At the roots of Italian Field Theory

This monographic issue represents an important continuation of the still unfolding and long overdue conversation between the Italian and Anglophone psychoanalytic worlds, and more specifically between Italian and Anglophone forms of psychoanalytic Field Theory.

With respect to North American psychoanalysis, certain nodal points in this conversation can be readily identified, such as Antonino Ferro’s keynote address to the 2009 IPA meeting in Chicago, itself summarizing a number of important publications in English-speaking journals over the previous 20 years. The special relationship Ferro and several of his colleagues established with the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies in the early 2000s is another nodal point and led to years of fertile conversations, collegial collaborations, and seminars, one outgrowth of which was the increased spread of ideas central to the Pavia-group version of the Post-Bionian, Italian Field Theory into mainstream psychoanalytic discourse in North America (Levine, 2022). Noteworthy also were a series of yearly discussion groups held at the February meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) in New York City in the last decade and a simultaneous series of small private clinical seminars on Field Theory held adjacent to these ApsaA meetings.

The establishment of the Psychoanalytic Field Theory book series by Routledge in 2015, edited by Giuseppe Civitarese and Stephanie Montana Katz, marked a significant recognition of Field Theory’s years long migration from its Italian beginnings into the broader mainstream of psychoanalysis. Alongside these developments, the publication in 2016 of the encyclopedic Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (edited by Borgogno, Luchetti, and Marina Coe) introduced non-Italian-speaking analysts to the rich history, tradition, and distinct cultural interpretations of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Ferro, Borgogno, and Civitarese become recipients of the Mary Sigourney Award. Almost a decade earlier, Marco Conci had edited a monographic issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis on Italian psychoanalysis (Conci, 2008).

The current monographic issue now offers interested readers a much-needed and broadly historical account of how in particular the concept of the field developed in Italian psychoanalysis, identifying its various theoretical roots while also introducing readers to the seminal figures in Italian psychoanalysis who nurtured and expanded its development and application. These important figures in the history of our discipline are not well known in North America, in large part because their writings have not been broadly translated. For instance, Francesco Corrao, in summarizing the conclusions of the national congress of 1980, specifically characterized the independence of the emerging Italian approach to psychoanalysis, ending his summary by noting “the more or less explicit introduction of the concept of ‘field’ which includes and amplifies that of setting” (Corrao, 1980, pp. 291–294; quoted in Borgogno, Luchetti, & Marino Coe, 2016, p. 5). Yet neither Corrao’s 1980 account nor his systematic 1986 paper on the field (Corrao, 1986/1997) are available in English on PEP-Web. We hope the current series of papers offers a corrective to these oversights and that interested readers will discover in them a useful perspective on the evolution of Italian Field Theory and its origins in Italian psychoanalytic thought.

In order to understand Corrao’s conception of the analytic field, readers should start from his contribution “The Concept of Field as a Theoretical Model.” First published in 1986, the essay was reprinted in Emotion and Interpretation, a book edited by Eugenio Gaburri in 1997. This was a cardinal publication for spreading Italian Field Theory. It is based on a selection of papers from the 10^th congress of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), which had been held in Rimini in 1994, with the title “The Analyst’s Response and the Transformations of the Analytic Field.”

At that moment, it became clear for the first time that a paradigm shift had occurred in Italian psychoanalysis, by virtue of which a field-based epistemology and a paradigm of complexity were now being raised as an alternative to the previous unipersonal and relational views (Riolo, 1997, p. 55) on the human mind (which, however, did not disappear).

Corrao died on April 23, 1994, and the 10^th Congress of the SPI, which celebrated the concepts he had developed in his analytic work, was held on October 6–9 of that same year.

An increasing interest in countertransference during the 1950s, which paralleled an analogous renewal of interest at the international level, was the starting point for the aforementioned paradigm shift in Italian psychoanalysis, even though the ground had been prepared by previous pioneers.

In a seminal paper entitled “Countertransference in the Psychiatric Interview,” Giovanni Carlo Zapparoli (1955) conducted a substantial analysis on the influence of the psychiatrist’s personality on the “inter-individual relationship” with the patient. As he observed:

If possible, the transferential atmosphere which should always be present in a psychiatric interview, creates a sentiment of resonance that the psychiatrist should feel about his patient. … Where a sense of resonance is present, the clinician feels kindly inclined towards the interviewed person and feels that he can identify with the subjective state of the patient – in other words, he has the perception of a close contact with the person who is in front of him, both on an intellectual and emotional basis. In order to define such a contact, psychoanalysts use the word “empathy”, which I think can be the case also for the simpler and shorter interpersonal relation occurring during psychiatric interviews. (p. 53; translated by current authors)

In 1962 the national congress of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society was devoted to the issue of countertransference. The following three contributions were published in Volume 8, Number 2 of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, which was entirely devoted to the congress.¹

Franco Fornari dealt with the narcissistic defenses of the analyst, which “are aimed at preserving one’s own ideal image, as they represent a fundamental obstacle to the exploration of the countertransference” (1962, p. 119).

Once the narcissistic wound is overcome, a constant recognition of how the unconscious elements operating in the analysand also operate in him- or herself can lead the analyst to positively elaborate those elements, to the point that they become an essential instrument for understanding. This purely Socratic-like position (I know that I know nothing!), on the basis of which a consciousness of the negative becomes the very tool for arriving at the positive, is one of the situations which, to my mind, best characterizes the analytic style, both in its theory and in its practice, which is often a matter of transforming what we encounter as an obstacle into a fruitful element. (pp. 118–119; translated by current authors)

Eugenio Gaddini, who would soon become one of the best-known Italian authors thanks to his inquiry on imitation in psychoanalysis, delivered a lecture in which he traced a new epistemological frame:

In its first conception, the analytic situation was characterized by the simultaneous presence of a patient – the object of observation – and the analyst as a detached and objective observer. The latter is not emotionally involved, nor it is possible that she gets involved with the object: in other words, it is a mirror-analyst. The more she is capable of “emotional neutrality”, the more she can “reflect”, to the patient’s consciousness, the observed unconscious material. In effect, according to this conception, a good therapeutic outcome is granted by the power, based on the physician’s analytical knowledge, to identify the unconscious material (which is repressed, and thus pathogenic) of the patient and make it conscious (i.e. no longer pathogenic). To achieve this goal, emotional neutrality was considered to be the basic technical rule, a mandatory rule for the analyst, while the patient was asked to observe a different fundamental rule: free associations. According to this sort of agreement, the patient is at the analyst’s disposal, in the best conditions for observation, which means, on the patient’s part, “not to observe” the analyst’s behaviour (lying on the couch, with the analyst behind her). In other words, the patient agreed to be placed in the position of a mere object of research. (1962, p. 97; translated by current authors)

Yet today the concepts of scientist and research can take advantage of the psychological instrument. The way in which we consider such concepts seems to be undergoing a radical and deep change in the direction of a less and less “subjectivistic” interpretation of scientific research: a process which is apparently no different than what characterized, within the psychoanalytic movement, the development of the concept of “analytical situation”. As far as we know, such a development started with the discovery of countertransference – which was announced by Freud in 1910 – and, until today, was closely connected to the slow and controversial development of such a notion. (p. 98; translated by current authors)

Finally, Francesco Corrao presented a seminal discussion of the analytic situation as a field of forces. Surprisingly, Corrao’s proposal is contemporary with the Barangers’ original elaboration of the same idea in 1961–1962 (Baranger & Baranger, 1961–1962/2008). Building on Freud’s account of countertransference as a “result of the patient’s influence on (the analyst’s) unconscious feelings” (Freud, 1910, p. 144), Corrao writes:

The exegesis of this proposition allows two diverse conceptions: the first being restrictive, and understanding countertransference as a discontinuous, parasitic kind of interference which can not but obstruct the analytic process; the second conception is extensive, and recognizes countertransference to be a constitutive and constant phenomena of the analytic situation. That extensive conception confers to the Freudian formulation the meaning of a phenomenological integration, of an objectifying kind, thanks to which the total representation (configuration) of the field is accomplished. (1962, p. 92; translated by current authors)

Corrao therefore considers countertransference as “the total response of the analyst to the total transference of the patient” (1962, p. 92) and describes the analytic situation as ingrained from the start in a “polyvalent interpersonal relationship” (p. 93), in which:

the two players-contractors establish a relationship of mutual interaction, governed by rules and inclined to some purposes; a relationship that develops slowly within some relatively constant spatial-temporal parameters. Such a relationship seems to set up a kind of total structure (both conditioned and conditioning) characterized by functional, variable oscillations, as regards their frequency, intensity and width, tightly dependent on the activity of the individual psychological forces and relationships which are operating. (p. 93; translated by current authors)

As Corrao explains, he conceives such a “total structure,” created by the specific features of the analytic situation, as organized:

1.	As a dynamic bi-personal (bi-polar) field with a metastable equilibrium.
2.	As a simultaneous transactional field: perceptual, affective, cognitive.
3.	As a semantic communicational field, verbal and non-verbal (extra-verbal); whose levels or degrees of interaction are phenomenologically describable on the basis of the intersubjective behaviours and the (lived) experiences of the two participants. (1962, p. 92; translated by current authors)

What does this imply? In the first place, the two individuals in the analytic room, just like two magnetic poles, generate – with their bodies and minds – a field of forces. The field thus created is subjected to a relative state of balance: if we perturb the system with a low amount of energy, it will return to the starting point, whereas if we perturb it with a high amount of energy, it will reach a new equilibrium. Within the field, then, various synchronic transactions occur: it becomes a kind of “stock exchange” of perceptions, affects, and cognitions. The observable, phenomenological aspects of the field are made of meaningful signs and symbols that weave together a communicational network: a matrix made by words, yet not by words alone. The complexity of the interactions that are linked in the field, over a certain period of time, is reflected by “the intersubjective behaviours and the (lived) experiences of the two participants” (Corrao, 1962, p. 92).

In this monographic issue readers will meet and get to know all these people who gave body and soul to Italian psychoanalysis. From the earliest research on telepathy and spiritism (discussed by Rita Corsa) to the current success of the post-Bionian model (from Michele Bezoari, Antonino Ferro, and Luca Nicoli), passing through the pioneering role of Francesco Corrao (Giuseppe Di Chiara), the relevance of group experiences (Alessandro Bruni and Alessandra Di Biase), and the role of outside influences (Marco Conci), All of these individuals have enabled current Italian psychoanalysts to develop an innovative and traditionally grounded way of working psychoanalytically (Franco Borgogno).

Enjoy reading this issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriele Cassullo

Gabriele Cassullo is a Member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and IFP Co-Editor in Chief.

David G. Power

David G. Power is a Member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, Founding Director of the The Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies and IFP Reader.

Notes

1 When the fifth national congress of the SPI, on countertransference, was held in 1962, Corrao was a 40-year-old physician. He was born on December 14, 1922 in Palermo. In 1945 – even before graduating in medicine in 1948 – he had started his analysis with Alexandra Wolff Stomersee, a Baltic noblewoman who had trained between 1927 and 1932 at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis founded and directed by Karl Abraham. Alexandra Wolff Stomersee worked in Vienna and London, and then married the Sicilian Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of the novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard), which depicts the changes in Sicilian society during the Italian Risorgimento; the most famous quotation from this is: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” After their marriage in Riga, they moved in 1932 to Palermo. A multicultural couple, speaking five different languages, the two of them nurtured their passion for literature and history. They lived in Palermo until 1957, the year Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa died.