ABSTRACT
Reflecting on psychotherapeutic failures, Gold highlights how most papers convey an initial sense of certainty about the assessment of cases, including the patients’ personal needs. The constructive assumptions sustaining liberal optimism cannot claim immunity from challenge. All clusters of power show strong resistance to new behaviour that is somehow inconsistent with entrenched convictions. In any maturational process, the initial steps can be the more painful ones, and any enjoyment may come only when proficiency and fluency are acquired. The unprocessed proto-emotions determine a generalised psychic atmosphere which is asphyxiating, toxic, deadening. In Ferro’s view of psychoanalytic work, different symptoms or different attachments indicate different ways of facing the same problem: dealing with intractable emotions. Psychoanalysis looks to develop the tools necessary to foster the development and production of thought itself, that is the apparatus for dreaming and thinking.
