Book Review: La Violenza delle Emozioni: Bion e la Psicoanalisi Postbioniana (The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis)

Giuseppe Civitarese, in this exposition and expansion of post-Bionian thought, a collection of some of his previously published essays as well as several new ones, begins with almost worrying high praise: “Bion induces a feeling of astonishment and near-reverential awe for his creativity, his courage, and the originality of this thinking” (p. 9; all translations mine). ¹ Luckily for the reader, Civitarese’s fervent and supple grappling with Bion’s legacy pulls us into lively dialogue not only with essential Bionian ideas, but with a methodology of creativity that Civitarese displays rather than merely describes: “The question is not so much what Bion actually said, as how we can most creatively make use of his extraordinary legacy” (pp. 6–7). In Civitarese’s own complex, rollicking, richly imaginative paean one finds a worthy disciple, one who exemplifies the generativity, the potential, and the affective intensity (the “Violenza” of the title) at the heart of the Bionian enterprise. Those of us familiar with Civitarese from his previous book, The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (2008), are accustomed to the philosophical grounding of his work, as well as to the highly theatrical mis-en-scène (in the best and fullest sense) of his clinical vignettes, which feel unnervingly alive. As he did in that earlier work, Civitarese presents a series of metapsychological investigations touching on knotty issues in philosophy and semiotics while somehow tethering them firmly to the recognizable dilemmas of everyday psychoanalytic treatment.

Civitarese uses as his starting point the question asked in Edna O’Shaughnessy’s title “Whose Bion?” (her contribution to a 2005 series of papers about Bion published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis). This present work is, in essence, Civitarese’s Bion. He guides us through a nonchronological intellectual biography of Bion, referring to, and at least partly explicating, almost all of Bion’s published work, as well as engaging in dialogue with some of Bion’s most prominent followers, including David Meltzer, James Grotstein, and Antonino Ferro. The book’s first chapter, “‘Caesura’ as Bion’s Discourse on Method,” underscores the importance in Bion’s methodology of Descartes’ systematic doubt and notes extensive similarities between the two thinkers. As Civitarese considers the consequences of Bion’s move from “I think, therefore I am” to “I lie, therefore I am” (p. 14), he revisits a lineage of philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas about the creation of the self, as well as about the essence of representation. Lying is possible only in a mind developed within an intersubjective matrix, in which thoughts are inseparable from affective life, and in which any apprehension of reality is linked inextricably to the way subjectivity is developmentally constructed. “For Bion, the subject is born with the lie. . . . Only false thoughts require a thinker, while true thoughts pre-exist” (p. 105). Bion’s Cartesian doubt is applied not only to the content of thinking, but to the faculty of thought itself (p. 16), and subsequently the analytic process moves away from a focus primarily on unconscious thought content to be unearthed within an individual to more broadly enlarging a capacity of symbolization within an analytic field comprising analyst and patient (p. 29).

Civitarese’s psychoanalytic viewpoint is closely intertwined with philosophy, which he draws on to develop an argument concerning the central position of aesthetic conflict in the construction of psychic reality: “The red thread that runs throughout the book, and that in my eyes lends it its coherence, is in fact the exploration of the aesthetic theme” (p. 1). Civitarese recalls that the word aesthetics stems from the Greek term for sensation. The individual’s multiply determined engagement with external reality places aesthetic conflict at the center of the self. “Aesthetic conflict is the meeting-clash [incontro-scontro] with the real, reflected in the destinies of the sensations-emotions that are its echoes” (p. 106). The self is in uneasy conflict between, on the one hand, a pull toward a real that feels harmonious but obviates differentiation and therefore the self and, on the other, an extreme disgust and alienation that pushes toward differentiation but breaks the self’s contact with an intolerable reality (p. 107). This conflict and how the self constructs itself in its vortex is central for Civitarese. He argues that for ideas about aesthetics to reach their full analytic potential, Meltzer’s take on aesthetic conflict must be supplemented by Kristeva’s views on the role of “abjection,” that is, an understanding of the even earlier threat to subjectivity, occurring before development of the self, (p. 117), occasioned by the initial separation from the mother: “Abjection, therefore, brings us back to the individual evolutionary stage in which one is neither subject nor object, neither entirely other nor yet one’s self” (p. 117) In a fascinating weaving together of clinical data, philosophical ideas, and Kristeva’s semiotics, Civitarese argues that the reaction to any aesthetic object (whether art or a piece of reality) is informed by and repeats the essential reaction to that first aesthetic object, the mother, and reproblematizes her function in integrating the child’s sense of self (p. 137).

Civitarese, referring constantly throughout his work to both the creativity and the maddening ambiguity and abstraction of Bion’s work, displays both of these characteristics himself. Civitarese’s work is hard to summarize, in part because he covers so much ground, and in part because he both describes and enacts the open-ended, endlessly generative nature of the ideas he is presenting. He turns our attention to places that are important precisely because they push at the edges of coherence and competence, because they resist set paradigms or intelligibility. At times making sweeping statements and bold claims, he also plays with breaking down his ideas into the smallest possible discrete units, like Bion’s mathematical abstractions. And yet, somewhat magically (Civitarese refers to Bion’s own mysticism as consisting of this very play with the boundaries of the known, a mysticism defined as “the inexhaustible push toward the unexplored” (p. 45), the bridge to clinical usefulness strongly persists, its own red thread throughout the text. In a chapter on the analytic understanding of hypochondria, he uses Bionian ideas to consider hypochondriacal symptoms as a sort of communication that gives “body back to mind” and puts into question the issue of bodily reality. Civitarese argues that the body, like the mind, is itself constructed from a world of sensations and perceptions that have occurred in an intersubjective universe. Made up of sensations and physical perceptions, the body is “produced” as the brain is, since birth, in relation to a maternal discourse (p. 49). The hypochondriac is in exile from his body, and this exile pushes to the forefront of the analytic scene the existential problems of subjectivity and self. Hypochondria itself is understood as a text, as a sort of narrative genre. Civitarese, extending Ferro’s ideas, understands hypochondria as an illness not of the body, nor of the mind, but of the analytic field itself.

In his earlier work Civitarese has written extensively about his conception of the analytic field, a conception he elaborates most explicitly in the chapter “Cat’s Eyes.” Here, with a nod to Pirandello, he writes of “six emotions in search of an actor,” showing how the analytic setting is designed to increase the patient’s ability to think and feel. Civitarese presents a number of clinical fragments in which art of various kinds (movies, opera, comic books) shows up in sessions, and in which any person or thing, including a lamp, can play different roles in the theater of the analysis. “Making a patient a better actor-director-critic-spectator of his own story means favoring the maturation of his capacity to think and helping him integrate his experiences in ways that gradually allow him to function better in his life” (p. 72). Civitarese speaks of “the spectacle of analysis,” imbued with an intense and present emotion, and lived within a space co-created by patient and analyst; to be immersed in the interactive nature of the relationship, analyst and patient take turns being actor, fan, critic, director, assistant, friend, and casting director (p. 73): “As in the theater, the more the ‘spectacle’ of analysis is effective on the dramatic (aesthetic) level, the more it helps the patient emotionally move and change” (p. 72).

Civitarese begins several of his chapters by starting with Freud. He roots himself firmly in a psychoanalytic tradition maintaining strong ties to Freud, and reflects in his stance toward Freud his persistent refusal of the false dichotomies and either/or choices that imperil and constrain analytic understanding. Civitarese sees Bion as enlarging and extending Freud’s work and moving it into the interpersonal sphere while holding firmly to a belief in the value of essential Freudian ideas, which are not always prized in the intersubjective worldview: Civitarese maintains the importance of recognizing an intrapsychic world, the force of sexuality and aggression, and the pull of the past alongside a focus on the present. The importance of interpretation, and of transference and countertransference, persist within Civitarese’s post-Bionian framework. The crucial role of dreaming is a strong link, as he regards Bionian thinking as the most faithful of contemporary views to the Freudian emphasis on dreams.

Civitarese writes of Bion’s ambuiguity that “it serves to activate the psychoanalytic function of the mind” (p. 2). Civitarese’s Bionian enterprise is similarly intended, a highly speculative, uncertain, open meditation that nonetheless, rather than dissipating in endless abstraction, makes one want to return to the consulting room afresh. The interplay between Bion’s mind and that of Civitarese exemplifies the very sort of creativity and play at the center of any dyadic relationship, the core of the two-person intersubjective psychology Civitarese both describes and performs. And have I mentioned the clinical vignettes? The juxtaposition of the sometimes philosophically thorny and recursively layered examination of the analytic situation with the finely textured, sparklingly idiosyncratic reality of the case material offers a heady brew, one that Civitarese uses to his advantage. Just as Bion’s style can be “simultaneously a torment and a delight” (p. 2), Civitarese’s is daunting and rewarding in its own unique way.