Understanding the Work of G. Civitarese
A Critical Survey of a Post-Bionian thinking
When I claim one could “understand” the work of Giuseppe Civitarese, perhaps I am already betraying him and the theory of thinking he has built over the last decade, deeply inspired by Bion. There is a certain irony in this title, and I owe the reader this much: if one wants to “learn from the experience” of reading and enter a becoming through the work of this author and psychoanalyst, I hope these pages can offer coordinates within the contemporary psychoanalytic landscape for grasping the specific relevance of this work. I could not avoid acting like J.L. Austin, who had to choose a catchy title for How to Do Things with Words, because I am writing on a blog. But essentially this is a “scholastic”/commentary approach, not the experience of someone who worked with this analyst and has been transformed by common thinking thoughts during sessions. Nevertheless, I sincerely hope there is in these lines knowledge enough to bring the appetite to start reading and digesting this immense work i.e to include it in one’s own psychic apparatus.
Giuseppe Civitarese occupies a singular position in the landscape of contemporary psychoanalysis. Recognized alongside Antonino Ferro as one of the leading figures of the Italian post-Bionian school, his work has been reviewed in the most prestigious journals of the discipline—the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, the British Journal of Psychotherapy—yet his specific contribution, as distinct from Ferro’s, remains insufficiently mapped in the Anglophone literature. This essay attempts to chart that contribution across an extensive body of work: over a dozen monographs and co-authored volumes, spanning clinical theory, Bionian exegesis, aesthetics, epistemology, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis.
Before anything else, what strikes the attentive reader is Civitarese’s extraordinarily fine-grained knowledge of Bion’s corpus. This is not the familiarity of someone who cites Bion in passing to legitimize pre-existing convictions; it is the intimacy of a scholar who has dwelt within the most enigmatic and resistant texts—the Cogitations, Taming Wild Thoughts, and above all the bewildering trilogy A Memoir of the Future—and emerged with readings that are at once faithful to the grain of the text and genuinely original. Bion and Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Reading A Memoir of the Future offers the most sustained demonstration: Civitarese enters Bion’s most experimental and least understood work to extract its theoretical coherence and clinical implications with a rigour and inventiveness that few commentators have matched.
This matters because it produces an effect of rereading. After traversing Civitarese’s oeuvre, one does not return to Attention and Interpretation or Transformations in the same way. Concepts that seemed marginal or impenetrable—transformation in hallucinosis, ‘Faith’, the notion of ‘O’ as ultimate emotional reality—acquire a new centrality and clinical meaning. Civitarese does not merely explicate Bion: he radicalizes and displaces him. The question that organizes this essay is therefore: what makes the singularity of Civitarese’s theoretical gesture? In what sense does his work go beyond Bionian commentary to constitute an original reworking of the conceptual and clinical tools of contemporary psychoanalysis? My opinion is the uniqueness of Bion reading is that one often has the feeling we are in fact reading him for the first time when one reads it again, but most likely, Civitarese brings something else. Apart from this special reading what is the fundamental insight the author has brought and what is its epistemological cost ?
To answer this, we follow an arc from Bionian foundations through the collaboration with Ferro, the major conceptual axes of the work, its clinical implications, and finally its critical reception—attending throughout to the patterns, recurrences, and genuine evolutions that emerge from one book to the next. Ferro himself, in a published conversation with Civitarese, has spoken of “a certain bitterness on account of sometimes gratuitous difficulties” encountered in the psychoanalytic world (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2022). Understanding the work means also understanding why it has met resistance, and what that resistance tells us about the stakes involved.
I. The Bionian Foundations: A Particular and Creative Rereading
Civitarese’s Bion is emphatically the late Bion: the Bion of Attention and Interpretation (1970), the Cogitations (1992), and A Memoir of the Future—not the Bion of Experiences in Groups or the early Kleinian theorizations of psychotic functioning (this is in fact has changed with the recent writing of Limits of interpretation which we are currently reading) . This is a deliberate and consequential choice. In The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis, Civitarese develops in detail the argument that the late Bion’s work represents not merely an extension but a transformation of his earlier positions—one in which the intersubjective dimension becomes constitutive rather than incidental, and in which the concept of ‘O’ (the unknowable ultimate emotional reality that the analyst must strive to ‘become’ rather than merely ‘know’) reorganizes the entire clinical field.
A central exhibit of this rereading is Civitarese’s treatment of Bion’s Grid. In the editorial introduction to a special issue of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2021), Hanoch Yerushalmi presented Civitarese’s contribution as offering the Grid not as a classificatory table but as “a map of the unconscious emotional attitudes of the patient and the analyst, used primarily to construct their here-and-now.” This is a significant displacement: the Grid ceases to be a static instrument for categorizing statements and becomes a dynamic, relational tool for tracking emotional transformations as they unfold in the session. The Violence of Emotions and Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis both elaborate this argument at length, showing how the columns and rows of the Grid can be read as coordinates of the analytic couple’s shifting emotional positions.
The concept that most vividly demonstrates the originality of Civitarese’s Bionian reading is that of transformation in hallucinosis. In his 2014 article for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Civitarese traces Bion’s use of the concept through three distinct registers. First, as a psychic defence in psychotic and near-psychotic scenarios: the patient, overwhelmed by proto-emotions that have found no container, evacuates them into a void and inhabits a hyper-concrete, emotionally flat world—“as if one were looking from very close up at a letter of the alphabet which had been enlarged almost to infinity.” Second, as what Paulo Sandler has called the ‘psychosis of everyday life’: the normal hallucinatory activity that infiltrates perception, providing the background of familiarity against which we perceive reality. Third—and this is the genuinely surprising move—as the ideal state of mind toward which the analyst must move in order to intuit the facts of the analysis.
What is specifically Civitaresean in this reading is the insistence on the intersubjective nature of hallucinosis. Unlike rigid-motion transformations and projective transformations—which can still be theorized within a one-person psychology—transformation in hallucinosis, Civitarese argues, can only be thought within a model where “what happens, happens between A and B, not only in A or only in B” (citing Bion, 1978–80). It is this reading that makes hallucinosis a genuinely post-Bionian concept rather than a merely Bionian one. Civitarese further differentiates it from two neighbouring phenomena on what he calls the ‘dream spectrum of the session’: rêverie, which implies a dimension of awareness from the outset, and Ferro’s transformation in dreaming, which is intentional and purposeful. Hallucinosis, by contrast, is experienced unconsciously, and it is factual reality that bears the charge of ‘waking’ the analyst. The clinical implications are profound: the analyst’s own micro-delusions and perceptual errors—far from being mere mistakes to be corrected—become the deepest probes for exploring the transpersonal emotional reality of the field.
II. The Collaboration with Ferro: Genesis and Architecture of a Current
The collaboration between Civitarese and Ferro is rooted in the institutional context of Pavia, which has served as the crucible of Italian post-Bionian psychoanalysis. In the published conversation between the two (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2022), Ferro was already a recognized figure when Civitarese was completing his specialization in psychiatry. Their joint work—most prominently The Analytic Field and its Transformations (2015) and Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis (2022)—has been described in a review for Psychodynamic Practice (2023) as representing a ‘fourth generation’ of field theory, “a post-Bionian field in which Bion’s radical conception of unconscious waking dream thought is associated with narratology.”
But the complementarity of the two authors should not obscure their differences, which are both temperamental and theoretical. Ferro’s emphasis falls on clinical narrativity: the ‘characters’ that emerge in the analytic field as transformations of proto-emotions, the transformation in dreaming as a direct technical tool (“I dreamed that…”), an écriture that is essentially that of a clinician-storyteller. Civitarese’s emphasis, by contrast, falls on epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophical grounding of clinical practice. His texts systematically mobilize continental philosophy—Merleau-Ponty in Sublime Subjects, Deleuze in the ‘aesthetic-rhizomatic matrix’ of thinking—alongside literature (Rimbaud, Kafka, Borges) and cinema (Bergman, Chaplin) as genuine instruments of thought, not ornamental references. Where Ferro provides the clinical toolkit, Civitarese builds the metapsychology and the epistemology that underpin it.
This division of labour is visible even within jointly authored texts. In The Analytic Field and its Transformations, the chapters that theorize the field’s conditions of possibility and its philosophical underpinnings bear Civitarese’s distinctive signature: the long excursions into phenomenology, the insistence on the aesthetic dimension of analytic experience, the sustained engagement with the question of truth. The hypothesis of a productive complementarity—Ferro as the navigator, Civitarese as the cartographer—finds ample support in the published record.
III. The Major Conceptual Axes: Cartography of a Thought in Motion
The dream as central operator. If there is a single thread that runs through the entirety of Civitarese’s work, it is the Bionian conception of dreaming—not as nocturnal narrative to be decoded, but as the fundamental process by which the psyche gives form to raw emotional experience. The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis develops this thesis at length: unconscious waking dream thought is a continuous activity, of which the analytic session is a particular and privileged instance. Interpretation is accordingly reconceived: it is no longer the unveiling of a hidden meaning beneath the manifest content, but the co-creation of a new meaning within the field.
The evolution from The Necessary Dream to Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis marks a deepening of this position. In the latter, the very concept of psychoanalytic truth is reworked: truth is not correspondence with facts but emotional truth, inseparable from the dreaming process. Bion’s ‘O’ is reframed as that toward which one tends asymptotically, never possesses. The clinical consequence is that the analyst’s task is not to reveal what the patient ‘really’ means but to participate in the ongoing dream-work of the session, contributing to the transformation of unmetabolized emotional elements into thinkable experience. In the 2014 article, Civitarese systematizes this into a ‘dream spectrum of the session’ running from hallucinosis through rêverie, flash dreams, and transformation in dreaming—a gradient from the most unconscious to the most intentional forms of psychic processing.
Aesthetics as constitutive dimension. One of Civitarese’s most distinctive contributions is his insistence that the aesthetic dimension of psychoanalysis is not decorative but constitutive. Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis argues that aesthetic experience is the model of the analytic encounter itself: the ‘sublime’ names the emotion that accompanies the encounter with that which exceeds representational frameworks—a convergence, as Civitarese makes explicit, with Bion’s ‘O’. A reviewer for the British Journal of Psychotherapy (2019) noted the originality of this approach; a reviewer for the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2018) similarly highlighted its theoretical ambition.
On Arrogance: A Psychoanalytic Essay pursues this line from the opposite direction. Building on Bion’s 1958 paper, Civitarese reconceives arrogance not as a character trait but as an epistemic position: the refusal of the constitutive uncertainty of analytic work, and thereby the blockage of access to the aesthetic dimension of encounter. Arrogance, in this reading, is the inverse of negative capability. The analyst who ‘knows’ too much, who arrives at the session armed with saturated theory, forecloses the very receptivity on which analytic work depends. This argument resonates powerfully with the discussion of hallucinosis as clinical tool: the analyst who interprets too quickly or too confidently may be operating in a state of theoretical hallucinosis, mistaking intellectual clarity for emotional contact.
In their response to Caron Harrang (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2022), Ferro and Civitarese develop the concept of an ‘aesthetic-rhizomatic matrix of thinking,’ arguing that analytic thought proceeds not linearly but through multiple, non-hierarchical connections—in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. This is also, one notes, a description of Civitarese’s own writing style, which moves between clinical vignettes, philosophical excursions, literary references, and metapsychological argument in a manner that enacts the very mode of thought it theorizes.
The ‘strong’ intersubjectivity and field theory. The most systematic formulation of Civitarese’s intersubjective position is found in Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction. The analytic field is theorized as a space of unconscious co-creation in which every analytic fact is a ‘field fact’—irreducible to the intrapsychic dynamics of either participant. The article published in JAPA in 2021 (“Intersubjectivity and Analytic Field Theory”) pushes this further: the opposition between subjectivity and intersubjectivity is dissolved into a dialectical relation. Intersubjectivity is not an ‘in-between’ added to pre-existing subjectivities; it is the very ground from which subjectivities are constituted.
Tracing the evolution across the published books, one observes a clear trajectory. The earlier works—The Intimate Room, The Violence of Emotions—lay the foundations in a framework that is still recognizably Bionian in its idiom and reference points. The later works—Psychoanalytic Field Theory, the volume Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory (edited with S. Montana Katz and Roosevelt Cassorla)—represent a progressive radicalization of intersubjectivity and a broadening of the philosophical horizon. The Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis offers a synoptic view of this trajectory: each entry reworks a classical concept from the standpoint of field theory and dreaming, functioning as a miniature essay that opens onto the whole. The trajectory is not merely one of increasing complexity; it reflects a genuine deepening of conviction. In the early work, the intersubjective dimension is presented as an important corrective to one-person models; in the later work, it has become the fundamental ontology of the analytic situation, the condition of possibility for everything that happens in the consulting room.
It is worth noting that this evolution also involves a growing engagement with the question of how field theory relates to earlier models of the analytic setting. In the collective volume Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory, the contributions situate the Ferro-Civitarese model in historical dialogue with the Barangers’ original formulation of the field as a ‘dynamic situation’ structured by the ‘bastion’ (the joint unconscious resistance of the analytic couple) and with the broader arc of South American psychoanalytic thinking. Civitarese’s own contribution to this volume demonstrates his characteristic move: appropriating a precursor (the Barangers) while showing how the Bionian lens transforms the inherited concept. The field is no longer merely a spatial metaphor for the analytic relationship; it becomes the name for the ceaseless unconscious dreaming activity that constitutes the couple’s shared psychic life.
The violence of emotions and the work of the negative. A final transversal thread concerns the negative: the unrepresented, the undreamt, Bion’s ‘nameless dread,’ the catastrophic emotional explosion (‘O’) that precedes all pathological hallucinosis. In The Violence of Emotions, Civitarese develops the Bionian argument that emotions can be forces of destruction for the thinking apparatus: when proto-emotions find no container, no mind to receive and transform them, the result is the psychic catastrophe from which hallucinosis is the last-ditch defence. The 2014 article elaborates a remarkable reading of Bion’s neologism ‘no-thing,’ finding in the body of the word itself the structure of an essential rhythm: “no-thing-nothing-no… that is, presence/absence, Fort/Da, on/off.” The analytic work consists in restoring this rhythm where it has frozen. This reading of the negative as rhythmic and relational—rather than merely privative—is one of Civitarese’s most original propositions, and it connects the clinical theory of hallucinosis to the aesthetic theory of the sublime in a way that is not, to my knowledge, found elsewhere in the literature.
IV. What Changes for the Clinician
It would be a mistake to regard Civitarese’s work as purely speculative. Its clinical implications are far-reaching, even if they are not always presented in the form of technical prescriptions. What the clinician gains, above all, is a reconceptualization of analytic listening. The passage from Freudian free-floating attention to Bionian ‘negative capability’ is radicalized: listening without memory, desire, or comprehension means also—and this is the point the 2014 article makes with particular force—without taking refuge in theory as a ‘hallucinosis of understanding.’ In the clinical vignette “V for Vendetta,” Civitarese shows how an interpretation that is theoretically correct (reading the patient’s associations in terms of the transference neurosis and the missed Carnival session) can function as a defence against emotional receptivity. The analyst’s ‘hallucinosis’ consisted not in getting the facts wrong but in attributing the anger entirely to the patient—“suspending my ability to see the facts of the analysis intersubjectively.” Only when the hallucinosis was followed by ‘awakening’ could the anger be recognized as a shared field phenomenon, and the session transform from an exercise in accurate interpretation into a moment of genuine emotional contact.
This has implications for the use of Ferro’s transformation in dreaming as a technical tool. Civitarese is explicit about this in the 2014 article: if the formula “I dreamed that…” is applied too mechanically, it risks becoming itself a form of hallucinosis—“it would give the analyst the illusion of understanding everything in real time, but without a real hold on the unconscious.” The caveat marks a subtle but important distance between Civitarese and a too-‘scholastic’ version of Ferro’s method. Transformation in dreaming, once assimilated, should be forgotten and allowed to float freely in the analyst’s preconscious, re-emerging as in a rêverie. The ideal is that it “returns as in a dream, as the mature fruit of the work of the unconscious.” What Civitarese proposes is not an alternative technique to Ferro’s but an articulation of where the different instruments of the dream spectrum stand in relation to one another. Hallucinosis, transformation in dreaming, and rêverie are ‘quite diverse conceptual instruments and not alternatives to one another’; all three serve the immersion in the emotional reality of the field, but at different depths and with different degrees of intentionality. If the immersive quality decreases in passing from hallucinosis to transformation in dreaming, what all these experiences share is the ‘aesthetic factor of surprise’ that accompanies the passage from dream to waking—the moment when something previously unseen comes into view.
The style of the clinical vignettes themselves is part of the argument. In “V for Vendetta,” the analyst moves from hallucinosis to rêverie to ‘talking-as-dreaming’—a concept borrowed from Thomas Ogden (On Talking-as-Dreaming, 2007; Rediscovering Psychoanalysis, 2009) and reworked in situ. The reference to Snoopy that arises spontaneously in the session, drawing on the analyst’s own childhood memories and his recent gesture of giving his Peanuts albums to his children, is presented not as a self-disclosure but as a shared dream—“a spontaneity that is not outside technique, but which perhaps one can only attain when one forgets it (enough).” The vignette is not an illustration of a pre-constituted theory; it is a site of discovery where theory and practice engender each other.
Finally, An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis deserves mention as a singular pedagogical resource. It is not a dictionary in the usual sense but a personal rereading of psychoanalytic concepts from the vantage point of field theory and dreaming. For the clinician in training, each entry functions as a miniature essay that refracts familiar concepts through Civitarese’s distinctive lens, offering unexpected angles of vision on terms one thought one already understood. It is, in its way, a training in the very mode of thinking the work advocates: associative, multi-layered, alert to the unexpected.
V. Critical Reception: Constitutive Tensions and Epistemic Costs
The reception of Civitarese’s work in the international psychoanalytic literature has been broadly favourable. The article “Post-Bionian Developments in Psychoanalytic Field Theory” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2017) examined the contributions of Ferro and Civitarese as a major extension of Bion’s thought. Reviews of Sublime Subjects and The Violence of Emotions in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and JAPA have highlighted the ‘sense of freedom, creativity, and humanity’ that emanates from the texts. The rereading of the Grid, the theorization of radical intersubjectivity, the introduction of aesthetic experience as a constitutive dimension of analytic work—these have been recognized as genuine innovations.
But the work has also generated significant debate, and it is worth treating the tensions dialectically rather than as simple criticisms, for each position carries its own epistemic cost.
The tension between radical co-creation and functional asymmetry. Civitarese’s field theory holds that every analytic fact is unconsciously co-created: the field is the true ‘subject’ of the analysis. This is the condition for the analyst’s full assumption of responsibility for what occurs in the session, rather than attributing it to the patient’s transference alone. Yet, as a recent article on projective identification in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2025) has observed, field theory in practice maintains a certain unidirectionality of projective flow (patient → analyst), in tension with the principle of co-creation. The tension is real, but it is worth noting the cost of each resolution. To abandon co-creation is to fall back into a one-person model that loses the interpsychic dimension Civitarese, following Bion, considers decisive: the recognition that ‘to make a mind, another mind is needed.’ But to radicalize co-creation to the point of symmetry is to risk dissolving the specificity of the patient’s suffering in an undifferentiated ‘we,’ making it difficult to think the direction of the treatment. The tension may be irreducible—and its productivity may lie precisely in keeping the clinician in a state of perpetual vigilance about his or her own position.
The 2015 debate on ‘Transformations in Hallucinosis.’ The publication of Civitarese’s 2014 article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis generated three critical commentaries: from Florence Guignard, Helmut Hinz, and Paulo C. Sandler. The commentaries bear on the fidelity to Bion and on the technical implications of the proposed reading. Civitarese’s response, “Styles of Criticism” (2016), does not merely answer objections: it poses the question of interpretive traditions within Bionianism itself, showing that what is at stake is not merely a concept but the manner in which a scientific community reads and authorizes itself to transform its founding texts. Here too the dialectic is instructive. The cost of orthodoxy (represented most clearly by Sandler’s position) is textual fidelity at the risk of freezing Bion into doctrine—paradoxically, given that Bion’s own theoretical style, made of paradoxes, reformulations, and ruptures, actively invites creative rereading. The cost of heterodoxy (Civitarese’s position) is interpretive freedom at the risk of projecting onto Bion meanings that are not there, or of departing from what is specific to his thought in favour of a personal synthesis. Both costs are real; neither is eliminable. What Civitarese’s “Styles of Criticism” does, at its best, is make these costs visible and thereby raise the level of the debate.
The articulations to be deepened: Civitarese, Ogden, and the models of the field. The secondary literature regularly places Ferro and Civitarese’s ‘shared space of dreaming’ in parallel with Thomas Ogden’s ‘analytic third.’ Both approaches share a radically intersubjective vision, but differ in their theoretical articulation. A recent article in a leading journal identifies three models of the psychoanalytic field: that of the Barangers, the post-Bionian model of Ferro and Civitarese (which conceptualizes the field as a shared space of rêverie), and a ‘plasmatic’ model associated with Ogden, which presupposes a ‘deep interpenetration of analyst and analysand from the start.’ Yet Civitarese himself cites and reworks Ogden (On Talking-as-Dreaming, Rediscovering Psychoanalysis) in the 2014 article, suggesting not an opposition but a conversation in progress whose terms remain to be made explicit. The clarification of these boundaries constitutes an open theoretical project, one whose stakes are a fine-grained cartography of the different models of analytic intersubjectivity currently available. It is perhaps the most pressing of the chantiers that await.
VI. Conclusion: The Inventiveness of a Work in Progress
What, in the end, should one retain from this extensive traversal? First, that Civitarese has built something that goes well beyond Bionian commentary. His oeuvre constitutes an open system—a network of concepts that echo across books while remaining in motion, from the early, more classically Bionian works (The Intimate Room, The Violence of Emotions) through the progressive radicalization of intersubjectivity and the broadening philosophical and aesthetic ambition of the later work (Sublime Subjects, On Arrogance, Psychoanalytic Field Theory). The Apocryphal Dictionary and Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory mark a moment of consolidation and transmission.
What must be saluted, ultimately, is the inventiveness of the enterprise. The dream spectrum of the session (hallucinosis → rêverie → flash dreams → transformation in dreaming), the rereading of the Grid as emotional map, the notion of an aesthetic-rhizomatic matrix of thinking, the treatment of Bion’s ‘no-thing’ as a fundamental rhythm of thought, the reconceptualization of arrogance as epistemic foreclosure—these are propositions that cannot be found in Bion himself but that, once formulated, seem to reveal what Bion ‘was thinking without knowing it.’ That may be the surest mark of a genuinely creative commentary: it transforms the text it comments upon, making visible what was always there but had not yet been seen.
As for the future, the most productive questions may concern the possibility of cohabitation. Can a post-Bionian framework of the kind Civitarese has constructed enter into genuine dialogue with other post-Kleinian developments—those of Betty Joseph and the London Kleinians, for example, with their emphasis on the ‘total transference situation’ and the close tracking of moment-to-moment shifts in psychic states? There are obvious affinities: a shared commitment to the analysis of the here-and-now, a common insistence on the analyst’s emotional participation, a deep seriousness about unconscious communication. Both traditions understand the session as a living process in which something is happening at every moment beneath the surface of manifest content. But there are also real differences in emphasis and in the theory of therapeutic action. The post-Kleinian tradition retains a stronger commitment to interpretation as the principal vehicle of change, and to the asymmetry of the analytic situation: the analyst’s function is to understand and to name, however tactfully, what is being communicated unconsciously. Civitarese’s field theory tends to decenter interpretation in favour of transformative experiences within the shared field: what heals is not primarily the accurate naming of unconscious content but the restoration of the capacity to dream, which occurs through the analyst’s own emotional processing and the gradual reconstitution of the ‘rhythm’ of presence and absence.
The American relational and intersubjective traditions (Stolorow, Atwood, the Boston Change Process Study Group) share Civitarese’s critique of the one-person model but arrive at their intersubjectivity through a different lineage—phenomenological and developmental rather than Bionian and Kleinian. The relational emphasis on mutual recognition (Benjamin), on the co-construction of meaning, and on the analyst’s subjectivity as constitutive rather than merely interfering, resonates with many of Civitarese’s positions. Yet the philosophical idiom differs markedly: where the relationalists draw on American pragmatism and infant research, Civitarese draws on continental philosophy, literary aesthetics, and the Bionian theory of thinking. Whether these frameworks can genuinely speak to one another—rather than merely gesture across a divide of vocabulary and institutional affiliation—remains an open question. The answer is probably yes, but only if the conversation is conducted with the same honesty about epistemic costs that the best of Civitarese’s own work displays. Each tradition has purchased its insights at a price: the post-Kleinians, by retaining an interpretive authority that the field theorists find problematic; the relationalists, by sometimes undertheorizing the unconscious dimensions that Bion and his heirs place at the centre; the post-Bionians, by a philosophical density that can make clinical transmission difficult.
The question of Ogden remains perhaps the most immediately pressing. Ogden’s ‘analytic third’—a jointly but asymmetrically created intersubjective entity that is the life of the analysis—is close enough to Civitarese’s ‘analytic field’ to make the differences instructive. Ogden’s roots are in Winnicott and the British Independent tradition as much as in Bion, which gives his intersubjectivity a different flavour: more attentive to play, transitional phenomena, and the analyst’s ‘use’ of the object than to the epistemology of ‘O’ and the Grid. Civitarese’s citation of Ogden in the 2014 article—both On Talking-as-Dreaming and Rediscovering Psychoanalysis—suggests not an opposition but a selective appropriation, which is itself characteristic of his method. The work ahead, for the field at large, is to make the topology of these overlapping but non-identical models explicit, so that clinicians can navigate between them with greater clarity about what each makes visible and what each obscures.
At a more institutional level, there is the question of transmissibility. Civitarese’s approach, precisely because it demands a tolerance of uncertainty, a wide philosophical culture, and a willingness to ‘dream’ the session rather than merely interpret it, is not easily codified into a set of teachable rules. It is a practice that depends on a certain cultivation of the self—an analytic Bildung—that resists formalization. Whether this is a limitation or a strength depends, once again, on the epistemic framework within which one operates (not to mention how deep a personal psychoanalytical work can go). What is certain is that Civitarese has given psychoanalysis a body of work whose inventiveness, philosophical seriousness, and clinical depth reward sustained engagement. To read him is to be changed in one’s way of reading Bion, of listening in the session, and of thinking about what it is that psychoanalysis does.
The work, like the waking dream thought it theorizes, remains open. And that, as Civitarese would probably say, is precisely the point.
References
Bion, W.R. (1965). Transformations. London: Karnac, 1984.
Bion, W.R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Karnac.
Bion, W.R. (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac.
Civitarese, G. (2008/2011). The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2011/2012). The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2013/2014). The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
Civitarese, G. (2014). “Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96(4), 1091–1116.
Civitarese, G. (2016). Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2016). “Styles of criticism: Answering comments by Florence Guignard, Helmut Hinz and Paulo Sandler.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 97(5), 1459–1473.
Civitarese, G. (2018). Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2021). “Intersubjectivity and analytic field theory.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69(6).
Civitarese, G. (2021). Bion and Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Reading A Memoir of the Future. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2023). On Arrogance: A Psychoanalytic Essay. London: Routledge.
Civitarese, G. (2024). An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
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Ferro, A. & Civitarese, G. (2015). The Analytic Field and its Transformations. London: Karnac.
Ferro, A. & Civitarese, G. (2022). “The aesthetic-rhizomatic matrix of thinking: Reply to Caron Harrang.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 58(1).
Guignard, F. (2015). “Commentary on ‘Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst’ by Civitarese.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 97(5).
Hinz, H. (2015). “Commentary on ‘Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst’ by Civitarese.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 97(5).
Katz, S.M., Cassorla, R. & Civitarese, G. (eds.) (2020). Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory: Concept and Future Development. London: Routledge.
Ogden, T.H. (2007). “On talking-as-dreaming.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88, 575–589.
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