Supervision in Psychoanalysis by Ferro Antonino;

Author:Ferro, Antonino;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1172914
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

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1

Schneider, R. 1995. Brother of Sleep. New York: Overlook Press.

2

See Thematic Seminar I.

3

Bion, W. R. 1962. Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

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Thematic Seminar II

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ANALYST IN SUPERVISION: I am going to talk about a young man I shall call Bruno. He is twenty years old, tall, physically well-proportioned, likeable and good-looking. His father is Asian and his mother South American. He has two brothers, one slightly older, the other much younger. He sought analysis after an accident in which he lost his left eye: while he was surfing, he fell in the water and when he put his foot on the surfboard to get back on again, it came up and hit him straight in the face, perforating his eye. The piece of rope connecting the surfboard to his foot was too short.

After various surgical attempts to save his eye, more than once he was forced to spend anything from fifteen to twenty days in a bed face-down, completely at rest, looking downwards through a window-like opening in the bed, designed so that he could read and watch television. For a long time he was unable to sleep or to dream.

He sees his father as stiff and cold; he is someone who has kept himself separate from his children despite providing them with every material comfort. The mother, on the other hand, is perceived as very fragile, and she despairs at seeing her children in any difficulty. She cries easily and is offended if anyone confronts her with anything. All it takes is a banal comment on daily life — for example, the simple statement that someone cooks differently from her — for her to feel denigrated.

At the beginning of our work, Bruno would speak in a continuous, monotonous way, without punctuation or intonation, without putting facts or feelings in context, which set me at a distance, and meant I had difficulty in remembering the content of the sessions and what had happened during them.

His contact with his inner world seemed slight. He was very impulsive, and often lost control: he would punch walls, the fridge and, on several occasions, he had had to have his hands bandaged because he had sprained them. Other times, he would take his car and drive along streets and roads at high speed.

Later on in the analysis, he refers to the anguish that he feels in relation to photography. He says he feels under pressure to be included in any photograph taken in his vicinity. In addition, he makes extra copies of all these photos, or asks his father to do so, fearing that they might be stolen or lost. He comments on this attitude by saying: “If one of them disappears from my sight, it is as if I did not exist”.

I recount here a fragment of the session that I consider crucial to his analytic process, and which relates to his ability to dream for the first time. It happened during a session that took place after about one year of analysis.

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