Psychoanalytic Practice Today offers the reader a good understanding of the school of thought inspired by the late work of Wilfred R. Bion. The contributors share a belief in the curative power of the analytic encounter and in the capacity of the human mind to develop from the encounter with a mind capable of reverie, dreaming and thinking. The multitude of vignettes presented emphasise the necessity of the emotional involvement of the analyst with his or her patients for improvement to take place.

The book is divided in two parts: 'Psychopathology' and 'Emotions and Feelings'. The first part adapts a more classic description of psychiatric disorders by diagnostic criteria, from neuroses to psychoses and including depression and borderline states. The second part of the book takes a closer look at specific clinical manifestations of basic emotions such as anger, surprise, sadness and more complex ones such as jealousy, abandonment and betrayal. The common thread is represented by the central place of dreaming in the psychoanalytic field as a tool to understand these clinical manifestations, and to allow for their psychic representation as an emotional experience.

The contributions together offer a varied introduction to current ideas that are growing increasingly interesting to English speaking readers, with a sufficient character of originality, irreverence and creativity that bears witness to the maturity of Italian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Practice Today will offer new ideas to the practicing psychoanalyst and psychodynamic psychotherapist.

About the Author

Antonino Ferro is a training analyst in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is the current president of Pavia's Psychoanalytic Centre. He received the Sigourney Award in 2007.

Reviews

"This volume, richly illustrated with clinical examples, explores the curative power of the intersubjective analytic encounter from the vertex of post-Bionian field theory. In so doing, it offers psychoanalysts of all levels of experience a pragmatic, clinical metapsychology of psychic process and the analytic encounter and demonstrates the centrality of transformations in dreaming and the value of the oneiric model of the mind." - Howard B. Levine, MD, Editor-in-Chief, The Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series

"Antonino Ferro, one of the most brilliant psychoanalytic thinkers of his time brings us directly into the heart of the psychoanalytic encounter, this time accompanied by a stellar list of contributors. Theoretically astute and clinically inspiring, Psychoanalytic Practice offers the reader a vivid and clear understanding of innovative Italian Psychoanalysis inspired by the later work of Bion on dreaming, reverie, and affect. This joins the ranks of Ferro's most important contributions." - Galit Atlas, Ph.D, NYU Postdoctoral program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis

Book Information
ISBN 9780367137090
Author Antonino Ferro
Format Paperback
Page Count 294
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 476g