Ferro, Antonino

An Ark to Survive the Emotional Deluge: The Lively Form of Interpretation in Child Analysis - 2012.


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Based on their clinical experience, the authors explore the form of interpretation in child psychoanalysis, favouring Bion's theoretical model. From Bion's perspective, meanings are not to be discovered but co-constructed; in other words, as the support, interaction in analysis can be conceived as a kind of dreaming together that transforms the role of interpretation, which changes from its classical role relating to transformation into a tool for constructing a more developed mental container and a more effective alpha function. The analyst who plays with a child is required to produce in turn a dream from the day before about what is happening in the relationship by sharing its underlying unconscious emotion, but above all he is asked to communicate it in a way that does not disrupt the process. The possibility of transforming a beta element into an alpha element therefore includes an interpretation that respects the specific nature of the process that characterises child analysis and uses play as a different symbolic form of speech.