6 Tuesday Evenings – Nov 5 – Dec 17

Facilitated by Joseph Aguayo, PhD
In the aftermath of Wilfred Bion’s notable contributions to psychoanalysis, there have been succeeding generations of psychoanalysts who have addressed underdeveloped themes in his many papers and books. This seminar addresses the succeeding psychoanalysts, primarily in Europe and the United States who have devoted significant attention to Bionian themes in psychoanalytic theory and practice. We begin with an overview presentation of the various modes subsumed in the approaches of the contemporary London Kleinians, followed by American approaches to intersubjectivity—and finally, with the advances made by Italian Field Theory in the new millennium.

One overarching theme in this course is the clinical and historical development of ideas on contemporary technique: we begin with how Betty Joseph took up many of Bion’s ideas, particularly on disturbed, ‘difficult-to-reach’ patients—and developed a tracking technique that followed carefully the patient’s subjective experience in analysis. We then turn to the work of James Grotstein and Thomas Ogden, American analysts working in California, who creatively amalgamated Klein, Winnicott and Bion in their theorizing and practice. Finally, we end with the work of Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese, with its emphasis on a different conceptualization of the analytic field, notions of intersubjectivity and increased emphasis on the analyst’s deployment of his ‘waking-dreaming function,’ reverie and creative use of hallucinosis in the analytic situation. Here, an attempt is made to pull together psychoanalytic literature that has existed in separate analytic traditions that have cropped up in the UK, the United States and Italy.