Atlas›Domain I · Psychodynamic & depth psychology›Guide 022
Guide I-022

Bionian analysis and post-Bionian field theory

Bion, Willy Baranger, Madeleine Baranger, Antonino Ferro1962
A 24 · L 41 · M 3522 interventions in the Trinity explorer
Client cardCompare
[source: …] where a claim comes from[uncertain] not confirmed in a primary source[synthesis] the writer's reconstruction

1. Introduction

Version followed: three strands, named separately throughout. (a) Bion: Learning from Experience (1962), Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963), Transformations (1965), "Notes on memory and desire" (1967), Attention and Interpretation (1970), The Grid (1971/1977). (b) Willy and Madeleine Baranger: "The analytic situation as a dynamic field" (1961–62; English, IJP 2008), "El insight en la situación analítica" (1964), and Baranger, Baranger & Mom, "Process and non-process in analytic work" (1983), which develops the bastion and the second look. (c) Antonino Ferro: post-Bionian field theory as set out in The Bi-Personal Field (1999), Mind Works (2009), "Transformations in dreaming and characters in the psychoanalytic field" (IJP 2009), and Ferro & Civitarese, The Analytic Field and its Transformations (2015). Giuseppe Civitarese is added where he extends Ferro.

What it is. This is not a manualised therapy. It is a body of psychoanalytic theory and clinical method, and no treatment manual exists. What follows gives the clinical procedures these authors actually describe. Anything turned into a step-by-step routine is marked [synthesis].

How change happens.

  • Bion: The mind grows by turning raw emotional experience (beta elements) into material it can think and dream with (alpha elements). This happens when an emotion is received and contained by another mind in a state of reverie. Over time the patient takes in a container and an alpha function of their own. [source: Bion 1962]
  • The Barangers: Analyst and patient form one bipersonal dynamic field, structured by a shared unconscious fantasy of the couple. Change comes when interpretation and shared insight dissolve the places where the field has become fixed. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  • Ferro: Everything said in the session is treated as a dream of the field. The aim is less to recover history and more to expand the field's capacity to dream, narrate and "cast" unprocessed emotions as characters. He calls that expanded capacity the container and alpha function. [source: Ferro 2009, Psicoanálisis XXXI]

2. Framework

No manualised phases. None of the three strands defines treatment phases, session quotas or criteria for moving between phases. Bion goes further and advises against holding a desire for progress or cure inside the session. [source: Bion 1967, 1970; Giampà, psychomedia] The framework below separates what the sources specify from what is derived.

Format (from sources).

  • The standard is psychoanalytic treatment: open-ended, typically several sessions a week, with stable invariants of the setting. Ferro names belief in the unconscious, respect for the setting's invariants and the analyst's asymmetry and responsibility as the minimum requirements. [source: Ferro 2009, Psicoanálisis XXXI]
  • Ferro and Civitarese apply the model in child analysis, adult analysis, psychotherapy at lower frequency and supervision. [source: Ferro 1999; Ferro 2013 Supervision in Psychoanalysis]
  • Duration is not specified. Treatments typically run for years. [uncertain: no source gives a number]

Process within sessions (from sources). The unit of work is the session, and in Ferro's case the single exchange.

  • Bion: Each session is approached as new, without past or future. An "evolution" happens in every session, and the analyst waits for it to cohere. [source: Bion, Cogitations, quoted in Giampà]
  • Barangers: The process is a series of moves. The analyst locates the point of urgency, interprets the couple's unconscious fantasy, and shared insight follows. The field is then redistributed and becomes mobile again. They describe the whole analytic process as the successive resolution of the obstacles to communication and to the field's mobility. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964] They call the movement a spiral, a term from Pichon-Rivière. [uncertain: the spiral attribution comes from secondary memory]
  • Ferro: Each move is listen, dream, intervene, then read the patient's response as a signal from the field, and adjust. He calls this micro-après-coup. [source: Ferro 2009]

Working arc, derived [synthesis]. This arc is for orienting a practitioner. It is not a protocol from the authors.

  1. Opening. Set up and keep the setting. Let the field form. Note the first characters and the patient's early reactions to how you speak. Move on when a recognisable shared emotional climate and a recurring cast of characters appear.
  2. Working through. Repeated cycles of receiving, containing, transforming and interpreting, with dosing guided by the patient's responses. Progress shows as more characters, more narrative genres, dreams and play, less concrete or evacuative talk, and some tolerance of turbulence.
  3. Non-process. The field stagnates: sessions are repetitive, the analyst is bored or complacent, and the same stories go round. Switch to the second look (section 4.13). Return to working through when the field moves again.
  4. Ending. Neither Bion nor the Barangers give termination criteria in the texts consulted. [uncertain] A defensible Ferro-consistent marker [synthesis] is that the patient can do the dreaming themselves. They bring and transform their own characters, can tolerate not knowing, and can stand moments of emotional turbulence without acting out or collapsing into concreteness.

3. Guiding principles

Bion

  1. No memory. Do not actively recall previous sessions or the history. What is needed will arrive on its own. [source: Bion 1967; Bion 1970 p.41 via Giampà]
  2. No desire. Hold no wish for results, for the session to end, or even for cure. Desire distorts perception toward what you hope to see. [source: Bion 1967; Giampà]
  3. No understanding. Hold back the urge to understand too quickly. Premature understanding closes off the unknown. [source: Bion 1970 p.46 via Giampà]
  4. Each session is new. Treat the patient as unknown today. Bion's phrase is "no past and no future". [source: Bion, Cogitations p.288 via Giampà]
  5. Negative capability, then patience, then security. Tolerate fragmentation and doubt (PS) until a pattern coheres (D). Do not interpret out of the discomfort of not knowing. [source: Bion 1970, ch. on "Prelude to or substitute for achievement" — from the book]
  6. Containment. Treat the patient's projections as communications to be received and transformed, not as attacks to repel. Notice what you are being made to feel. [source: Bion 1962; Ferro via SPI]
  7. Act of faith. Trust that an unknown emotional truth (O) is present and will evolve. Speak only once it has. [source: Bion 1970]
  8. The patient as best colleague. The patient's responses tell you whether your mind is available to them. [source: Bion as cited by Ferro 2009 and SPI]

Barangers

  1. The field is bipersonal. Analyst and patient are both inside it. Your countertransference is data about the field, not noise. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964; IPA Dictionary p.490]
  2. Interpret the point of urgency. At each moment, speak to where the contract, the manifest material and the shared unconscious fantasy cross. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  3. Insight is joint. In their words, "El insight analítico es obra de dos personas" (analytic insight is the work of two people). An interpretation that does not reach the patient is inoperative and dispensable. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  4. Partial involvement, double rescue. Let yourself be drawn into the pathological process in part, so you can know it from inside. Then use interpretation to rescue both yourself and the patient. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  5. Stagnation implicates both. A bastion forms with the analyst's countertransference difficulty or complicity. Look at your own part before attributing resistance. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964; Baranger, Baranger & Mom 1983 via IPA Dictionary]

Ferro and Civitarese

  1. Everything belongs to the field. Every communication, character, story or turbulence in the session is a field phenomenon. Ferro: no communication "que no pertenezca al campo" (that does not belong to the field). [source: Ferro 2009]
  2. Listen as if to a dream. Silently put "I had a dream in which…" in front of each communication. [source: Ferro 2009]
  3. Prefer unsaturated interpretation. Leave meanings open and co-constructed, not decoded. [source: Ferro 2009; WBCPS course]
  4. Develop the container before the contents. History matters mainly as a vehicle for growing alpha function and the capacity to dream. [source: Ferro 2009]
  5. Oscillate between too much and too little. Ferro calls this "a continuous oscillating between too much and too little". Dose your interventions by the patient's responses. [source: Ferro, SPI report]
  6. Do not decode early. Avoid decoding "a meaning which has not yet formed". [source: Ferro, SPI report]
  7. A few genuine fruits rather than a large false harvest. Avoid an analysis built on the patient's submission to your theory. [source: Ferro 2009, paraphrased]
  8. Hold theory loosely. Clinging to known theory is a defence against knowing. [source: Ferro 2009]
  9. Use reverie and hallucinosis. Take your own images, sensations and bodily states as possible data about the field. Civitarese invites a deliberate state of "hallucinosis" in order to see what the patient sees. [source: IPA Dictionary pp.1204–5; Civitarese 2014–15]
  10. The setting is an internal dream space. Actions that intrude on the setting may be attempts to repair it. Read them before you enforce the frame. [source: WBCPS Civitarese course]
  11. Reality limits the dream frame. A medical emergency or real danger ends the "as if dream" listening. A dream of violence toward the analyst does not. [source: Ferro, SPI report]

4. Intervention inventory

There are 22 interventions, grouped by strand. Most are disciplines of the analyst's mind, not exercises given to the patient. All step sequences are operationalisations [synthesis] of what the cited authors describe. All example language is illustrative and written for this guide. None of it is the founders' wording.

4.1 Containment (container–contained) — Bion

  • Purpose and when: Use whenever the patient evacuates unbearable emotion through projective identification. Signs are that you feel flooded, numb, guilty, attacked or confused in a way that seems to come from outside you. The aim is to receive the emotion and return it in a bearable, thinkable form. [source: Bion 1962; Ferro via SPI]
  • Steps:
    1. Register the state induced in you before you act on it.
    2. Do not discharge it. Avoid retaliating, reassuring or rushing to interpret.
    3. Let it link with images or words in your own mind (see 4.2).
    4. Put into words a small, tolerable part of it, at the patient's level.
    5. Notice whether the patient's tone settles or escalates.
  • Example language (illustrative): "Something today feels too heavy to hold alone." Or, staying in the patient's story: "That sounds like a load nobody helped you carry."
  • Watch for: Failing to contain shows up as the analyst becoming another emitter of beta elements: lecturing, defending, rushing to explain. It is working when the patient's speech becomes more narrative and less concrete or evacuative, and when the same affect returns in more bearable forms. [synthesis]

4.2 Reverie — Bion; extended by Ferro and Civitarese

  • Purpose and when: Reverie is the analyst's receptive, dreamlike state, in which the patient's emotions become images in the analyst's mind. Use it throughout the session. It is the instrument of the analyst's alpha function. [source: Bion 1962; Ferro, SPI report; IPA Dictionary p.1204]
  • Steps:
    1. Let your attention float.
    2. Allow spontaneous images, memories, tunes, bodily sensations or film scenes to come.
    3. Do not dismiss them as private distraction. Treat them as possible pictograms of the field.
    4. Ask yourself what emotion the image carries, not what it means about you biographically.
    5. Use the image to shape your next intervention, usually without disclosing it.
    6. Disclose it only selectively (see 4.19).
  • Example language (illustrative): Mostly silent. If used: "As you were talking I had an image of a house with every window shut."
  • Watch for: Reveries can be your own noise. Check them against the patient's subsequent material. Ferro reports one session where he "leaned too far" into illustrative reverie. [source: Ferro, SPI report] It is working when your images and the patient's later narratives converge.

4.3 Suspending memory, desire and understanding — Bion

  • Purpose and when: A discipline before and during every session. It keeps you open to what is unknown and evolving. [source: Bion 1967; Bion 1970 pp.41, 46 via Giampà]
  • Steps:
    1. Before the session, do not review notes or rehearse the history. [uncertain: whether Bion explicitly advised against note-taking is not verified]
    2. Notice any wish: for the patient to improve, to have a good session, to end, to be liked. Let it go.
    3. When remembering intrudes ("last week she said…"), set it aside. Wait for what is present now.
    4. When an understanding forms quickly, hold it as provisional.
    5. After the session, notice which memories or desires kept returning. They are data.
  • Example language: None. This is an internal discipline.
  • Watch for: Bion meant this as a discipline of mind, not forgetting or negligence. Safety-relevant facts still have to be known; see section 5. [synthesis] It is working when you feel more uncertain but more alert, and the material surprises you.

4.4 Waiting for the selected fact (patience to security) — Bion

  • Purpose and when: Use it to time and organise interpretation. The selected fact (from Poincaré) is an emotional experience that suddenly gives coherence to scattered elements. [source: Bion 1962, 1963, 1970; Ferro, SPI report]
  • Steps:
    1. Tolerate incoherent, fragmentary material. Bion calls this "patience".
    2. Resist imposing a pattern to relieve your own discomfort.
    3. Notice the moment when one element makes the others cohere. Bion calls this "security".
    4. Check that this is an emotional realisation and not an intellectual one.
    5. Only then formulate the interpretation.
  • Example language (illustrative): "The late train, the cold coffee and your sister's call all seem to share something: being left waiting."
  • Watch for: Ferro notes that every analyst inevitably chooses their own selected fact. Hold it as one possible organisation, not the truth. [source: Ferro, SPI report] An overvalued idea feels certain, and it keeps recurring regardless of the material. That distinguishes it from a selected fact. [synthesis]

4.5 Formulating and timing the interpretation — Bion

  • Purpose and when: Interpretation turns emotional experience (O) into knowledge the patient can use. Bion holds that the analyst should speak once an evolution of O has become perceptible. [source: Bion 1965, 1970]
  • Steps:
    1. Wait for the evolution (4.4).
    2. Base the interpretation on what is observable in this session.
    3. Phrase it simply, close to the emotional experience, with minimal theory.
    4. Make one point.
    5. Observe its reception (see 4.17).
  • Example language (illustrative): "I think you are telling me you need me to feel how hopeless this is, not to fix it."
  • Watch for: Interpretations that serve as defences against not knowing (−K). It is working when the patient elaborates, brings new material, or a new emotion becomes speakable.

4.6 Observing attacks on linking and −K — Bion

  • Purpose and when: Use with psychotic or borderline functioning, or whenever meaning keeps being destroyed. Attacks on linking hit links between thoughts, between patient and analyst, and within the patient's own perception. −K is an active stripping of meaning. [source: Bion 1959 "Attacks on linking"; Bion 1962]
  • Steps:
    1. Note where meaning breaks down: a sentence trails off, your interpretation is fragmented, the link with you is mocked or ignored.
    2. Do not escalate interpretation.
    3. Contain the fragmentation (4.1).
    4. Describe the breakdown simply when it can be received.
  • Example language (illustrative): "Each time we nearly get hold of something it seems to fall to pieces."
  • Watch for: Your own attacks on linking: forgetting, sleepiness, irritation. [synthesis] It is working when links persist across the session.

4.7 Binocular vision and vertices — Bion

  • Purpose and when: Use when you are stuck in one way of seeing. Bion recommends viewing the material from more than one vertex: conscious and unconscious, PS and D, different theoretical positions. [source: Bion 1962, 1965, 1970]
  • Steps:
    1. State, silently, your current reading.
    2. Deliberately take another vertex. Ask what this would look like as the patient's experience of you, as a dream, or as an evacuation.
    3. Hold both until one gains evidence.
  • Example language: Mostly internal.
  • Watch for: Using vertices as intellectual juggling rather than observation. [synthesis]

4.8 The Grid as a post-session exercise — Bion

  • Purpose and when: The Grid is a table for classifying statements, not for use during the session. It has rows for the genetic level, running from beta elements, alpha elements and dream thoughts up to concepts and scientific systems. Its columns are the uses a statement is put to: definitory, ψ (resisting the unknown), notation, attention, inquiry and action. Bion offered it as an exercise for the analyst outside the session, a "psycho-analytic game", to sharpen observation. [source: Bion 1963, The Grid 1971/1977 — books; uncertain on the exact phrase]
  • Steps:
    1. After the session, choose a few patient statements and a few of your own interventions.
    2. Place each on the Grid.
    3. Ask: was my interpretation a hypothesis, a column-2 defence against not knowing, or an action?
    4. Imagine alternative interventions for other Grid cells.
  • Example language: None. This is a private review.
  • Watch for: Over-intellectualising. Bion warned against using the Grid in session. It is working when your in-session attention becomes finer without deliberate effort.

4.9 Using the patient as "best colleague" — Bion via Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Ongoing. Treat the patient's associations after your intervention as their unconscious commentary on it. [source: Ferro 2009; SPI report]
  • Steps: See 4.17, which operationalises this for Ferro.

4.10 Locating the point of urgency — Barangers

  • Purpose and when: Use it to choose what to interpret. The point of urgency is where three configurations cross: the analytic contract, the manifest material, and the couple's unconscious fantasy. It is also the point where they converge. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  • Steps:
    1. Track the contract and setting events (fees, lateness, breaks, the couch).
    2. Track the manifest story.
    3. Track the fantasy the two of you seem to be living out.
    4. Find the element where all three meet.
    5. Interpret there.
  • Example language (illustrative): "Today you've paid late, you've told me about a landlord who overcharges, and I notice I've been careful about money with you. Maybe we're both caught in a question about who is exploiting whom."
  • Watch for: Choosing what interests you rather than what is most affectively alive. It is working when the interpretation is followed by insight and the field becomes mobile again.

4.11 Interpreting the couple's unconscious fantasy and working toward shared insight — Barangers

  • Purpose and when: This is the Barangers' main instrument. At each moment the field takes its meaning from an unconscious fantasy of the couple, built through reciprocal projective identification. Interpretation aims at joint insight, which they define as joint understanding by analyst and patient of an unconscious aspect of the field. Insight de-symbiotises the field and redistributes the parts each person holds. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  • Steps:
    1. Name, to yourself, the role you are being given and the role the patient is taking.
    2. Formulate the fantasy as a two-person scene.
    3. Interpret it at the point of urgency (4.10), including your own role where useful.
    4. Check whether the patient takes it up. An interpretation that does not reach the patient counts for nothing in their view.
    5. Look for the "double vision" of insight, where the patient's observing ego and yours coincide.
  • Example language (illustrative): "It's as if one of us has to be the doctor who knows and the other the child who is being examined, and neither of us can step out of it."
  • Watch for: Interpreting only the patient's side of the fantasy, which repeats the split. It is working when the patient discovers the fantasy with you, rather than agreeing with you, and the session's mood shifts.

4.12 Detecting bastions — Barangers

  • Purpose and when: Use when the analysis "doesn't move". A bastion is a split-off sector of the field, crystallised and kept out of the general dynamic. Patient and analyst build it jointly, with the analyst's countertransference difficulty or complicity. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964; Baranger, Baranger & Mom 1983 via IPA Dictionary p.490]
  • Signs from the sources: The field is paralysed and communication stereotyped. The Barangers' image is that analyst and patient "siguen dando vuelta alrededor de la noria": they keep going round the water-wheel. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
  • Extra signs [synthesis]:
    • a topic both of you silently avoid
    • a comfortable, pleasant routine with no affect
    • a recurrent story that you no longer listen to
    • a part of the patient's life, such as money, a lover, or a symptom, that is never brought into the analytic relationship
    • boredom or self-satisfaction in you
  • Steps:
    1. Notice repetition across sessions.
    2. List what is never discussed.
    3. Check your own investment in keeping it that way.
    4. Then do the second look (4.13).
  • Example language: Internal at first.
  • Watch for: Calling it the patient's "resistance" alone. The Barangers place it in the field.

4.13 The second look — Barangers

  • Purpose and when: Use when a bastion or non-process is suspected. The analyst steps back and looks over the whole field, including themselves and the analysand, to see the obstacle. [source: Baranger, Baranger & Mom 1983 via IPA Dictionary p.490; Ferro 2009 calls it the "segunda mirada"]
  • Steps:
    1. Step back after a session, or during it.
    2. Review the field as a whole: the shared fantasy, your countertransference, the setting, and what both of you protect.
    3. Identify your part in the bastion.
    4. Free yourself internally from that part, for example through self-analysis, supervision or consultation.
    5. Interpret the bastion as a field formation, once you can do so without blame.
  • Example language (illustrative): "I've noticed we've been talking about your job in the same way for weeks, and I've gone along with it. Perhaps it's been a safe place for both of us, away from something harder."
  • Watch for: Self-accusing confession that burdens the patient. Keep disclosure minimal and in service of the field. [synthesis] It is working when the material moves, new characters appear, and affect returns.

4.14 Transformations in dreaming: the "I had a dream in which…" filter — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Ferro's basic listening operation, used throughout. It de-concretises communications so new meanings open. Civitarese extends it as "hallucinosis": deliberately seeing what the patient sees, suspending rational contradiction. [source: Ferro 2009; IPA Dictionary pp.1204–5]
  • Steps:
    1. Silently prefix each communication with "I had a dream in which…".
    2. Ask: what is this element in the field? For example, what is "the operation", what are "the breasts", what is the dissatisfaction? This follows Ferro's own example of a patient planning breast surgery.
    3. Generate several possible readings, including ones about the session and you.
    4. Do not voice the decoding. Let it inform how you stay in the narrative.
  • Example language:
    • Usually none, because the filter is internal.
    • If the patient says "I'm going to have surgery because I'm not happy with my breasts", one internal possibility is "dissatisfaction with what is being given here" (Ferro's reading, paraphrased).
    • Any spoken response stays in the patient's story (illustrative): "Something isn't nourishing enough and needs changing."
  • Watch for: Pressing a dream reading onto real-world emergencies (see principle 24). The filter is for listening. It is not a licence to deny reality to the patient.

4.15 Listening for narrative derivatives — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Throughout. Following Bion's waking dream thought, the alpha function turns protoemotions into pictograms (alpha elements). The patient's narrations are "derivatives" of that sequence: stories, memories, films and family scenes carrying the same emotion in different genres. [source: Ferro 2009]
  • Steps:
    1. Track the emotional sequence beneath the shifting genres.
    2. Ask: what emotion is being pictured? Note the genre (thriller, comedy, documentary).
    3. Note shifts in genre after your interventions.
    4. Where the patient's alpha function is weak, help co-construct the sequence, using your reveries.
  • Example language (illustrative): "So first the volcano on TV, then the man in the mask in your street… a lot of things today that might explode or hide."
  • Watch for: Literalism on your part. It is working when the patient's narrations become richer and more varied.

4.16 Treating characters as characters of the field — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Throughout. People, animals, objects and symptoms in the patient's story are read as holograms of the current emotional state of the field. They are co-created by both of you. They are not only historical persons (the classical reading) or internal objects (the Kleinian reading). [source: Ferro 2009; Ferro & Basile via IPA Dictionary p.697]
  • Steps:
    1. When a character enters, ask what they bring into the room now.
    2. Note how characters transform across the session as signs of field transformation. Examples: herbivores multiplying, then a fox appearing, in Ferro's case Filippo.
    3. Respect the character. Do not collapse it into "you mean me". Ferro's image is that characters act like oven gloves for handling what is too hot to touch.
  • Example language (illustrative):
    • Patient: "My grandfather was incontinent, you couldn't stop him."
    • Analyst, staying with the character: "Hard to be close to someone who can't hold things in."
    • The analyst silently registers that the closeness and intensity of the analysis may feel incontinent too. Following Ferro's preference, this is not interpreted immediately.
  • Watch for: Ignoring real external facts the patient needs addressed. It is working when the cast diversifies and previously mute affects appear embodied in new characters.

4.17 Reading the patient's response as a signal from the field — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: After every intervention. The patient is like a satellite navigation unit continuously signalling the state of the field. Ferro, following Guignard, calls the continuous adjustment "micro-posterioridad" (micro-après-coup). [source: Ferro 2009; Ferro, SPI report]
  • Steps:
    1. Intervene.
    2. Hear the very next associations as a dream about your intervention.
    3. Classify, provisionally:
      • Persecution: for example, a dog chasing the patient.
      • Agreement: a cousin who "hit the nail on the head".
      • Frustration: a grandmother's meagre soup.
      • Violence: a bombing dream.
    4. Adjust your next intervention in dose, tone and saturation.
  • Example language (illustrative): After a persecutory response: soften and return to the narrative. "That dog really wouldn't let you be."
  • Watch for: Explaining the signal back to the patient as proof. Ferro's own attempt, "Perhaps yesterday I was like a bomber…", was rejected by the patient. [source: Ferro 2009] It is working when you feel guided by the material rather than by theory.

4.18 Unsaturated interpretation and the interpretive spectrum — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: This is the default form of intervention. An unsaturated interpretation leaves room for meaning to be co-constructed. A saturated one, such as a firm transference decoding, closes meaning down. Ferro describes regulating "the play between interpretations and transformations", moving among narrative, enzymatic and allusive interventions. Explicit transference interpretation is kept for when the field can bear it. [source: Ferro 2009; Ferro, SPI report; Wikipedia summary] [uncertain: the precise taxonomy (e.g. "interpretation in the field" vs "of the field") varies across Ferro's books; not verified in texts opened]
  • Steps:
    1. Start inside the patient's text. Speak about the character, scene or mood.
    2. Add an open, allusive element that could also apply to the here and now, without naming it.
    3. Move to explicit interpretation of the relationship only when the patient's responses show capacity for it (4.17).
  • Example language (illustrative), by degree:
    • Narrative: "Your colleague sounds cornered."
    • Allusive: "Being cornered by someone who keeps asking questions can be exhausting."
    • Explicit: "Perhaps my questions today have felt like that."
  • Watch for: Remaining endlessly in narrative to avoid the relationship. Ferro's "too little" is a failure as well. It is working when the patient picks up and develops the open meaning.

4.19 Sharing reverie selectively — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: When an image that came to you might open a stuck theme, and the patient's alpha function needs lending. Ferro describes a range running from one image to more explicit self-disclosure. [source: Ferro, SPI report, belfry vignette]
  • Steps:
    1. Check that the image belongs to the field, not to a private preoccupation.
    2. Offer it briefly, tentatively and without explanation.
    3. Watch the response (4.17).
    4. Drop it if it is not taken up.
  • Example language (illustrative): "While you spoke, a ruined bell tower came to mind, as if time had stopped."
  • Watch for: Over-use that puts your mind at the centre. Ferro judged one such use as too much. [source: Ferro, SPI report]

4.20 Dosing and modulating interpretive activity — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Use when the patient shows humiliation, submission, persecution or withdrawal. Ferro reduced his interpretive rhythm with Filippo so that the patient would not have to humble himself. [source: Ferro 2009; Ferro, SPI report]
  • Steps:
    1. Count your interventions mentally. Notice whether you are "bombarding".
    2. If the signals are persecutory, reduce frequency and saturation.
    3. If they show abandonment, such as the lifeguard waiting too long, step in sooner. Ferro also warns against waiting until a patient verbally asks for help.
  • Example language (illustrative): Fewer words. Shorter sentences. Stay with the story.
  • Watch for: Analyst passivity disguised as respect. It is working when the patient brings unforced material and their own discoveries. In Filippo's case this was "I must have been boiling with rage all my life" (Ferro 2009, paraphrased translation).

4.21 Casting and co-narration — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: This is the main aim of the analysis: developing the patient's casting capacity, so that mute zones can produce characters, stories and scripts. Casting means finding characters and situations that embody emotional states, alongside ordinary reality. [source: Ferro 2009; Civitarese & Ferro 2013 via IPA Dictionary]
  • Steps:
    1. Welcome new characters, including non-human ones.
    2. Help them grow by asking about them, elaborating them, and playing with the story.
    3. Let the field generate characters spontaneously rather than assigning them.
    4. Notice when an affect has no character yet. Offer a narrative or reverie that could host it.
  • Example language (illustrative): "And this fox at the farm — what is he after?"
  • Watch for: Turning casting into a guided imagery exercise. It must stay spontaneous and co-created. [synthesis] It is working when the patient increasingly brings dreams, stories and play that hold emotion.

4.22 Self-correction after the analyst's errors — Ferro

  • Purpose and when: Use after an intervention that was premature, critical or mistimed. Ferro documents his own: interpretations felt "like sinking my teeth" into the patient, and a decoding that was "not the result of reverie". [source: Ferro 2009, paraphrased translation]
  • Steps:
    1. Recognise the error from the patient's signals.
    2. Silently own it.
    3. Change your next interventions, for example becoming more receptive or attending to "the flower" and not only the thorns.
    4. Name your contribution only if the field can use it. Do not force it.
  • Example language (illustrative): "I may have come at you too quickly yesterday."
  • Watch for: Over-apology. It is working when the persecutory characters recede.

5. Handling problems

The sources treat difficulty as a field phenomenon. Each entry starts by asking what the field is doing and what your part in it is.

Stuck analysis / non-process

  • What the sources say: Repetitive, stereotyped sessions in which both parties go round the same circuit. Treat this as a bastion. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964; Baranger, Baranger & Mom 1983 via IPA Dictionary]
  • Response:
    1. Do the second look (4.13).
    2. List what is never spoken about.
    3. Examine your comfort, boredom or collusion.
    4. Take it to supervision.
    5. Then interpret the bastion as shared.
  • Ferro's addition: Check whether you have become saturated, holding one theory or one selected fact too tightly. [source: Ferro 2009]
  • [synthesis]: Re-read the last few sessions through the dream filter, looking for characters who have disappeared. A vanished character often marks where the field closed.

Resistance

  • What the sources say: No source treats resistance as the patient's alone. The Barangers place obstacles in the field, often maintained by the analyst's complicity. Ferro reads persecutory responses as signals that the analyst's dose or saturation is too high. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964; Ferro 2009]
  • Response:
    1. Reduce interpretive pressure (4.20).
    2. Return to the narrative (4.18).
    3. Read the next associations for what your interventions feel like to the patient (4.17).

Overwhelm / emotional flooding / psychotic functioning

  • What the sources say:
    • Bion: excess beta elements, attacks on linking, −K. [source: Bion 1959, 1962]
    • Ferro: "whirlwinds" of beta elements that the field has to metabolise. [source: Ferro 2009]
  • Response:
    1. Contain (4.1) before interpreting.
    2. Use low-saturation, concrete, narrative-level speech.
    3. Lend alpha function through reverie (4.2, 4.19).
    4. Reduce the number of interventions.
  • [synthesis]: Slow your speech. Name one feeling at a time. Keep the setting predictable.
  • Risk: If there is risk to self or others, the dream frame is suspended. Ferro explicitly separates a real emergency from dream material. [source: Ferro, SPI report] Conduct a standard suicide and violence risk assessment per your jurisdiction's protocol, and coordinate psychiatric or emergency care. Return to field listening once safety is addressed. [synthesis]

Non-adherence to the setting (lateness, missed sessions, unpaid fees, acting out)

  • What the sources say:
    • The Barangers count the contract as one of the three configurations of the point of urgency. [source: Baranger & Baranger 1964]
    • Civitarese reads actions that unconsciously enter the session as possible attempts to restore or heal the setting. [source: WBCPS Civitarese course]
  • Response:
    1. Hold the frame and make the practical arrangements calmly.
    2. Treat the breach as a character or event of the field.
    3. Ask what it says about the current climate, for example a session that felt too intense yesterday.
    4. Interpret at the point of urgency where useful.
  • [synthesis]: Keep the practical arrangement (the fee, the time) separate from the interpretation. Address both, so that interpretation never becomes a way of avoiding the boundary.

Ruptures

  • What the sources say: Ferro documents ruptures caused by his own premature or critical interpretations. Signs include bombing dreams, a computer destroyed by lightning after a too-sharp link, and the patient rejecting his attempt to name his "bomber" role. [source: Ferro 2009]
  • Response:
    1. Self-correct silently first (4.22).
    2. Become more receptive.
    3. Lower saturation.
    4. Acknowledge your contribution briefly only if the field can use it.
  • [synthesis]: Do not insist that the patient accept your transference reading of the rupture. Insisting repeats it.

Modality-specific difficulties

  • Theory used as a defence. Clinging to Bion's or Ferro's vocabulary to avoid not knowing. [source: Ferro 2009] Response: drop jargon in your own mind. Use 4.3. Use the Grid afterwards (4.8) to catch column-2 interventions.
  • Endless narrative, no contact. Staying in the characters forever to avoid the relationship. This is Ferro's "too little". [source: Ferro, SPI report] Response: step up gradually on the interpretive spectrum (4.18) when the signals allow.
  • Decoding instead of dreaming. Using the dream filter as a translation code ("the dog = me") and saying so. Ferro calls this decoding, not reverie. [source: Ferro 2009] Response: keep the decoding silent and let it shape your tone.
  • External reality neglected. [synthesis] Field listening can sideline real events: abuse, illness, legal or financial crises. Response: acknowledge real events in their own right first. Then also listen to them as field events. Ferro's own limit is real medical emergency. Safeguarding duties always apply.
  • Misusing "no memory, no desire". [synthesis] Do not use it to justify ignoring the history, risk factors, medication or a treatment plan. Know them, then do not cling to them in the session.
  • Self-disclosure creep. Reveries and second-look admissions can become analyst-centred. [source: Ferro, SPI report on over-use of reverie] Response: disclose briefly, rarely, and only for the field.
  • Lower-frequency or time-limited settings. [uncertain: the sources consulted are mostly about high-frequency analysis] [synthesis] At once or twice a week, rely more on narrative and unsaturated interventions. Make more use of the session-by-session response reading (4.17). Expect slower casting development.
  • Countertransference sleepiness, boredom or erotic pull. [synthesis, drawing on Barangers' field view] Treat these first as field data (4.1, 4.12). If they persist across patients, take them to personal analysis or supervision.
  • No safety concerns documented. The sources consulted record no documented serious harm specific to this approach. Standard ethical limits apply: no boundary violations, and "reverie" is never a pretext for action.

Sources

Sources

Further reading (not drawn on unless listed above)

Bion

  • Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. IJP 40.
  • Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.
  • Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psycho-Analysis. Heinemann.
  • Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. Heinemann.
  • Bion, W. R. (1967). Notes on memory and desire. Psychoanalytic Forum 2(3).
  • Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. Tavistock.
  • Bion, W. R. (1977). Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. Imago.
  • Bion, W. R. (1992). Cogitations. Karnac.

Barangers

  • Baranger, M. & Baranger, W. (1961–62/2008). The analytic situation as a dynamic field. IJP 89: 795–826.
  • Baranger, M., Baranger, W. & Mom, J. (1983). Process and non-process in analytic work. IJP 64: 1–15.

Ferro

  • Ferro, A. (1999). The Bi-Personal Field: Experiences in Child Analysis. Routledge.
  • Ferro, A. (2002). In the Analyst's Consulting Room. Brunner-Routledge.
  • Ferro, A. (2009). Mind Works: Technique and Creativity in Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
  • Ferro, A. (2009). Transformations in dreaming and characters in the psychoanalytic field. IJP 90: 209–230.
  • Ferro, A. & Basile, R. (eds.) (2009). The Analytic Field: A Clinical Concept. Karnac.

Civitarese and joint works

  • Ferro, A. & Civitarese, G. (2015). The Analytic Field and its Transformations. Karnac.
  • Civitarese, G. (2014). Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
← Previous · I-021British Independent traditionNext · I-023 →Separation-individuation approaches