From the Eclipse of the Body to the Dawn of Thought
Book Details
- Publisher : Free Association Books
- Published : January 2004
- Pages : 251
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 92895
- ISBN 13 : 9781853437885
- ISBN 10 : 1853437883
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This is a collection of some of Armando B. Ferrari's writings published in Italy and in Brazil as books between 1992 and 1998. The book is closely related to the line of thought that starts with S. Freud and continues with K. Abraham, M. Klein and W.R. Bion, and it is the first attempt at creating a psychoanalytic model centred on the relationship between body and mind.
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The main hypothesis is that the body - long excluded from the field of psychoanalytic research - has a fundamental role in the birth, development and realisation of mental functions. The founding element of Ferrari's theoretical model is that the body is the one "object" of the mind as well as its primary reality, hence the notion of Concrete Original Object (COO), a notion which aims of introducing the body in the field of psychoanalytical theory and originates, as a result, a totally new and different understanding of the term "object". In this perspective the psychic object is understandably regarded as a concrete inevitable presence not as a pure imago representing an aspect of external reality. The object is not understood as Klein's symbol: it is a concrete object because it is the body we live in, and provides, furthermore, an insoluble paradox for it presents itself, at the same time, as the object (since we have a body) and as the subject (since we are our body). Ferrari therefore defines the mind as a function of the body and sees the nucleus of human experience in the relation between these two poles. The different implications originated by Ferrari's hypothesis, both on the theoretical and on the clinical ground, are discussed in detail in the book. On the theoretical level a substantial expansion of the Oedipus complex, a revision of the concept of Ego and the presentation of new theoretical models such as the contact net conveying the notion that the roots of thinking, even the most sophisticated thinking, are in the experience of the body. On the technical level tools such as the analytic proposition and language registers provide new perspectives to clinical work with patients with severe psychotic disorders. The book ends with clinical specific examples of work with adolescents as adolescence is an age in which the body-mind relationship reaches levels of utmost tension.
Foreword by R D Hinshelwood.
Author Biography:
Armando Bianco Ferrari is Training Analyst of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Association of São Paulo and Full Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and of the Italian Psychoanalytic Association. He lived in Brazil until 1976 when he moved to Italy.
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