Working Through Transformations in Play

ABSTRACT

For Bion, one of the aims of analysis is to increase the transformation of negative emotions so that they do not exceed the personal capacity to contain them. Ferro described a transformation in playing as the possibility of giving the patient an emotion contained in action or a concrete situation, intuiting the underlying dream. A possible hypothesis to deepen the “transformations in playing” theory is that they can be a valuable tool to explore the relational area that escapes the word. Through transformation into play, the unthought can find a way to establish an invariant, a profound relational continuity that can move toward elaboration. The frequent clinical entanglement between transformations in play and reverie suggests that these are clinical phenomena that can take place in an area of analytical work at the frontiers of dreaming (Ogden, 2001). In this process, reverie seems to reveal itself both as a possible endpoint of a potential transformation in dreaming and a starting point of a possible transformation in playing. Transformation in play defines an intersubjective area where one can experience how the transformative capacity of the two subjects can establish continuity even between unmentalized sensory and emotional experiences, enabling the development of the embryonic dreams contained within them. Unlike transformations in dreaming, those in play preserveas wrote by Ogden; in ”Conversations at the frontier of dreaming” the features of playing, namely, bodily sensations and movements and the preservation of paradox.

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

Notes

¹ In Italian, this is the name given to clumps of woolly dust that gather in rounded shapes.

² Clinical case with Dr Violet Pietrantonio.

³ Eleonora Lo Bianco is a very popular volley player in Italy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Molinari

Elena Molinari is a physician specialized in pediatrics and psychotherapy and a full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), expert in child and adolescent psychoanalysis. Since 2004 she has been teaching child neuropsychiatry for the postgraduate course in art therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milano. Since 2021, she is a member of the executive board of Italian Psychoanalytic Society, in charge of scientific research. She published several papers on international reviews and contributions in different collective books. She is the author of a book that reflects on Bion’s theories applied to child analysis: Field Theory in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Reacting to Unexpected Developments.

Violet Pietrantonio

Violet Pietrantonio is a psychologist, with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, a Psychoanalyst, member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She lives and works as a psychoanalyst in Bologna. She is particularly interested in expanding the research of the oneiric functioning of the mind. She has written papers for collective books and reviews about experiencing an analytic work focused on the development of dream work in the session, as proposed by Bion’s Field Theory. Since 2016, she has been teaching Bion’s Field Theory in Contemporary Psychoanalysis for the post-graduate school in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at A.P.A, Chieti, Italy.