ABSTRACT
Nino Ferro has attempted to clinically operationalize the understanding and intersubjective access to that dimension in his formulations of Field Theory. This chapter focuses on Ferro’s recognition that Wilfred Bion has offered a somewhat different and certainly more optimistic perspective of the unconscious than many of people are encountered in the more classical analytic formations. Bion saw the psychic apparatus as a late evolutionary acquisition, the purpose of which was to help one to accommodate to and withstand what he felt were the inherently traumatic experiences of being sentient and alive. He ascribed the means for doing so to alpha function–originally referred to in Cogitations as ‘dreamwork alpha’– and elaborated his theory of container/contained, noting that as a species, the capacity for containment was rudimentary at best. His formulation of waking dream thoughts, a full-time process that took place both day and night, attested to the relentlessness of the regulatory need with which one faces every moment of the lives.
