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Building on their long-lasting scientific partnership, Civitarese and Ferro offer an array of thought-provoking writings bolstered by extensive clinical material, attesting to their shared interpretation of psychoanalysis not only as a treatment for psychic suffering but also as inherently pleasurable and vitalizing. In chapters that reflect inclinations, fantasies and obsessions that are both shared and personal, and by engaging with topics various enough to include dreams, ethics, emotions and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate how the practice of psychoanalysis might no longer be an insidiously moralistic or ideological exercise but rather a practice aimed at opening up and liberating th...
The Intimate Room provides an original exploration of psychoanalytic thought, showing how contemporary psychoanalysis seeks to answer the challenges raised by today’s post-modern culture. Offering a deeply personal and insightful reading of Bion, this book acts as a stimulating guide to the development of the theory of the analytic field and both its technical and clinical implications. As such topics of discussion include: the concept of the internal setting the rhetoric of interpretation the 'subversive' notion of Nachträglichkeit the role played by characters in analytic discourse the bi-personal field as virtual reality new concepts of transference. Allowing the reader to engage with the inner space of analysis, The Intimate Room will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all those with an interest in the field of psychoanalysis. It will also be a useful tool in psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work on a day-to-day basis.
In The Violence of Emotions the author marries an ability to introduce the reader to the intimate climate of an analytic session with a passionate rereading of Bion. To emphasize both the empirical nature of psychoanalysis and its extraordinary capacity to engender illuminating hypotheses concerning the functioning of the mind, clinical examples alternate with theoretical argument. The psychoanalytic model espoused by Giuseppe Civitarese in his approach to both is analytic field theory. Developed by various authors, including Ferro, commencing with Bion and continued with contributions from the Barangers, Grotstein and Ogden, the theory of the analytic field reveals the social nature of subj...
Sublime Subjects explores two fundamental questions: what is the start of humanity? When and how does a newborn child become a subject? These are relevant to psychoanalysis not only theoretically, but also in clinical practice, where the issue at stake is how to help the analysand’s mind to grow or, better, to increase the ability to give a meaning to experience. Giuseppe Civitarese here argues that the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and the aesthetic theory of the sublime are theories of subjectivation that can illuminate each other and give us a better understanding of the birth of the psyche. The aesthetic experience in art and in psychoanalytic practice are concerned with the soc...
The science of psychoanalysis is now more than a century old. During this period, it has been established as the instrument offering the most profound understanding of the human mind, and as the most effective tool for treating psychic suffering we have at our disposal. A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis offers readers an introduction to this extraordinarily interesting discipline. In this short volume, Giuseppe Civitarese and Antonino Ferro explore psychoanalysis, which is at the same time a theory of unconscious psychic processes, a technique for investigating these, and a method for curing various forms of psychic suffering, by explaining some of its main themes and ideas. As the only...
What is the truth of the unconscious? Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis explores the intersection of these two concepts within a Bionian framework. Giuseppe Civitarese maps out the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and focuses on the differences between the Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian and Lacanian schools of thought on this topic, as well as drawing on findings from neuroscience. The book explores topics including the inaccessibility of the unconscious, dreams, body issues, issues of personality, the influence of field theory and the clinical implications of this theorising. It contains innovative comparison between Freudian metapsychology and the Bionian theory on thinking, and novel...
An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis is a book of transpositions, collecting together the author’s clinical vignettes, enigmatic objects, stray thoughts, projects, images, notes from readings, and musings; but also remarks on films and exhibitions, memories, episodes from daily life, summaries of papers to write, questions, doubts and obsessions - all of which have shaped the author’s understanding of psychoanalysis. Born from moments in which the author has sensed a solution for problems encountered in daily work or for obscure but exciting points of the theory, the entries are ordered in an apocryphal manner, offering a personal and challenging view of psychoanalysis. Like small ...
Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict, and Psychoanalytic Criticism looks at the subject of beheading in art as a trope of the destruction of the mind. This book discusses both psychoanalytic theory and art criticism. It addresses critics, readers, and spectators interested in the keys of interpretation that psychoanalysis can offer, and analysts who are curious to know if artists can help them refine the tools they use every day. It asks whether artists have something to say about the concepts of reverie and negative reverie or about change as aesthetic transformation, and about aesthetic experience as a paradigm of what is most true and most profound in analysis. Why write about ...
In The Violence of Emotions the author marries an ability to introduce the reader to the intimate climate of an analytic session with a passionate rereading of Bion. To emphasize both the empirical nature of psychoanalysis and its extraordinary capacity to engender illuminating hypotheses concerning the functioning of the mind, clinical examples alternate with theoretical argument. The psychoanalytic model espoused by Giuseppe Civitarese in his approach to both is analytic field theory. Developed by various authors, including Ferro, commencing with Bion and continued with contributions from the Barangers, Grotstein and Ogden, the theory of the analytic field reveals the social nature of subj...
After a hundred years of psychoanalysis, what has the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams now become? Are what Simic calls "the films of our lives" still the royal road to the unconscious or do we now have a different concept both of dreams and of the unconscious? What is the meaning of dreams in the analytic dialogue? Do they still have a key role to play in clinical practice or not? These are just some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Nowadays psychoanalysts and psychotherapists do not work so much on dreams as with dreams, preferring to emphasise their function of transformation and symbolic creation, rather than decipher their obscure messages. Dreaming is the way in which we give personal meaning to experience and expand our unconscious. As such, it is a necessary activity which, as Bion says, takes place both in sleep and in waking.