The Aesthetic-Rhizomatic Matrix of Thinking: Reply to Caron Harrang

ABSTRACT

In their reply to Caron Harrang’s commentary (this issue, 2022), the authors dwell on the problem of the difficulty that many people have in reading Bion, on his propensity to intertextual dialogue with other disciplines, and on the centrality of the concept of intuition in his thought. They take up and then expand Caron Harrang’s beautiful image, inspired by Suzanne Simard’s work, of the secret communication between plants to further illustrate the theme of the intersubjective constitution of the individual and therefore the need to develop a concept of common or third unconscious. On a different way of understanding the unconscious, such as the one adopted by Bion and the analytic field, an ethical refoundation of psychoanalysis can be based, consisting in the abandonment or relativization of “suspicious” listening, the overcoming of the I/you split and the adoption of a shared or we-perspective for the analytic couple.

This article responds to:

Possibility Clouds Arising from a Close Reading of Civitarese and Berrini’s “On Using Bion’s Concepts of Point, Line, and Linking in the Analysis of a 6-Year-Old Child”

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jack Foehl for appreciating our work and for asking someone to comment on it, Stephen Seligman for his useful comments on a previous version, and Caron Harrang for her rich and exciting text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ On the concept of “O”, see also Civitarese (2019), and Foehl (2020).

² See Kierkegaard (1849/2004, p. 31): “To become oneself … is to become someone concrete. But to become someone concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. The development must accordingly consist in infinitely coming away from oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the finitization”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D., Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). He lives and is in private practice in Pavia, Italy. He is the past-editor of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. Among his books are: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (2010); The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis (2012); The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (2014); Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism (2015); The Analytic Field and its Transformations (with A. Ferro, 2015); Truth and the Unconscious (2016); Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (2018); L’ora della nascita. Psicoanalisi del sublime e arte contemporanea [The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art], 2020, and recipient of the Gradiva-Lavarone prize; Vitality and Play in Psychoanalysis (with A. Ferro, 2022, in press).

Chiara Berrini

Chiara Berrini, Psy.D., is a psychologist, psychotherapist and candidate analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI). She lives and is in private practice in Milan, Italy. She has worked for several years in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in Unaccompanied Foreign Minors.