary narration, characters in psycho
analytic narration prove to be the fundamental element that determines and
regulates textual cohesion and coherence, thus making the narration itselflegible
(G.L. Barbien, personal commumcation, 1 998) .
In this conneCtion, we may invoke the notlOn of'mterpretative cooperation',
imtIated by the two poles of the communication during the session in relation
to the text that comes into being, as Eco (1 979) does m the field of literature.
In Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1 939) , the headland (Howth Head) and the river
(the Liffey) assume anthropomorphic characteristics. Then there are the publican
Humphrey Chimpden EarwlCker and his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, but unlike
the situation m Ulysses ( 1 937), these characters do not retain their identities
throughout the novel: H . C.E. ls also Here Comes Everybody everybody through
-
all time, from Adam to Noah, Cromwell, Caesar, Napoleon, Wellmgton and an
mfimte number of other characters of the story and oflegend, down to the hod
carrier Tim Finnegan, as well as the common man and the father of humanity
(also with the name ofHaveth Childers Everywhere) .The same applies to Anna
Livia.
There is a continuous metamorphosis of characters who transmute from one
to another in a history in the throes of constant transformation. This history is
seen as the only possible conditlOn for humankind after the ' OK' uttered by the
half-asleep Molly Bloom in Ulysses, when she accepts the human condition in
its histoncal dimension.
With a view to conveying an mfimte range of meanings and a multiplicity
of levels of receptlOn, every word in Finnegans Wake is a transcription of an
ideogram into letters of our alphabet, and what matters is the complex and
ambiguous suggestiveness of the resultmg web of sound.
Finnegans Wake is the story of a family living in the village of Chapelizod on
the outskirts of Dublin, but what counts is how it is narrated. The story is
pervaded throughout by evasiveness and instability and the narration takes
90
place simultaneously on different levels; the same applies to its language, which
is a metalanguage with infinite expressive potential. Similarly, the approach to
psychoanalytic narration is based on the criterion of maximum openness,in such
a way that the analyst (as well as the patient) allows himself to roam freely
between the 'possible worlds' suggested by the emotional context of the moment,
at the same time undertaking, outside the text, all the inferential walks that
promise to be pleasurable and productive in like measure, without either
magnifYing or a priori anaesthetizing any possible channel of sense,observing
and not creating the successive isotopies called into being by the semantic flow
of the text as it forms. Moreover, an important element of this process is the
pleasure derived by analyst and patient alike from the interpretative activity: the
patent gives up his purely passive role, and participates in the more or less
unconscious search for proportio that presses for the unification of the words of
the text and the elements of reality in an interplay of harmonious relations.
The literary counterpart of the above is the dispute between Rorty (1989),
with his reader-oriented,or pragmatic,interpretation,and Umberto Eco (1990).
Expressed in the simplest possible terms,Rorty maintains that any reading of a
literary text is perfectly legitimate because the text is in itself a trace that is
completed and brought to life in one way or another. Eco rejects this hypothesis,
holding that what matters is less the intentio lectoris, as Rorty claims, than the
intentio operis: the structure of the text includes certain components that sanction
a particular reading and stand in the way of another (G.L. Barbieri, personal
communication, 1998).
The relational perspective in psychoanalysis places the activity of decoding
in an area midway between the posilions of Rorty and Eco: the basic assumption
is reader-oriented,in the sense that any key may be usable and legitimate,while
the emotional and relational context may make Eco's approach more productive,
provided that the preferential guidelines for one's own reading are sought in the
text and context of the session and not in the analyst's favourite analytic
categories.
This situation is also exemplified by Alain Resnais's 'double-barrelled' 1993
fum Smoking/No Smoking, whose plot is based on a series of narrative forks or
bifurcations that dictate the subsequent course of the story: if Character A had
done X,so-and-so would have happened,but if he had done Y, the result would
have been different. Each branch then splits into two again,in an entertaining
interplay of possibilities projected forward into the future and backward into
the past. This is certainly more enjoyable on DVD than with an ordinary film
shown in the cinema or played back on cassette,as the disc technology allows
the viewer to manipulate narrative time in a way that is not possible with
traditional unidirectional media.
Another medium that allows one to venture into the logic of possible worlds
is the gamebook, which enables readers to choose and construct their own
narrative journey and story.
91
The difference between the handling of possible worlds in literary and in

psychoanalytic narration emerges clearly at this point. Openness is essential in
both cases, but in the literary field the possible worlds are detours that will be
legltlmized - or not, as the case may be - by subsequent parts of the text, since
the events described have already been written, oriented, structured and
finalized. In other words, these are worlds that are 'possible' only for the readers,
who are immersed in a textual itinerary that proves to be labyrinthine, mysterious
and open only because of their limited and partial knowledge. It is thus basically
a question of time, for as the textual j ourney proceeds, the possibilities and
opemngs are progressively reduced.
In a psychoanalytic narration, on the other hand, the search for possible worlds
is a genuine one, in so far as we have a text in.fieri, constructed by two authors
on the basis of a creative dynamic that is stimulating and delicate in equal
measure, at the same time rich and uncertain, and, m particular, free of the need
to reach a definite narrative fimshing line. Here the worlds really are possible,
open to a narrative future (the unfoldmg of the story) , but also to a pragmatic
present (the mteractlon of the two subj ects in the sessIOn) and to a personal past
to be made to emerge.
The possible worlds m literature must take account of the concepts of
relevance, conSIStency and legitimacy, whereas their psychoanalytic counterparts
are not subject to any such constramts. So 'aberrant decoding' - that is, an
approach to a text whereby the addresser's intentions are overturned or at least
modified - which is unusual m literature and is accepted only with great caution,
is an instrument commonly used in psychoanalysIs precisely to make the patient's
text say something the patient himself never meant. Psychoanalytic narration is
'used' without the philological, historical, aesthetic and hermeneutic respect
demanded by a literary text (G.L. Barbieri, personal communication, 1 998) .
In a contribution on the thought of Francesco Corrao, Riolo ( 1 997) points
out some analogies between the work of the historian and scientist on the one
hand and that of the analyst on the other:
the intangibility of the obj ective data, the temporal bidirectionality of events,
the need for speculative imagination for reconstruction of the text or of the
narrative framework and, m particular, the inevitable transformational and
distorting interference of the observer with the observed and observable
objects.
Riolo adds that, m the view of Corrao, psychoanalysIs is not a symbolic system
charged 'with deciphering meaning', but a 'system for generating new thoughts'
- which m turn 'call for an unsaturated space, a margm of possibilities, an
oscillatIOn and a clinamen of sense relative to prior determmations' .
A very Important pomt must now be made. A s noted by Manoa ( 1 995), m
psychoanalysIs a necessary asymmetry results from the analyst's responsibility for
92
the treatment and from his guaranteeing that the transformations that take place
in the sessions are - in the language of Bion - from� to a and are directed
not towards confirming the analyst's theories but towards making what could not
previously be thought thinkable for the patient. The analyst in the session has
great ethical responsibility because he is 'treating' a suffering person, and each
piece of knowledge accruing on this journey is an instrument of therapeutic
change.
I shall now present some clinical examples of this approach, in which the
character's reality - both historical and fantasy-related - is deconstructed in
favour of its capacity to signify places, nodes or aggregates of meaningful
emotions within a field in constant flux. The character becomes the fluid
representation in fantasy of emotional and affective colours, of orographic
features and of waves of the transformational geography of the field (Bezoari
and Ferro 1990a, 199 1 a, 1 991b; Ferro 1994a, 1996a) .
Daria :S- drugs
Because Daria cannot tolerate the 'classical' analytic setting, I have reluctantly decided to
accept some correctives that were simply unavoidable. For instance, I allow her sessions to
overrun by one or two minutes (or sometimes more); I answer - within limits - questions she
asks in the urgency of her panic; I try to replace any missed sessions; and I have given her
the key to the street door for use in emergency. All these modifications have formed part of
our usual setting for a long time. Now that the analysis has progressed to a certain point, it
seems to me that the time has come to discuss these 'expansions' of the setting. I draw
attention, too, to another variable that has long gone unmentioned - namely, Daria's need
to avoid lying down on the couch , but to remain sitting upright on it like someone surveying
the world from a balcony, watching out for and observing every nuance of my facial
expression or posture.
After a session in which I attempted to bring up the subject of these 'acquired rights', Daria
arrives in a black mood which has not been in evidence for some time; she says she has
been to her psychiatrist, who has prescribed 'drugs' for her, which she (the psychiatrist)
said were necessary, as well as 'behaviour therapy', and adds that the analysis is of no use,
and indeed harmful , for her panic attacks. She tells me I have got everything wrong and
emphasizes that the only solutions to her panic fits are 'drugs' and 'behaviour therapy'. In
the previous session, Daria said that the purpose of every session was not to conduct analysis
but to allow her to leave at the end in the conviction - which had to be renewed each time -
that I was fond of her.
Taken aback for a moment and wondering about possible inadequacies of mine, I am able
in the next session, when she mentions the psychiatrist again, to tell Daria that she seems
to be thinking that 'the panic attacks are something so "specific" that they cannot be made
better or treated by psychoanalysis' . Analysis might be fine for other problems. It seems to
me that, according to Daria-as-an-expert-on-drugs, the panic attacks can be treated and
93
c u red only through behaviour therapy and drugs - namely, the key to the street door, my
willingness to answer her questions, the tacking on of extra minutes to her sessions, and
making up for m issed sessions. These d rugs and behaviours confirm that I am fond of her,
and that is the latest and only treatment for her panic attacks.
Analysis consists of words. Drugs and behaviours are unequivocal facts, which thus have
more value: 'So you are fond of me if you give me the key, if you answer my q uestions, if you
give me a few extra m i n utes, if you don't make me lose sessions . . . '
Lots of drugs and behaviours are perhaps about to be less in evidenee, so what is to be
done? Can an analysis be conducted without the 'correctives' of anti-panic drugs and
behaviours?
Francescd's cough
In the h i story of Francesca, a 4-year-old girl, the predominant character is a cough - a

constant, i rritable cough that has now tormented everybody for years on end. The doctors
themselves, having failed to find an organic cause despite all their sophisticated
examinations, suggested a psychological investigation .
At our first meeting, Francesca's mother tells me that the cough began at the age of 12
months when the family moved and the birth of a l ittle sister drew near. After a few months,
tics also appeared: Francesca would breathe i n and out i n fits and starts.
Recently she has started having nightmares, mentioning ' bad people' on awakening from
them in the night.
I think to myself that what was previously expressed by evacuation i n her coughing has
grad ually come to be elaborated into a 'sigh ' and has finally become representable in dreams.
The m other, however, points out that there is no aggression in her l ittle g i r l , and that the
cough goes away if she takes the d rug Sedoca/cio. This communication confirms to me that
the problem h as to do with an absent character - namely, the aggression that can be
expressed only in symptoms: she can only get better 'se-do-calcio,'5 if the aggression is
somehow expressed, as in the mother's next commun icatio n, in which she says she always
g ives her daughter her pasta 'with pesto'.6
The mother has brought along some of Francesca' s d rawings, which portray a female
warrior and a fire-spewing missile.
This initial consultation already indicates which characters might take shape i n the place
of a symptom that is beginning . . . to speak.
The tangerine and the anti-tetanus injection
A female patient dreams of an intimate situation in which she has pleasurable feel ings when
I 'touch' her genitals with a tangerine; she is embarrassed and ashamed and feels guilty about
the d ream. Here there is also a risk of erotization, which can be avoided without hurting her
94
by picking up the positive aspects of this contact - so I tell her: ' It seems to me to be a good
sign that there can be a fruitful relationship between us!'
On another occasion she dreams of an expanse of turbid sea with rust-coloured water; as
she swims, she also sees some nails . . . she hopes they will not prick her . . . her association
is that she has not had an anti-tetanus injection. 'Well, ' I comment, 'what you must beware
of are those rusty iron [ferro] nails . . . ' 7 She bursts out laughing!
Characters, as stated earlier, need not thus necessarily be anthropomorphic or

animate. The considerations (or 'laws') governing characters also apply to any
real or abstract 'thing' that may be connected with the analytic field - for instance,
to a 'memory'. A memory as a character of the session can be understood as
having to do with the history and thus involving the mnemic function; as relating
to a function of the internal world, which involves the internal obj ects and
the relations between them; or as a 'narration of the current field', applying the
waking dream thought that is active in the relational field.
Similar considerations apply to the 'history' brought by a patient at the very
first interview, and are evident to an even greater extent in supervision groups
when the literature of the sessions to be discussed is preceded by an account of
the patient's history. This history immediately becomes a character of the . field,
and can therefore be understood, according to the relevant listening vertex, as
(a) a real external history belonging to another place and time; (b) a fantasy about
the patient's internal world; or (c) something that tells of the present field of
analyst-patient functioning. Item c can of course be expanded to include c1 if
the narration also extends to the group field active at the moment of narration.
95
8
Notes on acting out, the

countertransference
and the transgenerational field
Acting out
In considering acting out, I shall for the time being set aside the genetic and
intrapsychic aspects and concentrate on the analytic field as the possible locus
for investigating the inadequacies or failures of'thinking' - as well as the locus for
learning, by modifying ourselves and our theories with a view to reconstructing,
and sometimes constructing for the first time, a capacity for thought in the
patient.
In the therapeutic situation, acting out thus signals an inadequacy of the a
functions of the field (or of the apparatuses for thinking thoughts) . While the
a-function affected may be that of the patient, it may equally well be that of
an analyst who has not been sufficiently capable of accepting and metabolizing
� -elements or the patient's proj ective identifications, or who (by inadequate
'thought' interpretations) has overtaxed the patient's a-function or even -
through interpretations which, although the product of fully matured thought,
are excessive - the capacity of the patient's apparatus for thinking thoughts.
My thesis is that acting out by the patient is indicative of a dysfunction of the
field and hence to some extent also of the analyst's mind. Once acting out (and
I use the term to include acting in; where it takes place outside the sessions we
learn of it only at second hand) has occurred, it must in my view be considered
in terms of proj ective identifications - remembering that the first signal of a
dysfunction of the field is the formation of a �-screen - and hence in its aspect
as a communication, of whatever kind (Bion 1962).
Whereas, for example, a dream, thought or fantasy brought by a patient is
already rich in a-elements - that is to say, the material has undergone considerable
elaboration - a violent proj ective identification or, afortiori, an instance of acting
97
Notes on acting out
out is imbued with and made up of masses of p-elements that sorely try our
apparatus for thinking thoughts and our a-function in the onerous task of
alphabetization, to which we are not always equal; hence the understandable
irritatIOn aroused by these manifestations.
I therefore see acting out as a signal of a dysfunction of the field, which,
however, contains within Itself the possibility of communication if it is received
and transformed Into thought, however demanding this operation may be (Ferro
1 998e) .
In Bion's model of the mind, the a-function - so called because we are
famIliar With some of its factors but not yet with its functioning - continuously
transforms all sensory, emotional and perceptual afferences (, p-elements') into
a-elements, which are predominantly emotional plCtograms that are constantly
produced; they are thus mainly visual and constitute the building blocks of
thoughts (through unconscious waking thought and oneiric thought) .
These operations that lead from p-elements to thoughts are subj ect to various
forms of dysfunction, chief among which are an excess of p-elements and a
deficiency of the a-function. In these cases, untransformed quantities of P
elements remain and must take the path of evacuation - through hallUCinations,
psychosomatic illness or acting out (and sometimes through 'baSIC-assumption'
behavIOur) . In other words, they lack the 'thickness' of thought.
However, even when everything works and suffiCient a-elements, and hence
thoughts. are produced, the problems are not at an end, for thoughts, once
formed, call for an apparatus suitable for treating and USing them (what Bion
calls the 'apparatus for thinking thoughts') . When this apparatus is seriously
inadequate (it is always to some degree Inadequate because, as Bion remInds us,
thought IS a new aspect of living matter, for which the human species IS not yet
appropriately equipped) , thoughts are treated as p-elements and hence evacuated.
(Elements of the apparatus for thinking thoughts are the Ps H D oscillation and
the VICissitudes of ,? d'.)
I hold, too, that the patient acts o u t ' I n order not t o think' ; however, it also a
way of expressing a corresponding 'Inadequacy of thinking' on the part of the
analyst, who may perhaps have given perfect interpretations (which may
themselves constitute actIng out - see Manfredi Turillazzi 1 978) , but has not
been able suffiCiently to accept and transform the patient's emotional state, or
to be in unison WIth him.
This means not that the analyst is to blame, but that he should be aware of
the limIts of his mmd's capacity to receive, to transform and to tune into
unknown wavelengths; it is Important not to evacuate these limIts of the capacity
for thought on to the patient alone, but instead to make them the engine of
subsequent transformations of technique.
It should be noted that it is not 'the mind' that governs the instmcts, and that
the specificIty of human beings is therefore not a rationality that can control the
world of the drives; on the contrary, the problem for humans is the possession of
98
Notes on acting out
a mind with its particularities.What gives rise to antisocial and violent behaviour
is the existence of a mind that has been unable to develop: violence is not a
matter of instinct, but results from a suffering mind that disturbs the harmonious
behaviour of the human animal - for if human beings did not have minds, they
would be functioning primates.
Humankind's problem is the mind and its rudimentary nature - and in
particular, the fact that, if it is to work properly, it requires many years of care
and attention. A dysfunctioning mind resorts to violence and destruction as the
only way of evacuating �-elements.
This is a good starting point for reflections on acting out. A properly
functioning mind is one that constandy creates images (a-elements) from proto
emotions and proto-sensations, metabolizing everything it receives and turning
it into factors of creativity. It creates oneiric thought, and, from this, dreams and
thought proper.
When a mind does not work in accordance with this model of reception,
transformation and creation, its functioning is reversed (Ferro 1 987; Ferro and
Meregnani 1 998) . What is responsible for this reversal? We already know the
answer: an evacuation of �- or balpha-elements. This evacuation can take many
paths, including acting out with the body (criminality and characteropathy) or
acting out in the body (psychosomatic illness) .
The place of the ' countertransference' in a field theory
When I first started work as an analyst, I saw the countertransference as

possessing central and growing importance, and I gradually came to define it in
more complex terms, understanding it in different senses and on the basis of
different models (Racker 1 969; Sandler 1 976; Faimberg 1 989, 1 992; Vallino
Maccio 1 992; Renik 1 993a, 1 993b; Ferruta 1 998) . My interest culminated in an
article written together with Francesco Barale on countertransference dreams
(Barale and Ferro 1 993) .
My interest in the countertransference then gradually waned, so that eventually
hardly any trace of it remained in my work. Thinking later about the concept,
I wondered: 'Why do I seem to know very litde, and have nothing to say, about
a subject that was so dear to me?'This led me to the realization that the lessening
of my preoccupation with the countertransference coincided with my growing
interest in field theories: in my view, the greater the complexity and sophistication
of these theories, the more marginal the concept of countertransference becomes.
As we know, the first psychoanalytic field theory was put forward by Willy
and Madeleine Baranger, two analysts of French origin who setded in Buenos
Aires, and can be summarized as follows. From their very first meeting (and even
before) , analyst and patient form a Gestalt independent of either. In this co
determined field they generate areas of resistance attributable to the couple
99
Notes on acting out
('bastions' or 'bulwarks') . The analyst must therefore be capable of distancing

himself from these bulwarks, to whose formation he himself has contributed,
because, by his 'second look' , he can interpret and thus dissolve these areas of
intersecting resistance. The entire analytic process is characterized by this contin
uous sequence: formatIon of bulwarks , the analyst's second look, interpretation,
dissolving of bulwarks, evolution of the field, formation of bulwarks, and so on
(Baranger and Baranger 1 96 1 -2, 1 964, 1 969; Baranger et al. 1 983) .
Various authors (Corrao 1 986; Gaburri and Ferro 1 988; Bezoari and Ferro
1 99 1 b ; Barale and Ferro 1 992; Ferro 1 992, 1 996a; Neri 1 993) developed these
notions into a different concept of the analytic field; having initially been found
to be of central importance in group work, they were then transposed also to
individual analysis (Corrao 1 986, 1 987; Riolo 1 986, 1 989; Neri 1 995) . This
development took place in a climate in which Bion's thought was understood
in strongly relational terms.
Thefield thus defined assumes the followmg characteristIcs: (a) it becomes the
space-tIme m which the emotIonal turbulence actIvated by the analytic encounter
IS mItiated; (b) It IS a functlOn of the two members of the couple, as m the work
of Bar anger and Baranger, but with an extremely high degree of non-saturatlOn;
and (c) it becomes the place and time of the promotIon of stones and narrations
that constitute the alphabetization of the proto-emotlOns present m the couple.
Traniformations of the field are brought about by an ongomg process of co
narration by analyst and patIent, who become 'two authors m search of characters'
(Ferro 1 992) , alphabetizmg the proto-emotions and enablmg them to evolve
continuously.
In the field, the semantic halo of the concept of interpretation is broadened
so as to embrace every unsaturated, conversational intervention by the analyst.
A central element of the field is the analyst's reverie (defined as his ability to
enter mto contact with his waking dream thought and Its compositional subunits
- the a-elements - and to narrate these in words) , which transforms it; however,
no less importance attaches to the narrative derivatives of the patient's waking
dream thought and to the a-elements that make it up.
Considered from a certam vertex, the patient's narration can be seen as a
continuous renarration of the way he as it were films, frame by frame, the
elements, events and lines of force of the field. From this point of view, nothing
the patient says is irrelevant to the field.
The attention formerly devoted to observing the patient's communications
and the countertransference now becomes attention to the figures that take shape
in the field, which emit constant signals of ItS life. These signals must be the
starting point for modulations of the analyst's interpretative trim. In other words,
all the ' obscure' emotional events that used to be picked up by the counter
transference are now usually - bifore activating countertransference manifestations
- signalled by the field, provided that the analyst is able to listen to the narrations
of the session as forming part of the current field.
1 00
Notes on acting out
I see the field as resembling Escher's lithograph Relativity! - as a visual vertex

- whereas other places in the field contain other possible readings, such as the
patient's history or internal world.
According to Bion (1 962) , a vital function of the � -screen is to generate a
countertransference in the analyst when the therapeutic environment is
inadequate. It seems to me that massive proj ective identifications must be
activated in order to generate countertransferences. In a properly functioning
field, the analyst's attention (attention being one of the components of the a.
function) to signals of microdysfunctions of the field prevents the activation of
the �-screen, and the analyst becomes the guarantor of the transformational
narration - i.e. the narration that transforms the proto-emotions (undigested
facts) brought by the patient. In this way, both the field itself and the patient's
narrations perform an important function that was previously assigned to the
countertransference. The analyst is able to keep watch over the gradients of
� � a. transformation occurring in the session.
However, this does not always happen. Instead, we observe dysfunctions of
the field, in one ofwhich a particular aspect it - the analyst's countertransference
- becomes the locus of signalling instead of the field itself. Other possible
discharge channels for ' �-screens' are countertransference dreams, acting out by
the patient, acting out by the analyst, and psychosomatic manifestations in the
patient's or the analyst's body or in the 'body' of the setting. If a signal from
the field goes unheeded, it may be transformed into a countertransference
manifestation.
In some situations, however, the countertransference (or countertransference
dreams) assumes great importance as a source of signals - for instance, when the
field is 'mute' , in an impasse, where the patient obstinately remains silent, or in
certain negative therapeutic reactions; in all these cases direct signals from the
field are lacking and it becomes essential to resort to this second line of signals
(Martin Cabre 1 994) .
In other words, the countertransference is one of the possible loci of signals
from the field, but in this case the field will already be dysfunctional. It is rather
like someone at an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter furiously striking the
keys at a faster pace than the machine can handle, so that they jam: the typist
must stop, disentangle the type bars, and resume work. The countertransference
indicates one of the possible loci of'jamming' of the field - albeit on its margins
- which can of course become the starting point for operations of transformation
and creation by the couple. In this respect, however, it is neither more nor less
important than any other entity that signals a dysfunction of the field and reveals
unmetabolized sectors of it that overflow into the analyst.
The countertransference - like a useful episode of indigestion - signals that
the field is permeated with �-elements which it has not been possible for the
analyst's a.-function to transform into a., or his inability to make contact with
his own waking dream thought. Working through in the countertransference
101
Notes on acting out
(Brenman and Pick 1 985) is the method whereby the a-function and Ps H D
I S? d' are put to work on accumulations of � to be transformed into a, or on
narrative derivatIves of a.
The present field and the transgenerational field
TransgeneratIonal themes (Faimberg 1 988; Kaes et al. 1 993; Nen 1 993, 1 997)
are reviewed by MeottI and Meottl (1 996) . Superimposed on the present field,
which IS horizontal and compressed Into the here and now, is an equally complex
vertical field that Includes the multIgeneratIOnal element. These authors thus
expand the field and confer the 'third dimension' of height on it; however, if it
is considered in terms not of heIght and thickness but of sequentIality, we also
have the fourth dimensIOn of tIme.Yet this IS not a tIme of' elsewhere' , but a time
that enters into the consulting room.
We are thus introduced to a geometry not only of the 'Internal world' and
'relationship' , but also of stones (Barale and Ucelli 1 992) and their transrrussion:
Instead of the analyst and the patIent WIth two-dimensional 'photographs' of
the parents, uncles and aunts or grandparents to be interpreted and revealed
in transference interpretations, we have presences and three-dimensional
characters of different temporalitIes, who demand, or need, to take the stage in
their own nght. In this sense, any interpretation 'in the field' is a transference
interpretation.
In my view, In this dimension the analyst must allow himself to be pervaded
by such 'freeze-dned' transgenerational elements, which await only the clear
water of acceptance of the field In order to be reconstituted and to assume
'thickness' and history.
In the consulting room, a scene is staged and inhabited not only along the
aXIS of space but also along that of time; 'undigested facts' and 'bagfuls of �
elements' admittedly appear in the room, but so do 'packets of a-elements' .
We are thus confronted by a complexIty for which we are not equipped; it
really is a matter of an 'extempore performance tonight' or, if you will, 'authors
in search of characters' - In search of crypts or treasure vaults (Meotti and Meotti
1 996) .
All this is, incidentally, relevant to the fascination of horror stories. Stephen
KIng's Danse Macabre is an extraordinary history of the horror story, in which it
is portrayed as something alien from which we cannot escape. It is my belief that
horror, or terror, actually belongs to the unresolved transgenerational sphere
that remaInS alive inside us awaIting narratIOn. Many of the stories of Poe,
Lovecraft and King himself can surely be viewed m this light.
However, the field IS also a field in the present - for it is not enough for all
this 'to be known '; it must also be transformed (see the scene from Corto Maltese in
Figure 1 ) .
1 02
Notes on acting out
These ideas have many other implications. For example, the narrating function
of the field can 'conjugate' the bagfuls of non-thinkability.2 A number of other
pomts offer food for thought.
First, there is the transgenerational side of the analyst, which also makes its
appearance in the room, both as a personal element and in terms oj transmission
oj the analytic junction, including the analyst's possible blind spots (to which,
fortunately, the field can draw attention, if only we will listen to it!) . An important
issue here is the 'maturation' of the analyst's mind, which is inevitably mediated
by illll tative identifications.
Second, the history, including our own history as analysts, must be reviewed,
not as a rite but as a way of discovering transgenerational legacies.
Third, there is much to say about the concept of projective identification and
emotional turbulence. A parallel in the world of cinema is the beginning of
Jurassic Park, where fragments of DNA have persisted into the present. Similarly,
the mind can develop only by bringing into the present split-off elements from
the past.
Whereas the 'double multipersonality' (Baranger, M. 1 959) of analyst and
patient previously opened the way to myriads of possible universes along the
axis of space, now it inevitably reveals to us a plethora of ramifications in time,
or, as Borges ( 1 941 a: 77) puts it, this 'web of time - the strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other': the world of uchronias,
or utopias in history. So we may consider possibilities that are mere exercises in
terms of the history of humankind (what if Custer had won at Litde Big Horn
. . ?) , but which can become realities in a personal history owing to the
.
phenomenon of Nachtriiglichkeit - for instance, 'If I had not left that trunk in the
left-luggage office, how different my life would have been' - and how different
that patient's life will be if, together with him, we can discover that laden trunk
. . . a trunk laden with . . .
Given the responsibility of parents for their children's mental life, it is possible
for anxieties, projective identifications and �-elements to be actively 'injected'
into a child's mind, so that the usual direction of flow (from child to parent) is
reversed and the child serves as a dumping ground for these entities. However,
another situation is equally possible: the parent's capacity to elaborate the child's
anxieties may be deficient, so that increasingly undigested accumulations of
�- and balpha-elements build up and ultimately persecute the child. Of course,
these two possibilities may coexist in varying proportions, and they emerge with
great clarity in the field whenever there is a dysfunction of the analyst's mind,
either because the analyst evacuates anxieties or because he is unable to absorb
them.
Oddly, some analysts say that this 'must' not happen, rather than that it
'ought' not to happen, or that it is desirable for it to happen as rarely as possible.
For the analyst's mind cannot but be a 'variable' of the field, since it is not
immune, however thoroughly analysed, to the Ps H D oscillations to which
103
Notes on acting out
every mind is subj ect, to mourning and to moments of difficulty, whic h -

unfortunately - will mevltably find their way i nto the field. This IS so although
it is the analyst's responsibility to recover his mental equilibrium as quickly as
p ossible.
1 04
9
Child and adolescent an alysis :

similarities and differences that m ask
an underlying unity
The first issue I wish to address in this chapter is whether major differences that
parallel those between child and adolescent analysis (as well as adult analysis)
exist between the approaches of the various theoretical models to psychoanalysis
(of children, adolescents or adults). One way of investigating the differences
between the various models is in terms of the different roles assigned to the
'characters' that appear in a psychoanalytic session.These extend over a continuum
ranging from characters seen as possessing 'real external' - i.e. historical - status
(father, mother, siblings, friends, sexuality, etc.), via ones deemed to be expressions
of the 'internal objects and the associated fantasies' , to others regarded as
'expressive modalities of the current functioning' of the analytic couple at work .
In my view, the more analysis is considered as a transformational interaction
between analyst and patient in the present, the more age-related differences
between patients are blurred and the more significant the specificities of the
particular analytic couple become. The more the characteristics are considered
in terms of age and behaviour ranges, these being correlated with developmental
stages and fantasies attributed to the patient, the more differences will be
discovered (Marcus 1980; Bernstein 1975).
My personal conviction is that there exists a unity of transformations and analytic
interaction and a specificity of expressive forms of language. For instance, many adult
analysts claim to feel closer to, and find it easier to approach, adolescent analysis
owing to their avowed concern with the different forms of expression '(play,
drawing, acting out in the session); one may, however, suspect that they are in
fact preoccupied with the 'infantile' (Guignard 1996). Many analysts would agree
that adolescent and infantile aspects are encountered in any analysis, including
those of adults (Aalberg 1997) , and that the adolescent and infantile aspects of
the analyst are also activated.
105
Child and adolescent analysis
How does an analysis work?
This may seem a naIve and superfluous question, since, of course, we all know
the answer. However, I should like to explain what I mean by the umty of analytic
processes by telling the story of a film and then reporting an analytIc session.
Jumanji
Joe Johnston's 1 995 filmJumanji IS based on a novel by Chris Van Allsburg. One
day at an archaeological dig, a little boy, Alan Parrish, finds a box containing a
board game with a kind of central lens in the board and a number of pieces.
After a row with his father, he and a little friend, Sarah, begin to play. Sarah rolls
the dice, a particular number comes up, and out of the lens come a vast swarm
of bats that invade the room. Then, when it is Alan's turn, the lens sucks him
through the board into a j ungle, where he must remain until another player
throws a certain number - but his little companion runs away in terror, breaking
off the game.
The scene changes to a time 26 years later: the Parrishes' house is for sale, the
owners haVIng died In misery after spending all their tIme and money in a futile
search for their son following his mysterious disappearance.
New people move Into the house : Peter and Judy, a brother and sister
orphaned after lOSIng theIr parents in a car accident, together WIth their aunt.
Up In the attic one day, they happen upon the box WIth the game. They open
it and begIn to play. Once again, terrible things emerge from the central lens:
enormous mosquitoes, which first invade the room, then the whole town . . .
and so on. Eventually, as they play, the dice come up with precisely the number
that would have allowed Alan to return in the onginal game - and that is
precIsely what happens: on to the scene steps Alan, 26 years older, dressed like a
denizen of the jungle . . . and pursued by a lion. After a series of mistakes and
terrifYing VIcissitudes, Alan and the two children realize that, to continue, they
must find the little girl from the original game, as the pIeces have to be moved
in a precise sequence and the others cannot be moved unless Sarah j oins in.
The three go in search of Sarah, whom they find grown up 26 years having
-
of course elapsed! - and working as a medium. We later discover that she has
undergone prolonged psychotherapy to persuade herself that what she experi
enced never happened - namely, that bats came out of a board game and that
Alan was sucked into it and disappeared.
I omitted to mention that the reason why the game had to be resumed was
that, according to one of its rules, all its effects would come to an end only if
and when it was brought to a conclusion.
Sarah is persuaded to play agaIn. Further terrible things happen in the play
room and spread to the town: plants with roots that grow so stupendously fast
1 06
that they penetrate and destroy everything in their path; headlong charges by
rhinoceroses, elephants and other jungle animals; a hunter, also from the jungle,
with the same features as Alan's father, who wants to kill Alan; and, for good
measure, monkeys that invade the town and cause mayhem, alligators, floods and
every kind of calamity.
All these vicissitudes are interspersed with constant incidents whereby the
game risks being carried away either by the hunter or by flood waters, in which
case it would never reach its conclusion and all the terrible events would never
be undone.
But in the end Alan somehow manages to throw the number that takes him
to the home square, and to pronounce the fateful word: 'Jumanji' . Then the
miracle happens: everything that had come out of the lens spirals back into it -
the bats, the mosquitoes, the monkeys, the hunter, the rhinoceroses and the
elephants, which are sucked 'backwards' from outside to inside by a kind of
tornado. All the effects of the game are undone - and I mean all of them: Alan
is back in the room as a little boy with Sarah as a little girl; the other two children
are not there because we have gone back 26 years and they have not yet been
born!
From then on, we have a different reality from the one that existed from the
time ofAlan's disappearance on. Alan's father comes home and his son embraces
him; the story is rewritten from this point on without all the catastrophes of the
previous script.
The Parrishes' shoemaking business does not fail; Alan becomes its owner
and marries Sarah when they grow up. However, they have not lost the memory
of the other story, and when, 25 years later, they meet the two children Peter
and Judy at a party, they immediately recognize them. When they hear that the
children's parents are about to leave for Canada, they manage to stop them,
so that they do not die and leave their two children orphaned. At the end of
the film, other people seem to retrieve the 'game', which Alan had consigned
to the waters to get rid of it . . . and so the game continues.
There are of course an infinite number of possible readings of this 'story', and
no limit to the drift of meanings and possible deconstructions. This is so even if
we confine ourselves to a single vertex, namely that of psychoanalysis: here alone,
we could range between the surname of the hero, Parrish, which may suggest
'parricide' , the resulting persecution, the reconciliation that tells a different story
from that of the 'orphaned children', and other possible content-related and
symbolic readings.
However, my preferred 'invention' (or 'selected fact' - Bion 1 963 - on the basis
of an emotion that assembles the facts into a possible Gestalt) is to see the events
described in the film as a thoroughly apt metaphor of the analytic encounter -
as a game that can be played by the adult, adolescent and infantile parts of both
analyst and patient. What come into being in this game are the emotions, affects
and characters that narrate and personifY it, invading the room, the setting and
1 07
the internal world (and sometimes the external world too) through constant
externalizations (transformation into hallucinosis, hallucinations and evacuations)
that activate imitative fury, rage, persecution and fetal fantasies; yet, in spite of all
the difficulties, the game must be brought to a conclusion, because it is only then
that the inversion of the inverted (X-functIon (Bion 1 962) - i.e. the metabolization
of previously acted-out fantasies - will put things back in their place, so that
what had been evacuated can be transformed and reintroj ected (i. e. made
thinkable) .
All this, however, permits the complete rewriting of the patient's history, not
only in the present but also transgenerationally, so that the transformed proto
emotions can return and inhabit an unconscious that is now sharply distinguished
from the waking world, which need no longer suffer its encroachments.
This, in my view, is the game of analysis: getting m touch with the entire
unthinkable and unrepresentable world that was previously throbbing away
amorphously, so as to confer on It a representation capable of 'narration', after
which it will be able to remhabit an unconscious composed now of narratable,
albeit repressed, elements of a story. I n other words, the throbbing mass, or
accumulation of �-elements, is first evacuated, elaborated and transformed into
(X, and can only then be reintrojected as a dream of the mind about itself ('waking
dream thought' and 'thoughts' - see Bion 1 962, 1 963, 1 965) .
Moreover, the ' central lens' , which produces lines of verse before its projected
outpourings, is like an analysis that can accommodate the most violent emotional
turbulence, where proj ective identifications find a space in which they can be
received and where no attempt IS made to avoid the transformations into
hallucinosis that may arise in the field - let alone the hallucinations, acting out
and other manifestations entailed by the free, turbulent circulation of �-elements,
which must of course find their way into the field as a prerequisite for
transformatIon.
This means that a board lacking a central 'lens' capable of dreammg and
evacuating permits only those more classical games that do not afford access to
the more primitIve jungle which lies beyond the repressed - i.e. �-elements.
Agam, when the little girl drops out of the game, we can see this as an attempt
to escape from the involvement of her infantile parts, resulting in an impasse and
intense negative transference; these are later metabolized by the restoration of
genuine cooperation between the adult, child and adolescent aspects of both
patient and analyst, which must necessarily all be present together in the analytic
field.
How do adults, adolescents and children coexist in the consulting room in
an adult analysis?
1 08
The Russian doll: the adult, the child and the adolescent
Giorgio, an adult analysand, begins a session in December by telling me about a severely

depressed man undergoing treatment at a psychiatric unit: when his landlady breaks an
unspoken agreement by demanding a rent increase, he immediately shoots both the landlady
and himself dead.
For some time I have been wondering whether it might be appropriate and possible to ask
this patient for an increase in the fee for his analysis from January, and have decided, for a
number of reasons, not to do so. I therefore reply: 'Well then, thank goodness I didn't ask
you for an increase in the New Year!' After a moment's surprised silence, the initially
disconcerted Giorgio bursts out laughing.
The patient misses his next session, and in the one after that he tells me how his 1 6-year
old daughter has resumed their previous warm and playful relationship, 'giving him a friendly
punch in the stomach' when passing in the corridor; although this pleased h i m , he did
not come because his 8-year-old son was struck violently by a bal l while playing with his
mates and sustained severe bruisin g , so that he had to be kept at home from school for
a day.
Although I do not say so, I of course see the missed session and what Giorgio tells me as
the response of his adult, adolescent and infantile parts to my interpretation, which he no
doubt felt as a blow: he had to miss the session although he had rediscovered a warm
relationship with me, because the warmth wounded him, mortifying his most fragile parts.
Let us consider the characters involved: Giorgio, the patient, a 50-year-old lawyer of Latin
American origin; Carla, the rebellious 1 6-year-old adolescent daughter who doesn't speak if
she is angry, doesn't go to school and doesn't do her homework; and Stefano, the 8-year
old son , a delicate boy whose joints are easily damaged. How are we to think of these
characters on the analytic stage?
From a certain vertex, they are of course real persons: the father, the daughter and the
son. From another standpoint, however, Carla and Stefano are also Giorgio's internal objects.
Obviously, too, considered in sti ll other terms, they have to do with current modes of
functioning of our relationship in the analytic consulting room.
I found it very difficult to discover appropriate modes of interpretation with Giorgio; at first
I thought I could interpret his communications exhaustively and directly in the transference,
but then sessions would be missed, dreams would be forgotten (Carla) and the work would
grind to a halt (Stefano).
Eventually, however, I succeeded in distinguishing between these three forms of functioning
in the room, each of which called for a different interpretative strategy. With 'Stefano', it was
vital for me not to say anything that he would experience as intrusive or in any way 'wounding';
I needed to interpret in narrative form, in images and metaphors, as if playing with words
until a shareable meaning could be constructed. With 'Carla', I had to 'accept and gently
transform ' , as if dealing with a hedgehog, avoiding any direct, explicit and im mediate
interpretation in the transference. With Giorg io, it might be permissible to interpret by talking
about characteristics of 'Stefano', who bled if he were hit, or 'Carla', who played truant if
. . . or would not speak if . . .
1 09
Giorgio is gradually becoming able to integrate these things, which are narrated like a story
about Carla or Stefano - and, albeit at an incred ibly slow pace, is taking them on board as
his own .
However, what does all this mean? In a sense, it is indeed true that the adult, the
adolescent and the child are always present in the analyst's consulting room. Of
course, an infinite number of combinations are possible.
The adolescent and the little girl
Si lvana suffered a severe trauma at the age of 4, after which she lost the faculty of speech
for a long time, but gradually regained it. She is now an intelligent, alert teenager currently
having inexplicable difficulties at school, which I felt to be related to the traumatic experience
and to anxieties that seemed beyond my reach until the drawings Silvana has begun to make
in her sessions made it possible to delve into the quality of our commun ication. One of these
(Figure 1 2) shows two music stands with books; the one on the first stand is on fire and , to
save his life, one of its characters leaps into the other book. He greatly misses his companions
from the first book, and has to confront new stories and situations in the second.
With the gradual emergence of these stories, Silvana draws a faceless figure (Figure 1 3);
next comes a face, part of which is 'protected by an iron cap' (Figure 1 4), but which begins
to reveal itself as an unknown and enig matic aspect about which questions can be asked
(Figure 1 5). Eventually, further transformations lead to a masked face (Figure 1 6) and then a
skiing outfit with goggles that disclose '90% of what is inside' (Figure 1 7).
So I find myself with an adolescent containing a l ittle g irl who does not speak but is
increasingly capable of expressing herself through drawings.
At this point, however, a further question arises: what changes if we have in the
consulting room not infantile or adolescent 'aspects' or 'parts', but actual children
and adolescents, as Machtlinger (1 987) points out? Furthermore, what formal and,
in particular, substantive differences are there between child and adolescent
analysis?
Formal similarities and differences
For reasons of space, I shall not dwell on the obvious formal differences. A child
plays, draws and 'moves about' in the consultmg room, while the analyst for his
part IS 'dragged' into these activitIes (Ferro 1 995c, 1 996g, 1 997b; Sacco 1 995a,
1 995b) . An adolescent, on the other hand, does not usually play or draw, and
stays relatively still.
However, these differences are not absolute (Markman 1 997; Ferro 1 996e) .
A 1 6-year-old girl who finds It hard to get in touch WIth things that lie deeply
1 10
iT i . l- > / y�
---i+-
/ i ;- ,�.) . ! T, �
--
--------\--
f-I�/ :>t /- i : " \,�-----
- - -- - --I---'--f- --++.----lf
_·-- ---------',-'IrlI----+-+ II----4fI;;
Figure 12 From the old story to the new
buried b eneath her ritual communications about her 'studies' takes a calculator
from her rucksack, tries to open it up, succeeds in doing so, looks inside and
says: ' How ugly the inside 'This immediately re-establishes our
communication: I am able accept and use clear, explicit
interpretations) that she aspects of herself, c onnected
with her fear of being a this fear makes her keep
everything 'locked up inside' _
H owever, a n adolescent - and why not also an
adult? - can draw in an Sacco 1 995) . An example
is Martina, an adult patient, who, to show me what happens if anything sounds
to her like a criticism or if she thinks she has criticized me, draws two cats tearing
each other to pieces and furiously gobbling each o ther up, leaving only a tail:
end of story.
111
Figure 1 6 Now it's only a mask Figure 17 I'm 90% sure who I am
the analyst's approach to the characters that come to life m the sessions (Ferro
1 993c, 1 9 96e) .
Interpretation
Rather than wo nder about the age of the person to whom an mterpretatlOn is
directed, I ask myself about that person's capacity to accept the mterp retation,
as constantly signalled to me by the responses to my interventlOns. It is also, in
my view, Important to respect the patient's text for long perIods without
excessIVe interpretative caesuras . I believe, too, that, with adolescents and adults ,
we can learn to interpret 'as if playing' or 'as if drawing' - that is, as if using words
as a drawing that c hanges or is enriched or coloured in various ways.
1 14
Another important element is the transformation achieved, which does not

solely and necessarily involve the disclosure of something, but also entails
constant elaboration of the emotions present in the session, so as to unfreeze the
'frozen game' represented by every symptom.A similar view is taken by Gibeault
(1991), who, citing Berberich (1 990) , distinguishes interpretation in the trans
ference from interpretation of the transference.
These matters are thoroughly discussed by Bonaminio (1 993) , Bezoari and
Ferro (1 989, 1 994a, 1 994b) , Fonagy and Sandler (1 995) and Norman (1 995) ,
and are central to Guignard's (1 998) article.
The countertransference
This may be the level of the most significant differences. There are in my view
periods in an analyst's life when he prefers to have child or adolescent patients.
Colleagues I have asked about this point report a wide variety of individual
experience.
Working with small children is more tiring - if only, according to some, in
motor terms. Many who have treated young children switch at some point to
supervision of such treatments:Waksman (1 985) and Siniavsky (1 980) emphasize
the greater level of mental fatigue, the difficulty of grappling with archaic
identifications, and the need for - sometimes even physical - containment.
What matters most is often held to be the analyst's internal cohesion in relation
to the analytic situation - that is, the analyst's internal setting or, in other words,
the internal situation from which he interprets. This is surely the main point
made by Laufer (1 997, 1 998) , who has often drawn attention to the importance
of the analyst's 'scotomas', which are substantially analogous to Guignard's (1 998)
'blind spots'. It is impossible to disagree with Laufer's view of the fundamental
need for a deep understanding of our adolescence and its continued role in adult
life. In this author's opinion, in the analysis of analysts-to-be, infancy is as a rule
examined in some depth, while adolescence is neglected. Yet, he goes on, it is
essential for the future analyst (of adolescents?) to be capable, in his own analysis,
of assigning not a theoretical but an affective reality to his own adolescence: he
must have been able to summon up and reconstruct the fantasies, fears and
perverse and psychotic acts of that age, the moments of loss of control, and the
sense of his own sexual and masturbatory practices.
The analyst (perhaps of adolescents) must be equipped to work with virtual
psychotics and have worked through his psychotic defences; he needs great
internal freedom if he is to be able to say (and tell himself) everything, whether
it be homosexual fantasies and attractions or violence - for psychotic nuclei
must be confronted in order to work through them (Olmos de Paz 1 990) .
Cahn (1 997) , too, draws attention to aspects of the countertransference - in
particular, feelings of longing or the anxiety-related avoidance of excitation,
1 15
agitation, confusion and the alternation of despair and hallucination. Owing

to the difficulties of relating to adolescents, Anderson ( 1 997) advocates special
ization, following prior experience with either adults or children. However,
it is Interesting to note that Guignard, whose 1 987 article is devoted precisely
to the similarities and differences between child, adolescent and adult analysis,
emphasIzes the countertransference effort required with children and the
difficulty of maintaining an analytic position owing to their motor discharges.
The setting
The first problem arising is that of session frequency, on which a wide variety of
opinions have been expressed (Anderson 1 993; Berberich 1 993; De Levita 1 993;
Schacht 1 995) . This question must therefore remain open.
Another important factor IS of course the differing weight assigned to the
presence of the parents and the relationship/vicissitudes with them (Norman 1 993;
Eskelinen de Folch 1 988) . Laufer ( 1 998) gives a particularly clear account of this
issue. My own attitude towards parents has gradually mellowed and become
more accepting, as I have progressIvely tried to adopt a more constructive
approach. I do not refuse meetIngs when requested, and as far as possible I regard
parents as allIes (even if they have sometimes unconsclOusly sabotaged the work) .
An idea I have found useful 111 this connection is Kancyper's ( 1 997) extension
of the concept of the field to the entire analytic sItuation with children and
adolescents, including the relatlOnship with the parents (GOlJman and Kancyper
1 998) .
Furthermore, I proceed in the same way WIth the parents or relatives of
psychotic analysands, whom I try to refer to a colleague, but for whom I try to
be accessible whenever I am asked and I consider it useful. Eskelinen de Folch
( 1 988) discusses this issue at length, together WIth its countertransference
implications.
What I have felt to be most important IS the need to respect the confiden
tIality of adolescent patients who place themselves In risk situations: their
commumcations, after all, were made in a setting that presupposes secrecy.
Narrative scenarios and their characters
The scenarios encountered in child analysis are usually less realistic and more
fantastic - full of animals, witches and ogres - than those of adolescents. However,
111 my VIew, for all the manifest differences, there are substantive similarities.
I gIve my students what I believe to be a useful exercise, asking them to

consider how one and the same theme might be expressed by a child, an
adolescent and an adult. This involves taking a real session with a child and
1 16
rewriting it in the form it might have assumed with an adult patient, and then
taking a real session with an adult and rewriting it with the expressive modalities
of a child. I have seldom encountered material so specific that it does not point
to something deeper than the manifest aspect, which could not be expressed in
adult, child or adolescent language.
It seems to me that what changes is the plot, but not the fabula1 - the 'plot'
being the story as told, as it appears on the surface, and the 'fabula' the funda
mental pattern of the narration, the syntax of the characters, and the profound
mental exchanges between patient and analyst.
1 17
10
Play: characters, narrations

and interpretations
This chapter is intended as a reflection on how best to approach patients and

on how to encourage trust and hope in the analytic encounter. It deals with the
effects of interpretation and the way the characters and narrations of the sessions
provide us with extremely valuable signals that enable us to modulate our
interventions. This presupposes that characters and narrations are regarded as
events of the relational here and now and not merely as derivatives of the
individual patient's history and internal world.
Let me begin with a play sequence from a child analysis, as a basis for the
development of theoretical observations. The clinical material dates back many
years, so that I can dearly see how my ideas have changed over time; I find it
painful to 'look back in this way, in view of everything I failed to understand
despite the patient's indications.
Massimo
Massimo is a 9-year-old boy who has been brought to analysis on account of serious
problems at school : his academic performance is excellent, but his relations with his
schoolmates are very bad. He has been tortured since birth by regularly repeated surgical
interventions for certain malformations (plastic surgery). He also suffers from serious
anorexia; he eats little, always consuming minimal amounts of the same foods, intellectualizes
constantly and is remote from his emotions. The following sequence of sessions chosen at
random from the first year of Massimo's analysis illustrates some problems of techn ique.
119
Play: characters, narrations and interpretations
Monday
Massimo begins by taking some wooden blocks from the toy box and starts making a figure
of a man (a), followed by that of a boy (b).
(a) (b)
While making the figure of the boy, he comments that, if the boy's head is to stay in place,
it needs to be supported by something, so he puts the locomotive - ' it's made of iron,l so
it's strong' - behind it, but says we are not to think about it.
I now point out to him that, here in the room, there are also a man and a boy, and that the
boy needs to have his head supported - by the locomotive, which is made of iron [ferrol, just
as he needs to be supported by Dr Ferro. (After Massimo's first communication, I immediately
give a transference interpretation, but from today's vantage point I feel that it prematurely
closes off and saturates what is happening; nor do I respect Massimo's need for the support
to remain implicit ['We mustn't think about it1. Today, I would give a more open, less saturated
intervention, perhaps asking a question about the boy's head.) However, let us consider the
response to my strong, univocal entry on to the stage.
He says: ' I see what you mean about the boy needing help.' He now starts 'making an
animal ' , putting its legs obliquely under a rectangle as if it were in motion - 'an animal running
away, or escaping' (c).
(c)
The fig ure's balance is precarious, and the whole thing collapses when he adds further
pieces, until he makes the animal 's legs u pright (d).
120
He now finishes off the construction, which revea.ls itself as a cat (e).
He tells me it is a cat, an animal he is very fond of. The verbal response is conciliatory.
Today I tend to see the 'animal running away, or escaping' as Massimo's deep emotional
reaction to my first interpretation, which generates 'panic' and then humiliation - everything
col/apses - until the flight is at an end (he gives the animal upright legs). He now produces
the cat, which today suggests to me distrust and suspicion. (This character, who is 'born ' at
this point in the session, can be seen as something that has to do with Massimo 's real extemal
experience, with distrust in his relationship with his parents, or with an internal object
attributed to the boy; however, it can also be regarded as something that comes to life in the
room through the interaction between our minds: the way I interpreted generated fear,
disappointment and flight in the patient, aI/ of which flow into the cat, who represents the
affective quality of the moment. Although I did not then think in these terms, I am obviously
cautious nevertheless.)
I ask him what aspects of the cat he likes, and he answers: 'Cats are crafty; they don't
trust anyone and they're suspicious.'
(Massimo puts into words the view I would take today of the quality of the emotional field
that has formed.)
I tell him that he wants to talk about feelings like that towards me, that he feels suspicious
and distrustful, and wonders if he can tell me the things he is thinking or if it would be wiser
for him to keep them to himself. I pick up the last drawing from the previous session, which
is lying on top of the other drawings and represents a road roller, and suggest that what
happens between us might be like the interaction of a roller and stones. (Here again I felt the
need to give a transference interpretation, interpreting the cat as something belonging to him
and not as an entity partly generated by my first interpretation. I then have a reverie - although
I did not realize it at the time - and use the drawing from the previous session to tel/ him (quite
unconsciously) what has been happening: I was squashing him with my knowledge about
him, like a road rol/er, rather than he/ping him to develop thoughts with my help ./
He says everything I am telling him might well be right, although he doesn't feel that he
thought it himself.
121
Tuesday
In the next session, M assimo is very quiet and sullen; he decides to make a d rawing from
the three-dimensional figure of the cat 'so that I can redo it whenever I want' . He then begins
to number the drawing sheets, a process that takes a long time. I tell him that he wants to
keep everything well classified and to see if I too remember the order of the work we are
doing. He then i nvents a complicated key to his sheets of drawings.
I tell him he wants 'to be sure that he can keep everything under contro l ' . (Today, it seems
to me that the effect of my interpretations of the previous day has been to make him sullen
and sad, and that the effect of my oversaturated interpretative activity has squashed him,
flattening out the cat and our communication. I interpret academically, thus stripping the
session of affect.)
Wednesday
On arriving for his next session, Massimo takes off his coat, which falls to the ground. He
comments: 'My coat slipped off because it's heavy and the l i n i ng i s smoot h . ' He g oes on:
' Let ' s make some more animals with the blocks . ' He takes the blocks and builds a very
realistic, very big dog ; he wants to draw it too on a sheet of paper, but one sheet is not big
enough; he asks me if I have some glue to stick several sheets together, and I say I will get
some for next time. He says: ' But I can try to make some other animal - say, a rabbit. ' I watch
in astonishment as a rabbit comes into being before my eyes; he has difficulty in shaping
the head .
I ask h i m what these animals suggest to h i m , and he replies: 'The cat and the dog are
enemies; they make war on each other. ' I say that we too, in this room, are a l ittle one and
a big one and he is afraid that war might break out between us. He replies that this is possible,
but he is sure I won't believe him when he tel ls me he has seen an enormous cat i n the street,
which he describes in detail .
(Today, I think h e is shrugging o ff my interpretations, which h e feels to b e heavy and
slippery; like the lining, they fail to stick. This revives his spirits and he is able to resume his
play with new projects - the dog (trust, a bond) and the rabbit (a peace-loving animal). In other
words, a relaxed, trustful climate replaces that of distrust, the dog and the cat being different
in the sense that they are two different mental climates. Instead, I interpret the cat and
the dog in the transference, as myself and himself, and this generates an enormous cat,
representing enormous distrust.)
I tell him that, at times, he would like to be the enormous cat and to frighten me. He says
he wants to see if he can put the dog together again because he remembers it, but wants to
be sure. He adds: ' But the rabbit represents peace, and perhaps I coul d n 't d o the head
properly because I don't really know what peace is l i ke, and we need to find out a few more
things before we get there. '
Takin g some plasticine, he says he wants to make some other animals; he takes the
animals - for the first time - out of the toy box and separates them into two piles, one with
1 22
the horse, hen, dog and crocodile, and the other with all the other species; then he puts them
all aside except for the crocodile and starts copying them in white plasticine on a large scale
(about 3: 1 ) . . .
When I ask him what the crocodile suggests to him, he answers: 'War, battles, quarrels.'
I suggest he might mean he is more familiar with war and quarrels, both between Daddy and
Mummy and with me, and perhaps he feels there is fighting rather than peace inside himself.
He nods thoughtfully, signifying agreement. The crocodile's head continues to protrude.
I say that, while warring, this crocodile actually loses its head. 'I know what you mean when
you say there are quarrels and fighting between us; we can't find out new things and we go
forward slowly.'
(Once again I have interpreted his wish to frighten me in the transference, instead ofpicking
up the new wave of distrust that is forming. Massimo then tries to rebuild a climate of trust:
he doesn't want to forget the original 'dog'. In my subsequent interventions, I do not succeed
in helping him to find a peaceful, farm-like climate (the rabbit). My interventions make him
reject other possible climates (emotional atmospheres) and banish him to the savannah, where
the crocodile exemplifies a dangerous place of battles, fights and skirmishes rather than of
welcoming and peaceful containment. I am stressing his a-function and <.i? cJ beyond their
capacity for acceptance and transformation, thus generating persecution.)
A few general comments are now in order.
Interpretation
Interpretation will be more mutative if it takes the form of a factor of growth

rather than of persecution (Lussana 1 984; Rosenfeld 1 987; Tuckett 1 989;
Speziale-Bagliacca 1 99 1 , 1 998; Bianchedi 1 996) .
I recall what happened once when 1 gave a premature transference inter
pretation: the young woman patient started up and said: 'I've been stung by some
creature; look at the weal, all red and swollen.'The interpretation was an intense
source of turbulence; it resulted in the formation of an a-element, an emotional
pictogram that remained behind like an inner Polaroid photograph. However,
we can discern its 'narrative derivative' - ' I've been stung by some creature; look
at the weal, all red and swollen' - which tells of a pictogram that has conferred
form, colour and expression on an experience of surprise, pain and irritation.
Other intensely communicative narrative derivatives could have been chosen
- for instance, 'When 1 was small, my father used to slap me without warning,
leaving a mark behind' or 'I saw a lorry on TV that went through a red light and
crashed into a line of cars' or 'At nursery school my little brother was knocked
bleeding to the ground by a bully' or 'I remember an episode of Emergency Room
where some people were injured by robbers and had to be revived: there was so
much blood' - and so on. There are in fact an infinite number of other possible
narrative derivatives of the same a-element, as well as, perhaps, a graphic
1 23
derivative (a drawing of an arrow hitting a bear and making it bleed) , a play

type derivative (a bounding tiger that suddenly sinks its fangs into a hunter) , a
sensory derivative (an acute stomach ache) , a motor derivative (bumping into
the corner of a table and hurting oneself) or an oneiric derivative (reporting a
dream in which the patient's foot is injured by a shard of glass) .
In my view, interpretations must often take the form of an unsaturated,
polysemic event (Guignard 1 997, 1 998) that opens the way to new meaning
(Andrade de Azevedo 1 996) and permits a narrative development to which the
patient contributes constructively and actively at all times (Nissim Momigliano
1 99 1 , 1 992) .
As Riolo (1 997) points out, there are symbolic systems with the function of
deciphering meaning and others whose function is to produce it. Psychoanalysis
is a system directed towards the generation of new thoughts, which, however,
require a space of non-saturation in which they can oscillate, and, as Guignard
would say, there is always a risk of interprhations-bouchon blocking the develop
ment of thought.
That said, It is of course sometimes necessary to 'close off the sense' with
saturated transference interventions (Spillius 1 983, 1 988; Rocha Barros 1 996) .
Signals emitted by the text
Patients give constant Signals of their experience of our interpretative inter

ventions (Munoz 1 998) . What the patient says can be seen as generated by the
repetition of his history (which, in part, it is) , or as a projection on to the outside
world of fantasies from his internal world (and this too, in part, is the case) - but
it can also be considered as issuing from the immediacy of the here and now, as
a real-time response to the emotional afferences of the relational instant. This
last approach enables us constantly to modulate our interventions in such a way
as to permit an expansion of thinkability.
The characters cif the session
As stated in Chapter 7, these will be seen in very different ways according to

one's chosen model. For instance, when Massimo mentions his 'cat', the 'dog' or
the 'rabbit' , these characters can be thought of mainly on the realistic level: the
acquisition of the cat and the promise of the dog are certainly significant events
in the real external life of Massimo, enabling him to undertake deeper affective
cathexes and to emerge from his defensive shell. However, the cat and dog can
also be attributed to intrapsychic forms of functioning, to Massimo's internal
obj ects, and will in this case be interpreted as such. In yet another model, they
are viewed as signals of relational qualities of the couple at that particular instant:
1 24
trust, suspicion, closeness and fear succeed each other in the consulting room,
and what matters is how they are transformed in the present.
Some time ago, Marcella, a 1 5-year-old patient who came twice a week, told me that at
school there were only two toilets for 1 5 girls and that it wasn't easy to use them because
they had to pass some boys on the way. I said only: 'Two toilets for 1 5 girls is really not very
much; it isn't easy to show that you have needs in front of other people; that problem certainly
has to be solved .' Marcella smiled and drew a little dog - which, I thought, was something
born of the session on account of my unsaturated intervention. (Had I chosen a different
model, I might have thought she was telling me about a real external problem, or I could have
given a saturated interpretation to the effect that she wanted to have more than two sessions.)
A few days later, Marcella was talking about school and the toilets again; it was one of the
last sessions of the day and I was tired, so that I failed to notice her signal of my deficient
availability (not enough toilets), and told her: 'I think you are telling me that two sessions a
week is not very much and that it isn't easy for you to show me that you have needs.' Marcella
looked at me sadly and said: 'I was looking out of the window at school and saw a man with
a moustache hitting a puppy with a big stick: he hurt it so badly that he eventually killed it.'
My saturated interpretation was experienced as something very violent that inflicted wounds,
and that not only failed to cause anything to be born, but also killed off something.- trust
that was coming into being.
So we must always pay close attention to the response to our interpretations.

admittedly regarding it as something that draws on the patient's history and
internal world, but bearing in mind that it also has to do with the here and now
of our relationship with the patient. The analyst can constantly and constructively
modify the field by monitoring it and varying his own interpretative setting.
Of course, what applies to a verbal response is also true of its 'play' counter
part: if Marcella had been 7 years old, she might well have expressed the same
material in play instead of in words.
Play
In view of the foregoing, it is readily understandable that I found the title of a

recent symposium - 'Play as a mediator between the internal and external
worlds' - particularly felicitous in that it casts play as the central intermediary
between the world of fantasy (that is, in my Bionian dialect, a-elements) and
the external world (in my dialect, relationships with others) . Play is the ludic
derivative, or carrier, that makes a,-elements communicable.
I am convinced of the unity of mental functioning - i.e. that what applies to
children also applies to adolescents or adults (Ferro 1 992) - and also that play,
drawing, acting out and narration all have the same function of mediating what
is happening in the depths of mental life and of making it knowable.
1 25
I further b elieve that the kind of 'play ' concretely enshrined in the use of
characters , obj ects or animals can be unc onditionally equated with the more
abstract narratlOns of an adult patient, so that instead of a game with a she-tiger
we have, say, an account of supper with the patient's mother-in-law.
What matters is the form of the analyst's participati o n in the play: whether
play in the literal sense or verbal play, It must be able to develop freely without
premature closure o f its meaning.
1 26
Notes
1 Narrations and interpretations
According to Bion ( 1 963) , to be effective an interpretation must extend into the

field of 'sense, myth and passion'.
2 Translator's note: to avoid clumsy constructions, where applicable the masculine
personal pronoun and possessive adjective are used throughout for both sexes.
3 The inclusion of narrative transformation among the various types of transformations
is due to Corrao (199 1 ) .
4 -K stands for the opposite o f authentic knowledge. Column 2 ofBion's Grid i s the
column of lies (including interpretative lies) aimed at avoiding the anxiety generated
by truth. .
5 The reference is to Bernard L. Kowalski's 1 969 fum Krakatoa, East ofJava, inspired
by the catastrophic eruption of the Krakatoa volcano that submerged many
Indonesian islands in 1 883.
6 The reference is to Steven Spielberg's 1 993 f!1mJurassic Park, in which the disabling
of the security system of a theme park containing dinosaurs bred from DNA
fragments causes these animals to embark on an orgy of devouring and destruction.
7 Translator's note: Fausto Coppi was an Italian champion cyclist who died in 1 960.
8 Translator's note: AIda Merini is an Italian poet, born 1 93 1 .
9 Translator's note: the name Quantestorie means 'Manystories'.
10 Translator's note: the Italian word lettino can mean either bed or couch.
2 Telling ourselves stories with, perhaps, a grain of truth
This ten-minute interval between patients is in my view of fundamental importance,

acting as it does as a kind of decompression chamber that enables one to exit one
story and prepare to enter another, with a minimum of contamination.
2 Riolo ( 1 989) stresses that a thought arising in the session from one mind only is
somehow a mendacious thought (-K) .
3 Translator's note: the Italian word for railwayman is jerroviere, which contains the
analyst's surname Ferro.
1 27
Notes
4 Translator's note: L ' Unita is the I talian Communist newspaper; the title means
' Unity ' .
5 Translator's note: Serenase I S the Italian commerClal name for haloperidol.
6 Translator's note: 'tranquil' is sereno m Italian - a play on the name of the tranquillizer
Serenase .
7 Translator's note : Tinto Brass IS an Italian erotic filmmaker.
8 Translator's note : the Italian word griglia means both grill and gnd (i. e . Bion's Grid) ,
while the Italian for iron is ferro , which IS also the analyst's surname; ' F ' IS the initial
letter of the I talian word for Iron and of the analyst's name, but the reference is also
to Row F of Bion's Grid.
9 Translator's note: the Italian word for uncovenng can also mean discovenng.
3 In praise of Row C: psychoanalysis as a particular form of

literature
Translator's note : both Qui and Qua mean 'here ' ; Quo does not mean anything.
The explanation follows .
2 Translator's note : the Italian phrase can mean either 'threw a pen' or 'plucked a
feather' .
3 Translator's note : the I talian word fu ma re (to smoke) also means ' to fume' .
4 Sexuality a s a narrative genre o r dialect in the analyst'S

consulting room: a radical vertex
I shall not consider sexual acting out m the analytiC session because, while on the
one hand (on the analyst's side) a is a matter of the analyst's own pathology, on
the other (with regard to the patient) i t has to do With the many different fonns of
acting in.
2 'w' here refers to a 'whole response ' of the field itself With emotional coloration,
by analogy with Rorschach's W .
3 Translator's note : the reference I S t o Pedro Almodovar's 1 990 fi l m A tame ('Tie m e
up') . I n I talian, if t h e stress is on the first syllable (Ugaml) , the meaning would b e
' tie m e up ' , b u t i f a is o n the second syllable (Legaml), the word would mean 'bonds ' .
4 Stephen Frears' 1 996 fi l m Mary Reilly.
5 The Italian word ferro (which IS also the analyst's name) means 'Iro n ' , an English
word that to Italian ears suggests ira (ire, or mcontment rage) .
6 Memory is a children's game usmg cards of which each pair has a different picture
on one side, while all the cards have the same pattern on the other. An a-element
is m reality a much more complex and mterlinked emotional plctogram, but for the
sake of clanty I have imagmed It grossly oversimplified, as if it con tamed a single
elementary Image; a better analogy might be With a tarot card.
7 A balpha-element IS a useful concept which denotes a partially digested �-element
that can be stored precisely as an ' undigested fact' , but differs both from a-elements
and from unprocessed �-elements . The analogy is With Incomplete rummatlve
predigestIOn.
1 28
Notes
8 The fabula is the basic schema of the narration, the syntax of the characters, whereas
the plot is the story as actually told, as it appears on the surface (Eco 1 979) .
9 Although I have discussed a-elements in purely visual terms, they are in reality more
complicated, as they may also be auditory or coenaesthetic. However, the basic
argument is the same.
5 The waking dream: theoretical and clinical aspects
1 Translator's note: the Italian word sollievo means 'relief.

2 Translator's note: a play on words because ferri here means knitting needles, but is
also the plural offerro , which is the analyst's name.
3 Elvira Banotti is a well-known Italian feminist historian.
6 Delusion and hallucination
Translator's note: the reference is to Francis Bacon's 1 953 painting Study After
Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.
2 Translator's note: Val Padana is the area around Milan and Pavia, where the analyst
practises.
3 Translator's note: Piero Chiara was a Sicilian author ( 1 9 1 3-86) who moved north.
4 There is in my view a gradient of delusional forms extending from 'waking dream
flashes' to ' transformations into hallucinosis' or 'hallucinations' according to the
extent to which the evacuations of a-, balpha- or �-elements are internal. However,
whereas the visual phenomena are indicative of the immediacy of the disturbance
of the a-function or of � d', delusional narrations involve in addition a pathology
of the signification and resignification of the world and of the world of the emotions.
I recall the first delusional patient I treated as a psychiatrist: an elderly woman, she
had lost her only daughter as a little girl while she herself was still young; having
been unable to work through her mourning, more than twenty years later she was
still caring for a rag doll, which she would not let out of her sight and which she
said was her daughter. The evacuation of balpha-elements into the doll in effect
brought it to life, or protected the patient from catastrophic collapse.
5 Translator's note: Giorgio Scerbanenco was an Italian thriller writer ( 1 9 1 1-69) , born
in Kiev.
6 Translator's note: Demetrio Pianelli is a character created by Emilio D e Marchi
( 1 85 1 -1 90 1 ) , who depicted the Milanese urban middle classes.
7 Translator's note: the Castle of Fenis is in the Val d'Aosta.
8 Translator's note: cappuccino coffee is so called, according to the Concise Oxford
DictIOnary, because its colour resembles that of a Capuchin's habit.
9 Translator's note: this is a reference to the Italian system of driving licences - class
A for motorcycles, B for cars, C for lorries and E for public service vehicles. The
patient invents a non-existent class G, the initial letter of the Italian word guarigione,
which means cure.
1 0 This is a phrase in our private analytic language meaning 'to lose control' .
1 29
Notes
11 This concerns an analytIc functIOn of nune, because I had certainly not yet under
stood that the anxiety was due to a gap that needed to be bridged.
12 Translator's note: the Italian word is palazzo, which means a large buildmg such as
an office block. However, m this context it also has the connotation of the analyst's
consultmg room, where the analytIc work IS done, but may also Imply confusIOn of
ideas, or alternatIvely 'commg straight to the pomt' .
7 Characters in literature and in the analyst's consulting room
See note 8 m Chapter 4.

2 From Grelmas on, an antI-anthropomorphic approach has p revailed, m which a
character IS not necessarily a human agent, but may be any element assigned figurative
status at surface level that takes the form of a profound syntactic unit (an actant) . A
character can thus be an animal, a house or a concept. As Lotman ( 1 970) notes, once
the anthropomorphizmg discrinunant IS elinunated, the character does usually p rove
to refer to human agents, but this is no longer necessarily so.
3 For Grelmas ( 1 966) , actors are Simply the vanous characters, whereas actants are
classes of actors With similar groups of functIOns and spheres of actIon.
4 Hologram: holography IS an optIcal technique that uses coherent light sources
allowmg the three-dimensIOnal photographic reproductIOn of an object on a single
substrate and ItS subsequent three-dimensIOnal reconstruction. The most promismg
applicatIon is likely to be three-dimensional holographic cinematography, which
would produce a complete illusion of the scene represented, with all the effects of the
actual presence of objects (Demsyuk 1 979, translated) .
5 The word Sedocalcio can be broken down mto ItS elements se-do-calcio, which means,
in I talian, 'if I kic k ' , thus expressmg rage and aggression.
6 'Pesto' not only is a condiment used m Ligunan cUisme but also suggests the Italian
verb pestare, meanmg to thrash .
7 Translator's note: ferro means iron, b u t I S also the analyst's name.
8 Notes on acting out, the countertransference and the

transgenerational field
The lithograph IS reproduced m Ferro ( 1 996a: 39) .

2 The narratmg functIon: that IS, the co-narratmg functIon of analyst and patient.
9 Child and adolescent analysis: similarities and differences that

mask an underlying unity
See note 8 m Chapter 4 .
10 Play: characters, narrations and interpretations
Translator's note: the Italian word IS ferro, which is also the analyst's name.
1 30
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141
Index
abandonment 64 98; and free association 61; and

aberrant decoding 92 hallucinations 73, 80; stressing in
Abraham, K. 5 1 , 87-8 therapy 1 23 ; and the transformation
acting out 72, 97-9, 1 0 1 , 1 1 2, 1 25 of 3- into a-elements 1 0 1 -2; and
'actors/ actants' 87 visual flashes 73
adolescents see child and adolescent a-metafunction 53
analysis analysts: adolescence of 1 1 5; as
adoption 36 co-narrator 33; and the compulsion
affectionate qualities 73 to repeat 25, 26; ethical
afferences 27 responsibilities of the 92-3; infantile
aggression 94 aspect of the 1 05 ; internal cohesion
allegory 88-9 1 1 5 ; and interpretation 6-7;
Allen, Woody 1 1 maturation of 1 03-4; as Michelangelo
Almodovar, Pedro 4 1 figure 6; narcissism of the 6-7; not
a-dreaming 5 2 , 62 paying attention 58; openness 9 1 , 92,
a-elements 2-3, 1 0-1 1 , 1 9-20, 27-3 1 , 1 20; phobias of the 6; reverie of the
3 1 ; and acting out 97-8; definition of 1 00; soiling of the field 25, see also
54; and dreams 53; and free patient-analyst relationship
association 6 1 ; knowability 0[ 38, 39, analytic encounter: metaphors of 1 07-8,
46-7, 52-5; narrative derivatives of see also patient-analyst relationship
27-9, 38-40, 45-8, 52-3 , 5 5-6, 1 00, analytic function 60, 6 1 , 1 03
1 02, 1 23-4; and play 125; proj ections Andersen, Hans Christian 87
of 46-7; and sexuality 47; Anderson, R. 1 1 6
transformation of 3-elements into anorexia 1 1 9
29-33, 37-40, 46-8, 93, 98, 1 0 1 -2, anthropomorphism 90
1 08; transformation of balpha anti-knowledge (-K) 5, 7, 1 8 , 29, 36
elements into 70; as unique and antisocial behaviour 99
unrepeatable 46; and waking dreams anxieties, transgenerational transmission
5 1 , 52-61 1 03
a-function 2-5, 1 3 , 1 8 , 20, 29, 33, 40, 'as if 1 1 4
45, 55, 72, 86, 1 08; and acting out autism 36
97, 98; deficient 3-5 , 38, 73, 80, 97, autoeroticism 5 9
1 43
Index
autonomy 64 expressive modalities of the

functioning of the analytic couple 60,
balpha-elements 46, 47-8 ; and actmg out 1 05 , 1 24-5 ; historical-referential 39,
99; build up of 1 03 ; and delusion 69, 50, 82-3 , 86, 87, 1 05 , 1 09 , 1 24 ; as
70; transfonnatlOn into internal objects 39, 50, 87-8, 1 0 5 ,
a-elements 70 1 09-1 0 , 1 24 ; in literature 8 1 -3 , 90-2;
Banottl, ElvIra 65 as memories 95; patient histories as
Barale, Francesco 99 95; realism of 82-3 , 86, 87; in state of
Baranger, Madeleine 6-7, 8 , 1 1 , 1 3 , constant flux 90, 93-5 ; as symbols of
5 1 -2 , 89, 99, 1 00 relating 60; of a text 29
Baranger, Willy 6-7 , 8, 1 1 , 5 1-2, 89, 99, child and adolescent analysis
1 00 34-6, 1 05-1 7 , 1 25 ; characters
bamers, breaking down 3 4 of 1 05 , 1 09- 1 0 , 1 1 6- 1 7 ;
Barthes, R . 84-5 countertransference in 1 1 5- 1 6 ; and
Berbench, E. 1 1 5 mterpretatIon 1 1 4- 1 5 ; models of
B-elements 2-5 , 1 0 , 1 2, 1 8 , 29-3 1 , 3 1 ; 1 1 3- 1 4 ; narratIve scenarios of
and acting out 97-8; build up of 1 03 ; 1 1 6- 1 7 ; play sequence 1 1 9-23 ;
evacuation i n hallucination 6 7 , 73-4; setting of 1 1 6; slmilantIes and
transfonnatlOn into differences between 1 1 0-1 3
a-elements 29-3 3 , 37-9, 40, 46, childhood memories 1 9-20
47-8 , 93, 98, 1 0 1 -2, 1 08 ; childhood sexual abuse 1 9-20
transgeneratlOnai transmission of 1 0 3 , childhood trauma 1 1 0
see also balpha-elements Chinese ideograms 29, 3 0
B-screen: fonnation of 97; functions of Clementi, Pierre 7 3
the 1 0 1 closeness seeking 7 8
betalomas 3-4 , 3 8 co-narrative transfonnation 1 -2 , 3 3 , 1 00
Bezoari, M . 5 1 , 8 4 confidentiality 1 1 6
Bion, W . R . 2-3, 7 , 9, 1 0 , 2 1 , 22, 27, Conrad, Joseph 87
3 3 , 3 4 , 39-40 , 4 5 , 46, 49, 5 1 , 52, 5 5 , containment 60, 6 5 , 74, 7 5-80; in child
6 1 , 62, 8 5 , 89, 93, 98, 1 0� 1 0 1 ; Grid therapy 1 1 5
2 1 , 27, 29, 3 1 , 3 3 , 40, 7 1 contempt 7 1-2
Bleger, J . 6 control, giving up of 4 1 , 45
blmd spots 1 0 3 , 1 1 5 Corrao , Francesco 8, 92
bodily fantasies 87 coughs 94
Borges, J .L . 9-1 0 , 1 03 countertransference 86, 99-1 02; of child
Brenman, Eric 6 and adolescent analysis 1 1 5- 1 6
creatIvity 2 3
Cahn, R. 1 1 5-1 6 critIcism 1 1 1
Calvino, I . 29, 8 4 , 90, 1 1 2
catastrophic change 62, 70-1 Dante Alighieri 85
Cavazzonl, E . 1 1 defences 6 5 , 76-7 , 79-80
change : catastrophic 62, 70-1 , see also delUSIOns 67-7 3 ; loss of 69-7 1 ;
transfonnatlon seif-contammg/protectIve function
characters 1 4 , 39-50, 60- 1 , 8 1 -9 5 , 1 00, 67, 69-7 1
1 02 , 1 1 9-26; as affective-holograms depth 1 4
39, 50, 89; m child and adolescent dialects o f the client 40
analYSIS 1 05 , 1 09-1 0, 1 1 6- 1 7 ; as Di Chiara, G. 7
1 44
Index
Diderot, D. 8-9 figures of the field 49

distortion 67 Forattini, Giorgio 19
distrust 1 2 1 , 1 22, 1 23 fortiori 97-8
Dostoevsky, F. 87 free association 61-2, 85
'doubles' 72, 87, 1 03 Freud, Sigmund 1 , 10, 33, 37, 40, 51 ,
drawing 1 1 0-1 1 , 1 1 1- 1 4, 1 25 83, 88
dream interpretation 20-4, 28-9, 5 1 , Freudian theory: characters of the session
5 5-65; and character 83-5 , 87-8, 82, 86, 87, 89; dream interpretation
94-5 ; and delusions 67-8, 73; dreams 83-4
of others' 6 1 ; Freudian 83-4
dream-like flashes 67 Gadda, C.E. 84
dream-work-_ 85 garnebooks 9 1
dreams 5 1 , 53, 55-65; a-dreaming 52, Gibeault, A. 1 1 5
62; place for 63-5; violent 63, see also graphic derivatives 28, 29, 30, 123-4
nightmares; waking dream thought Greimas, AJ. 82, 87
Guignard, F. 1 1 5, 1 1 6, 1 24
Eco, Umberto 7-8, 90, 9 1
emotional facts, renarration 3 9 , 5 0 hallucinations 4 1 , 67, 73-80
emotional scar tissue 6 2 hallucinosis, transformation into 67, 7 1 ,
emotional turbulence 6 3 , 8 9 , 1 00, 1 03, 72, 74, 1 08
108 Hamon, P. 87
emotions 10, 40, see also proto-emotions hate 42-3
erotization 4 1 , 94-5 headaches 1 7-1 8
Escher, M.e. 1 0 1 Heimann, P. 86-7
Eskelinen d e Folch, T. 1 16 'here and now' 5 1 -2, 6 1 , 84, 102, 1 24-5
ethical responsibility, of the analyst 92-3 Hesse, H. 87
European Psychoanalytic Federation homicide 1 09
(EPF) Congress, Estoril 1 977 6 homosexuality 59
expressive language 105 hope 1 1 9
horror stories, fascination o f 102
fabula 1 17 hypochondria 3
falsehood 7 1
fantasies 41-2, 49-50, 87-8; unconscious ideograms 29, 3 0
bodily 87; violent 72 indifference 23-4
fear: and hallucinations 74, see also terror infantile, preoccupation with the 1 05
Fellini, Federico 1 1 infantile sexuality 37, 40
field 4-8, 1 0-1 1 , 1 3-14, 1 5, 19, 2 1 , 25; infinite nature of narration/ stories 1 2, 39
analyst's soiling of 25; bringing about insight 13, 1 8
transformation outside the 49; integration 72, 1 1 0
characteristics of 1 00-1 ; and intentio leetoris 9 1
characters 39; and countertransference intentio operis 9 1
99-1 02; dysfunctions of the 1 0 1 ; intention, o f the text 8, 9 1
figures o f the 49; fluidity o f the 1 1 ; internal objects 8 , 49; characters as 39,
here and now of the 47, 51-2, 1 02, 50, 87-8, 105, 1 09-10, 1 24
1 25; present 102-4; transformations interpretation 1-1 5 , 27-8, 32, 39-40,
of the 39-40, 47-8, 60, 1 00; 1 09-10, 1 1 9-26; adapting to achieve
transgenerational 1 02-4 transformation 65; analysts and 6-7; as
1 45
Index
antI-knowledge 29, 36; broadening rmnd, properly functlonlng 99

the concept of 7-1 4; In child and missing sesSIOns 1 09
adolescent analysIs 1 1 4- 1 5 ; limits of mothers 4 1 -3 ; ambivalence towards 64
7-8; open 1 20; patlent signals motor denvatlves 28, 124
regarding 1 2 4 ; premature 1 23-4 ; Musatti, C . 84, 85
saturated 23, 3 9-40, 4 1 -2 , 63, 77, myth 29
1 20-2, 1 24-5 ; unsaturated 89, 92,
1 00 , 1 24-5 narcIssism, of the analyst 6-7
interpretative cooperatlon 90 narcIssIstIC personalitles 72
introjection, of the analytIC functlon 60, narratibility spectrum, of emotIOnal
61 expenence 1 4 , 1 5
inventions 1 07 narration 1 - 1 5 , 4, 1 1 9-26; i n child and
adolescent analysis 1 1 6- 1 7 ;
Jakobson , Roman 89 definitlons 1 ; Infinite stories of 1 2, 3 9 ;
Johnston, Joe 1 06-8 influences on story choice 39;
Joyce , James 2, 29, 90- 1 successful 33-6
Jumanji (film, 1 99 5 ) 1 06-8 narrative capacity 47, 5 5 , 84
narrative deconstruction 3 8
-K (anti-knowledge) 5 , 7 , 1 8 , 29, 36 narrative derivatives, a n d _-elements
Kancyper, L . 1 1 6 27-9 , 3 8-40, 45-8, 52-3 , 5 5-6, 1 00,
King, Stephen 1 02 1 02 , 1 23-4
Klein, Melanie 1 0 , 3 3 , 40, 49, 5 1 , 88 narrative failure 36
Klelnlan theory 86, 87, 88, 89 narrative genre 28
Krakatoa syndrome 3 narrative inconsistency 1 3
narrative nodes 50
Ladame, F. 1 1 2 narratIve retransformation 86
language, expressIve 1 05 narrative transformatlon 20, 3 2 , 39-40,
lateness 1 8- 1 9 5 1 , 86, 1 0 1 ; capaCIty for 84; failure of
Laufer, M . 1 1 5 , 1 1 6 36; successful 33-6
lies 7 1 narratology 85-6, 87
limitatIOns of stones 1 0, 1 2- 1 3 Nichetti, Maunzio 1 2
loss 1 4 nightmares 94
Lovecraft, H . P . 1 02 non-containment 60
Luzes, P. 3 2 non-saturation 1 3 , 29
Norman, J. 88
Machtlinger, V . 1 1 0
Mancia, M. 92-3 '0' 3 9 , 40
Mann, Helnnch 70 obligatory assoCIatIOns 8 5
meaning, constructlon of 1 obseSSIve disorders 4
Meltzer, D . 46, 5 1 -2 Oedipal Issues 5 9
memory 49; as character 95; childhood onemc denvatlves 28, 1 24
1 9-20 'oneinc flashes' 27
mental fatlgue 1 1 5 onemc functioning 28; in the analytic
Merinl, Alda 7, 84 seSSIon 5 1 ; 'film frames' 52; and free
meta-narratlon 84 aSSOCIation 6 1 ; and hallUCinatIOns 74
metaphors: of the analytlc encounter openness: of the analyst 9 1 , 92, 1 20 ;
1 07-8 ; of raising 24 attempts t o achieve 34-6
1 46
Index
panic attacks 3, 20-1 , 34, 59, 93-4 repeat, compulsion to 26; breaking of
parental relationships 1 1 6 the 25
patient histories 95 resistance 99-100
patient-analyst relationship: co-generated Resnais, Alain 9 1
content of 86, 88, 92, 1 00, see also responsibility, ethical 92-3
analytic encounter retransformation, narrative 86
persecutory thinking 1 8 , 39, 57, 6 1 , 75, 'reverie' 27-8, 32, 46-7, 52-3, 100, 1 2 1
84, 1 03, 1 23 Riolo, F. 92, 1 24
personnages-embrayeurs 87 Rorty, R. 9 1
personnages-riferentiels 87
phobias 4, 6 sadism 7 3
plctograms, emotional 27-8, 33, 38, scar tissue, emotional 6 2
45-6, 56, 98, see also a-elements Scerbanenco, Giorgio 69
plastic surgery, childhood 1 1 9 schema 85
play 1 1 9-23 , 1 25-6 Schnitzler, Arthur 25-6
play derivatives 28, 1 24 'second look' 1 00
plot 1 1 7 seduction 22
Poe, Edgar Allen 102 Segal, H. 87
possible worlds 9 1-2 'selected facts' 1 07
premature ejaculation 48-9 sense: construction of 1 3 , 32; extension
primal scene 76-7, 88; reconstruction of of 40
the 83-4 sensory derivatives 1 24
projection: delusional 67, 69, 70, 72; sensuality 20
of internal objects onto the analyst separation anxiety 2 1 , 76-7, 80
87 sexual abuse, childhood 19-20
projective identification 38, 1 03, 1 08; sexual intercourse, fear of 43-5
and acting out 97; and sexuality: of the consulting room 48-9;
countertransference 1 0 1 as narrative genre 37-50; real external
proportio 91 40; real internal 40

Propp, V. 82 Siniavsky, M. 1 1 5
proto-emotions 3, 10, 1 2, 71-2, 1 00, Snow White 1 2-1 3
1 08 ; transformation of 1 0 1 space, unsaturated 92
psychosis 1 1 5, 1 1 6 Speziale-Bagliacca, Roberto 49
psychosomatic manifestations 1 0 1 splitting 2 1 , 1 03
Stevenson, Robert Louis 55, 8 1 , 82
rage 42-3, 64, 7 1-2 story choice, influences on 39
raISIng, metaphors of 24 suffering, and delusions 70, 7 1 , 72
Rat Man 83 symbols 88
reality: deconstruction of 93-5; invaSIOn
of 70-2; screenmg of 67-8, 69 tender qualities 73
referential function 89 terror 59, see also fear
relational development 4 1 , 59 texts: characters of the 29; intention of
relational models, unsaturated 89 the 8, 9 1
relational perspective 9 1 therapeutic setting 1 1 6
renarration 85-6; continuous 57; of therapy sessions: adaptations to 65,
emotional facts 39, 50 77-80, 93-4; breaks in 1 8-19, 55-6,
Renik, Owen 86 6 1 , 74; frequency of 1 1 6; late arrivals
1 47
Index
1 8-19; rescheduling of 20-1 ; skipping unconscious 33, 37, 46, 108

of 79,see also analytIc encounter; understood, feelings of not being 7 1-2,
patient-analyst relationship 76-8
thought generatIOn, apparatus for see unsaturated interpretation 89, 92,
(X-functIon 1 00, 1 24-5 , see also
tolerability, thresholds of 1 8 non-saturation
transference 10; premature 1 23-4; and a
return to reality 72; saturated 1 3 Van Allsburg, Chris 106
transformatIon 8 , 1 2, 1 3 , 26, 48-9, 1 02, violence 63 , 72-3, 99
108, 1 1 5, 1 25 ; adapting visual flashes 38, 52-5, 54, 73, 75
interpretations for 65; and age 105; of visual reference 29, 45-6
fl-elements into (X-elements 29-33, visualization 46
37-9, 40, 46, 47-8, 93, 98, 1 01-2,
108; of balpha-elements into 'w' 40
(X-elements 70; of be tal omas 38; waking dream thought 1 9 , 49, 5 1-65 ,
co-narrative 1-2, 33, 1 00; o f t h e fIeld 73-4, 1 00, 108
39-40, 47-8, 60, 100; into Waksman, J . 1 1 5
hallucinosis 67, 7 1 , 72, 74, 108; Winnicott, D . W . 23
outside t h e field 49; unity o f 1 05, see Wolf Man 5 1 , 83
also narrative transformation; worlds, possible 9 1-2
retransformatlon wounding of the patient by the analyst
transgenerational fIeld 1 02-4 58, 6 1 , 85, 1 23-5
transgenerational legacies 1 03 wnting things down 33
trauma, childhood 1 9-20, 1 1 0
trust 1 1 9, 1 22, 1 23 Yeaworth, Irvin S . , Jr 3
1 48

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Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling

Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling examines psychoanalysis from two

• Psychoanalysis as a particular form of literature

Antonino Ferro is Full Member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association

The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in assoClatlOn with

Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

General Editor: Dana Birksted-Breen

Translated by Philip Slotkin

The translation of this work has been part-funded by SEPS

ViaVal d'Aposa 7 40 123 Bologna - Italy

tel +39 05 1 27 1992 fax +39 05 1 265983

English language edinon fmt published 2006 by Routledge

Simultaneously pubhshed m the USA and Canada

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Typeset m Bembo by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton

All nghts reserved. No part of this book may be repnnted or reproduced

This pubhcation has been produced WIth paper manufactured to stnct

Bnnsh Library Catalogumg m Pubhcanon Dara

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN13: 978-0-415-37204-6 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-37204-6 (hbk)

English translation © 2005 Antonino Ferro

riverrum, past Eve and

1 Narrations and interpretations 1

2 Tellmg ourselves stories with, perhaps, a grain of truth 17

3 In praIse of Row C: psychoanalysis as a particular for m of literature 27

4 Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect in the analyst's

5 T he waking dream: theoretical and clinical aspects 51

6 Delusion and hallucination 67

7 Characters in literature and in the analyst's consulting room 81

8 Notes on actmg out, the countertransference and the

9 Child and adolescent analysis: similarities and differences that

10 Play: characters, narrations and mterpretations 1 19

The term 'narration', as used in psychoanalysis, is highly ambiguous, because its

A seeming digression: towards a clinical model

I use the term 'model' as a provlSlonal truth, validating it to a greater or lesser

which, finding no possibility of transformation, are continuously evacuated in

Similar consideratIons could be applied to obsessional syndromes, in which

... BUT I WON'T DO IT ... BECAUSE EVERYTHING

The analyst'S narcissism and interpretation

At the 1 977 EPF [European PsychoanalytIcal Federation] Congress in Estoril,

and Baranger, W 1961-2, 1964, 1969; Baranger, M. et al. 1983,1988;Baranger,

Taking a broader view

At this point a digression on interpretation is called for. The theme of

finishes .. . Every time he resumes his account, he is interrupted by an incident

What couldn't this adventure become in my hands, if I took it into my head

point of departure for other bifurcatIOns [that determine] an infinite series

shelves contain all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic

This is a perfect description of the claustrophobic, sterile circle of already

Fluidity of the field

Destructuring ofprevious configurations

In accordance with developments that take more account of traniformations in

The status of the characters of an analytic session differs according to one's

This is illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 3: if S represents the 'white light'

Figure 3 Narratability spectrum of an emotional experience

Telling ourselves stories with,

What do I mean by my helping to bring about a good climate, as mentIoned

I make no distinction between the different forms of a patient's communications

In my View, the chapters of Elements of Psycho-Analysis ( 1 963) in which Bion

The fur coat and the sandals

Ifthe analyst gives excessively direct, saturated interpretations, he is experien� ed

In the iguana 's belly

The organless little girl

For the sake of clanty, I have grossly ovefSlmplified my exemplificatIOn of a