The Violence of Emotions

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 subjectivity and, in clinical work, the intersubjective and dreamlike climate in which a psychoanalytic session unfolds. This leads to a new way of interpreting the facts of analysis. As such, topics of discussion include:


transcending the caesura as Bion's theoretical method


hypochondria as de-subjectivation and narrative genre in analysis


the aesthetic conflict and alfa function


Bion's search for ambiguity


the casting of characters in the analytic dialogue


metaphor of text and translation in Freud and Bion.


Yet the book has an even more specific objective, focusing attention as it does on the central importance of emotions in mental life and of aesthetic experience as the model of what truly happens in analysis. This is an aspect which the author rediscovers and explores in the thought of Bion and his successors, and which he regards as a way of investigating the deepest and most primitive levels of mental life. This book will be of great interest to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists.

Sabbadini, Preface. Foreword. 'Caesura' as Bion's discourse on method. Under the cover of darkness. The burning body: The perception of psychic qualities and hypochondria. The cat's eyes: Internal focalization and casting in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The equation analysis/painting and the aesthetics of the real. Aesthetic conflict and the function. The analyst's internal setting and its discontent. From the mystical writing pad to the function: Metaphors of text and translation in Freud and Bion.