Torments of the Soul

Psychoanalytic transformations in dreaming and narration

Antonino Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317539575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Torments of the Soul, Antonino Ferro revisits and expands on a theme that has long been at the heart of his work: the study of dreams during sleep and in the waking state, and the psychoanalytic narrative. Following Bion, he focuses on the importance of what he sees as the task of contemporary psychoanalysis for generating, containing and transforming previously unmanageable emotions with a clinical psychoanalytic context.

Antonino Ferro explores the concepts of 'transformations in dreaming', the session as a dream, individuals transformed into characters, the interpretation of these characters, and readings of them as the functioning of a single mind or as an analytic field created by the meeting of two minds: the client's and the analyst's. Here, a new identity, the analytic field, is formed from the reverie of both participants, which makes it possible to work on complex, nonlinear phenomena in a radical way, creating a 'royal road' to the unconscious communication of the patient.

Torments of the Soul contains a plethora of clinical vignettes from the author's extensive psychoanalytic work with adults and children to illustrate the substantial theoretical progression he advocates here. Offering significant and important new interpretations of theories and ways of working with patients, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, students of these fields and those interested in the human sciences.

Chapter 1
Torments of the soul

As is easy to imagine, the title of this book is a deliberate allusion to Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1926 film Secrets of a Soul, which was made with the specific aim of giving spectators a correct understanding of psychoanalysis. Working as consultants on the film were Karl Abraham, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), and Hans Sachs, his colleague at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

As Sabbadini (1994–1999) has pointed out (quoting Ries), one of the paradoxes of the film is that it is ‘a silent film about the talking cure’. As a silent film, it has only a few captions inserted at certain key moments.

The story (Musatti 1980) concerns a chemist, a tender and affectionate husband who develops a phobia of knives at the moment when his wife’s attractive young male cousin comes to visit. The man is terribly troubled by the cousin’s presence because he is afraid that his beautiful young wife might be attracted to this adventurous relative. The ‘crisis’ comes out in a series of dreams that reveal the persecution besetting his tranquil family routine. However, a happy ending is reached after a short but intense period of psychoanalytic therapy that reveals the causes and roots of the protagonist’s suffering as lying in his childhood. I shall avoid going into any more detail so as not to spoil the reader’s pleasure at discovering how the plot develops and what happens during the treatment and the film, which is constructed like a detective story.

The film is, of course, open to any number of interpretations, from the most obvious interpretation, that here we have a husband (a Don Abbondio) who is unable to live out the passions of an Othello, to the perhaps more interesting one (but not at all intended by the author and the film’s consultants) that sees a difficult transition from a regime of tenderness and affection to one of passion – the only system capable of generating something new and alive. Another – completely arbitrary – interpretation might look at what happens to a psychic economy when there is a plan to start an analysis, and what is triggered by the analyst in his/her dual role as ‘uncanny’ outsider and therapist.

I remember as a child how ‘terrified’ I was when I saw the original black-and-white version of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers; I also remember how, a long time ago, lying on a bed in a dark room in some anonymous hotel in an American city I had never visited before, I turned on my side in a state midway between sleep and waking, and had the fantasy that the devil might be there beside me, and how I fell asleep thinking, ‘At last I’ve got someone to chat to.’ The path that joins together these split parts and functions is very long; some 50 years elapsed between the two episodes.

When I saw the Pabst film, I was lucky enough to experience it to the masterful accompaniment of a live pianist, just as would really have happened in the age of silent movies. This prompted in me the thought that, in analysis, exactly the opposite happens: what we have are not images with a sound commentary, but rather emotional sounds, deeply emotional music, an exchange of proto-emotional states that are then enacted by the patient.

I was reminded of a female patient of mine (Ferro 1992) who, after years of analysis, said to me: ‘When my boyfriend talks to me, I don’t pay attention to the words he says, but to the tone of his voice. From the inflections and the timbre, I try to figure out whether he likes me or not, if he is emotionally close to me or not.’ Only at that point did I remember the last session of the day just before taking the car to go from Pavia to Milan, where a film I was supposed to talk about was going to be projected. It was not that I was excited at the prospect, or at least I was not aware of being excited. Also, it was not that I was not listening to the patient (or at least I thought I was listening to her), but Annalisa, in her third year of analysis, after starting off by picking up some of the issues from the previous session, had immediately changed script and set design: she took me to the house of her childhood, a very large house, where there was room for everything, but not for her. It was a cold house, where every time she approached her mother to receive warmth she was sent away because her mother had other things on her mind. What had seemed to me to be a good session, which had led me to this childhood scene, was then confirmed as an accurate description of my mental functioning, blocked up, cold and distant, and of a session in which effectively – it was impossible not to realise it at this point – my mind was busy with thoughts about the talk I was due to hold later that evening.

So it really is true that the patient always knows the way in which we function mentally and communicates this to us by dreaming it in real time (Bion 1983), but very often we do not want to hear about this dream and take refuge in Column 2 of the Grid, protecting ourselves with a plethora of lies, rather than with authentic feeling. With a dexterous ‘hip flick’, Column 2 could also become the column of dreams (Grotstein 2007), if we had the courage to put up with their relativity and polysemy.

At this point, I would like to reflect on how we cope with – or fail to cope with – our emotions.

As I have already described in Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions (Ferro 2007), the paths we follow can be highly evacuative, not seriously symptomatic and sometimes transformational.

Not only herbivores: Paolo

Paolo begins his analysis like the good boy he is. At the first session, he tells me about the work he is doing to fix his ‘Vespa’ (the Italian word refers both to the scooter and a wasp), which has been lying around forgotten for years. After a number of sessions on this theme, I venture to remark ‘that sometimes wasps sting’. There is a long silence.

At the next session, Paolo, who until then had always brought a computer with him to the session, says: ‘A bolt of lightning struck my computer and literally fried it.’

I then lower the pressure of my interpretations, whose aim had been to de-mechanize some aspects of Paolo, but later, when I go back to a tastier interpretive diet, along comes ‘the neighbour who collects weapons and appears to own a rather menacing machine gun’. I go back to a more ‘playful’ interpretation and Paolo again talks about the neighbour and his machine gun, which, as he saw very clearly, has a red cap. This means it is a toy weapon, so there is nothing to worry about.

As the analysis goes on, he tells me about his grandmother’s farm with all its chickens, ducks, hens, sheep, cows and so on, until at some point I ask him whether he is not fed up of all these herbivores. This sets off a new wave of feelings of persecution, so I am not surprised when, at the last session before the summer holidays, he gives me some small wild animals, the kind children play with.

During the session immediately after the holidays, he looks at the ceiling in my consulting room and makes out a five-pointed star, like the one used by the Red Brigades, which appears to have been carved into one of the beams. In over 30 years, nobody else has ever noticed this – I had not noticed it and neither had any of my patients lying on the couch. I understand that anger and revolution have now entered the room. But when I look for the incision again, I cannot bring it into focus. These aspects of Paolo are prone to disappear. Another time, when he shows me the five-pointed star and the letters BR, I tell him he has the eyes of a sparrow hawk, a sparrow hawk that has replaced the lost sparrow he kept in a cage and that he had once talked about at great length.

Highly intense passionate aspects enter the session, albeit somewhat blanched, when he receives a letter from his girlfriend after a long period of hearing nothing from her (and after I had been silent for a long time). His reaction is to say: ‘I didn’t know whether to rip it open or to use a paper knife.’

Metaphor and reverie

A patient talks about the state of anxiety he had been thrust into by a friend who has suggested he might not receive his monthly salary for his new job. In actual fact, if he stopped receiving this cheque, it would not be so serious, because he would then be able to change job and take on other work that would bring in more money and be more satisfying. His friend manages to plunge him into this dark and turbid climate of persecution and threat where he is the target of others’ envy. This is, of course, a function of the patient (‘the friend’), who, at the weekend, when there is no analysis, comes to undermine his basic (wobbly) trust and pitches him into an atmosphere of despair and hopelessness, with the result that he loses sight of the progress he has made and his development towards independence.

At this point, I make a comment that is apparently metaphorical (I say that his situation seems to me to be that of a person who is swimming well but who has now been told that his lifejacket might be taken away or he will not be given one, a lifejacket he does not really need or that might even be an obstacle). This intervention is not a pre-packaged metaphor, but is an image that forms itself inside me, with him, for the first time and in real time as a response to his communications: that is to say, it is a reverie that came to me at that moment.

This reverie, this affective-visual transformation that takes its cue from his story, becomes a growth factor. I transform anxieties and feelings of persecution into affective images (I shape and pass on alpha elements to him, but mostly I put him into contact with my functioning – alpha function – which carries out these transformations). So it is not a metaphor as such, but a living metaphor that comes into being there and then, specific to the patient, which demonstrates to the patient the dream function of my mind and passes on to him the method used to perform this function. In other words, I make a dream of the patient’s communication and pass it on to him, and in doing so I transmit to him, at least in part, the method I use to perform this function. So not only do I contribute to forming alpha elements, but I also produce a development of the alpha function. With more severe patients (or with the more severe aspects of an individual patient), this is the only level that fosters the development of the alpha function, namely the patient’s own ability to engage in waking dream.

The analyst’s reverie, which can often – although not only – be expressed as metaphor, can be understood as a source of the development of the ability to transform persecutory beta elements into thoughts. The session is played out, then, at the level of a dream exchange, both when the patient ‘dreams’ (if he can) the intervention of the analyst or his mental state, and when the analyst ‘dreams’ the answer to give to the patient. The more this response is ‘dreamed’, the more it will be a founding factor, one that repairs any deficiencies in the patient’s alpha function.

After my reverie about the ‘swimmer’, the patient referred to above talked with some degree of wonder about having a dream where he was swimming and then there was someone who …

What for simplicity’s sake I can only describe as belonging to the analyst and the patient actually takes place in a dimension that transcends them both, namely the field. So everything will have to be rewritten from this other complex point of view, taking in the turbulence and the alpha function of the field.

Orthodoxy and science

Recently, I had the experience of seeing a talented colleague, who was the discussant of a paper of mine, criticize the paper (with its clearly post-Bionion approach) from a Freudian perspective. I felt the same strange effect that a particle physicist might experience who, while speaking of mesons or neutrinos, felt he was being criticized because he was not talking about levers and fulcrums and their (undeniable) importance. This does not mean that mechanical physics is worth less than particle physics, but they are two different things, in the same way as there is a difference between the various models – or perhaps strong theories – available to psychoanalysis today (Freudian, Kleinian, Bionion, intersubjective, ego psy chology, each with their own range of sub-models).

These models are not comparable; perhaps one can find ‘common ground’ between them, as Wallerstein (1988, 1990) suggested with a certain optimism, or perhaps we should focus on ‘clinical thinking’, as Green (1989, 2005) has more recently argued. If psychoanalysis is a science, there is no place in it for orthodoxy, and the 2009 IPA Congress in Chicago focused precisely on recognizing the different models in psychoanalysis. Orthodoxy has to do with religions; science with ‘facts’. Bion (2005) wrote that we have fragments of theories with which we build the theoretical wrecks we cling to – such is our fear of not knowing – but these theoretical wrecks sink when they collide with a fact, just as happened to the Titanic when it met a ‘fact’.

Our excessive fear of the mind and of the unknown is such that we are constantly tempted to exorcise both by thinking that the paramnesias that make up our theories are true and credible. We know so very little, and often any attempt to find out more is stigmatized as something that violates a supposed orthodoxy, a supposed ‘real psychoanalysis’.

It would be impossible for anyone to disregard developments in quantum physics or the introduction of antibiotics for the treatment of infectious diseases, but this is not the case in psychoanalysis, where we allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring everything that disturbs what we know. This way, we slow down the development of psychoanalysis incredibly, making it into a religion. Once, during a seminar, a fellow psychoanalyst, whom I hold in high esteem, was asked by a young colleague why psychoanalysis should be any different from biology: her husband, an expert biologist, did not feel it necessary to start each paper he wrote by quoting Darwin, but took into account only the most recent literature. My colleague’s reply was to argue that Freud’s ideas have not entered the shared heritage and therefore need to be repeated. I confess I was (and still am) not very convinced by the answer and I am not sure that a living psychoanalysis should have to start ab ovo, or worse, from ipse dixit. We must remember that what happened to Galileo continues to happen in various psychoanalytic contexts (not everywhere, thankfully) where periodically the anathema is pronounced: ‘This is not psychoanalysis.’ The psychoanalytic establishment has perpetrated abuses no different from those of the Church (fortunately without recourse to burning at the stake); its victims have included Bion (Grotstein 2007) and, to some extent, Meltzer himself (the former an absolute genius of psychoanalysis and the latter a truly creative analyst).

Many psychoanalytic theories, as Bion (2005) constantly reminds us, resemble complex delusions that take the form of keloids on the wounds of our non- knowledge. Everything is explained, given a meaning, deduced from a theoretical system that has already contemplated everything. Whether there are three or only two trees in a child’s drawing takes on enormous significance. There is a method for deconstructing dreams that enables us to detect their true meaning, and so on!

As a matter of fact, we do not know how to live with the gaps in our nonknowledge; we are like carpenters continually putting plugs into the keel of a ship that is in fact nothing but a flimsy fabric connecting the holes. We continually apply ‘patches’ to avoid sinking into non-knowledge; non-knowledge terrifies us, so we create ‘religious systems’ that cushion the fall into depression.

The fact is, we know very little, and the little we do know is uncertain and provisional. And yet there are university courses on these systems of psychoanalytic theology. The session, then, completes the operation through continual ‘transformations in hallucinosis’; in other words, when we project ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Torments of the soul
• 2 Grasping and casting
• 3 Looking around and going to the cinema
• 4 In praise of interruption and apparent stupidity
• 5 Therapeutic action and characters of the field
• 6 Casting and mental suffering
• 7 Who has seen it?
• 8 Stories of life, stories of analysis, publication and transmission of psychoanalysis
• 9 Clinical implications of Bion’s thinking
• 10 Psychoanalytical exercises and games
• References
• Index
• Plates