Marina Harutyunyan read for us the book by Antonino Ferro «Psychoanalysis: Making Stories»
“Antonino Ferro is one of the most modern psychoanalysts. Today, psychoanalysis is so many-sided that perhaps the only thing that is similar to what is happening in the psychoanalytic office today and in Freud’s time is attention to context and subtext, to messages “from the depths”, expressed (or unspoken) in words.
Another constant embedded in psychoanalytic practice is the idea of cooperation, co-creation between the analyst and the patient. Shifting in his book the extremely complex ideas of the great British analyst Wilfred Bion into the language of everyday metaphors, Ferro makes the reader an accomplice in the process of analytical processing.
In this sense, for specialists, this book is an opportunity to get closer to Bion — one of the most difficult theorists to perceive — and an exercise in professional listening. For a non-specialist, the book is valuable in that it gives a glimpse into the interior of the psychoanalytic cabinet — into the «psychoanalytic kitchen», into the head of a very peculiar, lively, emotional person who listens to the stories of other people and helps to create them.
The reader, I am sure, will be captivated by the stories of internal, deep relationships and stories of their analytical understanding. There is no better antidote to the ingrained image of the analyst, who, looking at his watch, silently waits for the moment when he can give out a pre-prepared interpretation. Reading Ferro, one is imbued with respect for both the analyst and the patient, for the intense work of the human soul in the psychoanalytic office.
The book opens with a wonderful foreword written by a talented and receptive person — the recently deceased psychoanalyst Anna Kazanskaya. This is not so much an introduction, but an example of co-creation in creating stories, which the entire book is about. “Whether in everyday life, in creativity, a bright individuality is not closed from other people’s influences, they are not dangerous to her, on the contrary, they are necessary to her like air. It is carried out in them. Antonino’s next book is Anna’s last book.