The Analytic Field and its Transformations

The Analytic Field and its Transformations presents a collection of articles written jointly by Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese over the last few years. All revolve around the post-Bionian model of the analytic field (BFT). Indeed, analytic field theory is emerging as a new paradigm in psychoanalysis. Going hand-in-hand with this is an ever-growing interest in Bion in general. Bion mounts a systematic deconstruction of the principles of classical psychoanalysis. His aim, however, is not to destroy it, but rather to bring out its untapped potential and to develop ideas that have remained on its margins.

In its Italian version, the analytic field theory embraces Bion’s both rigorous and radical spirit. BFT is a field of inquiry that refuses a priori, at least from its own specific perspective, to immobilize the facts of the analysis within a rigid historical or intrapsychic framework. Its intention is rather to bring out the historicity of the present, the way in which the relationship is formed instant-by-instant from a subtle interplay of identity and differentiation, proximity and distance.

The truth of the analysis is no longer something one arrives at, it cannot be fixed or possessed; it lies rather in the experience, it is the experience. The answer lies in the question – or, rather, asking the question is the feature of this model that most closely corresponds to the idea that what feeds and grows the mind is the weaving of a sustainable meaning, or dreaming reality, just as in the nurturing relationship between mother and child.