A Guide to the Galaxy of Psychoanalysis by Antonino Ferro
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Antonino Ferro, a psychiatrist and training psychoanalyst with the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and one of Europe’s most renowned post-Bionians, has published a guide to the galaxy of psychoanalysis—The New Analyst’s Guide to the Galaxy: Questions about Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
It is a dialogue with his young colleague Luca Nicolì on current issues in contemporary psychoanalysis: the setting, working techniques, and training methods; the practical application of classical, Bionian, and post-Bionian models; as well as the field theory developed by Ferro himself. It is a fascinating discussion of the past and present, aimed at looking toward the future of psychoanalysis. And right at the beginning of his work, Ferro urges the reader to bid farewell to clarity, to challenge any sense of certainty, and to leave the known behind in order to focus on what has not yet been discovered and may emerge in the field of research.
Antonino Ferro himself calls the book a self-defense guide for young analysts just starting out. To find out what the master of psychoanalysis suggests those new to the profession defend themselves against, read the brief review I co-authored with my colleague Igor Popov.
Already in the introduction, Ferro notes that, first and foremost, young professionals should defend the very possibility of remaining young. “A couple of days ago, I read about an Italian colleague who mentioned a sixty-two-year-old analyst who prefers to respect the views of his senior colleagues rather than engage in debate with them… Very soon, the young members of the psychoanalytic association will be analysts in their thirties and early thirties, and their professional age as association members will come significantly closer to their actual age, whereas now this “age gap” reaches twenty to thirty years, and we may encounter a 62-year-old “young” member of the psychoanalytic association and a 65-year-old “young” specialist. This is a characteristic of our times.”
The second thing against which young professionals need to protect themselves, says Ferro, is an excess of orthodoxy in the profession. It slows the development of new ideas. “It’s important to remember that an analyst who is, say, sixty-five years old—even if he actively teaches and tries to keep up with the times—received his professional training in the second half of the last century. In a sense, he is still teaching the analysis of the 1980s because of this 20- to 30-year lag.”
Young professionals also face the danger of getting bogged down in meaningless or outdated formulas that are valuable only as a sign of belonging to the profession. These formulas are stubbornly repeated by colleagues time and again simply to show respect and solidarity with the professional group. Ferro believes this resembles “Kyrie eleison,” “Christe eleison” (balloon text: “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison—a prayerful invocation frequently used in liturgical prayer and worship [as a hymn] in historic churches. It dates back to the prayer of the blind men of Jericho: The Russian word “kurolesit” derives from the chant “Kyrie eleison” (ordinary parishioners did not understand the Greek chants, which were recited hastily—“kuroles” became a synonym for nonsense). ”), and concerns not only the citation of Freud at the beginning of every work, but also everything we have come to take for granted—what we consider obvious and indisputable—which has become an article of faith in psychoanalysis. It is precisely this, in his view, that prevents us from fully grasping Bion’s ideas as expressed in the Tavistock Lectures. According to the author, everyone—not just new analysts—needs to learn to resist the pressure of what is already known. What is already known is not the subject of research.
Let’s take, as Ferro suggests, the concepts of transference and countertransference. They were extremely important in their time, played a significant role in understanding psychoanalytic processes, and gave rise to a multitude of new working ideas, but now we can do without them. “If we accept that there is an unconscious—or something that is called such—and I hope that in the future it will be replaced by a new concept—and if we plan to work with it, we must be primarily interested in the unknown. As soon as I learn something about my patient, I can set it aside, since it is no longer the subject of analysis. My gaze, my attention, and my hearing must be directed forward—toward what is still unknown to me.”
This approach also applies to psychoanalytic theories, the author believes. Instead of cherishing them or defending them against criticism, we must let them go. They are a well-trodden path. It is obvious, Ferro explains, that if we are on the seventh floor, it is because we have climbed all the floors before it. Step by step, from the first step to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth, and so on. We are grateful for the opportunity each step has given us to climb so high, but now we are more concerned with the steps we still need to take to conquer the floors we haven’t yet reached, as well as those we may still have to build.
Consider, Ferro suggests, how much orthodoxy limits our ability to see. Does this sound familiar—“negative transference must always be interpreted!” or “negative transference must be interpreted in such-and-such a way!”? These are far too radical judgments for us to allow ourselves as analysts. We must discover a new truth each time regarding what to do with the patient at that moment, based on who they are today and who we are today…
There is one more thing against which we must devise defenses—“light pollution” generated by knowledge. It is precisely because of this so-called light of knowledge that we are unable to discern those areas of the psyche and psychoanalytic work that still remain in the shadows. “Something similar happens in large cities illuminated by night lights,” Ferro reminds us. “Pay attention the next time you’re flying toward a major city: dense clusters of light prevent you from seeing the sky, the stars, and the darkness itself.”
It is well known that when we find ourselves in a less illuminated area, we begin to see better at night. So, can we assume that a young professional’s senses are better adapted to the darkness of the psyche and that he has a better chance of discerning the unknown? This is not known for certain, but Antonino Ferro shares with us: “I remember that during psychoanalytic training, two young candidates suddenly and effortlessly articulated what I myself had been thinking about for a long time but could not express as clearly as they did.”
Given all of the above, we must admit that today we are blinded by the light of what we already know and cannot allow ourselves to peer into the dark zones of the unconscious. It is similar to how people often look for their keys under a streetlight.
Ferro cites the opinion of Arthur Schnitzler, who wrote extensively on psychoanalysis. Schnitzler argues that the attention paid today to the Oedipus complex prevents us from seeing a vast number of other “complexes” that could be brought to light, were it not for the “light pollution” of Oedipus. And so it is—whenever we gaze at the starry sky of a psychoanalytic situation, we constantly see Oedipus, just as when we look at the starry sky we can always see the all-too-familiar Big Dipper. Such loyalty to the familiar prevents us from seeking out new, equally significant constellations.
In other words, “contaminating” the patient with our knowledge is disastrous for clinical work, and “contaminating” our minds with familiar, well-known concepts is disastrous for exploring the new. Therefore, Ferro believes, theories and models must be learned and immediately forgotten.
January 27, 2019
Excerpts translated by I. Popov and S.V. Belukhina. Read more…
