Torments of the Soul: Psychoanalytic transformations in dreaming and narration

by Antonino Ferro

In Torments of the Soul , Antonino Ferro revisits and expands on a theme that has long been at the heart of his 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 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.

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2014