ABSTRACT
At the heart of Antonino Ferro’s work is a vision of the analytic process that is transformational in its aims and intersubjective in its means. For Ferro, as for Wilfred R. Bion, the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is the creation of thought and the creation of mind. Ferro captures the aspect of analytic listening in his formulation that, from the perspective of the Field, each character in the patient’s narrative may be viewed as an ‘affective hologram’ or emotional constellation independent of the manifest subject or object to which it is attached in the discourse. The distinction in the options of the analyst’s interventions that Ferro is making between saturated and unsaturated interpretations is analogous to the difference between interpretations of the transference and interpretations from within the transference, which has been described in French psychoanalysis. Ferro offers many illustrations of how a unique series of alpha elements may underlie, give rise to and be expressed by different ‘narrative dialects’.
