Giuseppe Civitarese
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4055474 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Giuseppe Civitarese |
| PRENOMES | Giuseppe |
| SOBRENOME | Civitarese |
| ASSINATURA | CIVITARESE G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | American Psychoanalytic Association |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3466-4329 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 57 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 149 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Response to Michel Sanchez Cardenas
Who is Missing From the Picture? Recognition, Enactment, and Containment in Lucy Lafarge’s “The Imaginer and the Imagined”
formula, treated as an unconscious phantasy that organizes reciprocal expectations and that, in clinical work, comes into view as a shared scene rather than a purely individual "distortion." The author brings out the essay's unspoken dialogue with European traditions, especially Kleinian and post-Bionian lines, and traces its turning point, when the case lets LaFarge's own history surface, shifting argument into testimony. The paper thus reframes…
Intercorporeality and the Fabric of Ethical Life
S’il-vous-plaît, considérez-moi comme un rêve ». Une vision bionienne du rêve
Recognition in Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications”
A seminal text in psychoanalytic literature, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications,” like the Sphinx, continues to challenge us. At birth, the infant attempts to destroy the object, and if the mother survives this destruction, the child gains a sense of reality. In this essay, Winnicott challenges classical conceptions of aggression, viewing destruction as an expression of love and innate vitality. He critiques idealized view…
We-Community, Ineinandersein and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis
The author examines Dan Zahavi’s study of Husserlian philosophy, tracing Husserl’s transition from an early solipsistic position to the later development of a radical intersubjective view. He examines the concept Husserl invented of intersubjectivity, highlighting its development and influence on Heidegger, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. The main thesis is that his speculative view of the complex relationship between self, other, and world de…
Upgrade to PI.4, or rethinking projective identification from the vertex of the analytic field
The paper attempts to answer a key question: does the concept of projective identification (PI) still have a place in the metapsychology of post-Bionian analytic field theory (AFT)? Over time, PI has been characterized as increasingly interpersonal, especially as revised by Bion and Ogden. Beginning with the Barangers, writers on AFT have also spoken about what might best be called "crossing" PI as the foundation of the analytic field. However, o…
Bion’s “Attacks on Linking” and the Roots of Ethical Life
“Thus far and no further”
Humans are highly social primates who naturally seek out groups in which to live. Our individual psychology is inherently intertwined with that of the group, forming an inextricable link between the two. In keeping with Bion's insights into group dynamics, we approach contemporary conflicts by examining them through both social and psychoanalytic lenses. Drawing on Foucault's and Deleuze's analyses of societies, as well as considering the impact …
Flashes in a Moment of Danger
The author emphasizes Adrienne Harris’s skillful use of autobiographical material in his writing, an aspect that contributes to making it a remarkable essay. He also argues that any psychoanalytic writing about is invariably autobiographical, and that this is also the way, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, to move from mere chronicle to history. Nothing in a psychoanalytic essay tastes true unless it has first been immersed in the subjectivity of the …
Does it Appear to ‘Resemble’ Reality? on the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Writing
This paper explores the intricate nexus of writing and psychoanalysis by addressing a key question: In what and how many directions should analytic writing be ethical? The author structures the argument across three axes. First, in an introduction, writing's role as a psychoanalytic invariant is emphasized. Then, an exploration ensues, delving into writing as praxis, navigating complex technical choices, from micro- to macro-perspectives in clini…
Intuition and we-ness in Bion and post-Bionian field theory
Intuition" is probably the most frequently used term in all Bion's writings. However, in order to understand its role in his thought it is essential to give it the clearest possible definition. The thesis of this article is that by intuition Bion means a "specific" psychoanalytic concept. It is thus possible to extract intuition from the vague and mystifying reading of it by some authors, whic runs the risk of falling into an empty "intuitionism"…
And Bomb or no Bomb, We, We Will Get to Rome”
Que significa «brincar» em psicanálise
«Brincar» em psicanálise tem que ver com a) escutar o discurso inconsciente como se virtualmente qualquer coisa possa refletir o sonho do par ou do campo analítico, b) interpretar o processo analítico não como uma correção às distorções da transferência, mas como uma promoção de transformações, c) adotar um estilo simples, direto e espontâneo de conversação com o paciente. No novo paradigma da psicanálise, que se pode definir como ontológico e já…
On Bion’s Concept of Truth in an Extra-Moral Sense
Interview with Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PHD, July 2014
From Listening to Overhearing. A Review of Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year
There is no intelligence without emotion.–-Ezra Pound1In my experience a great many analysts don’t really know what sort of artists they are.Q: What if they are not artists?Bion: Then they are in t
Intercorporeity, Un-Distancing, and Aura in Skype Analysis
The Covid pandemic has forced analysts around the world, some more than others, to work using Zoom and Skype. The technical innovation is here to stay and raises questions on a theoretical level. Is online analysis 'real' analysis or not? What is lost from the analytical experience? What, if anything, is gained? The global health emergency, on the one hand, has made these questions inescapable; on the other, it has provided a kind of huge experim…
Invisible-visual hallucinations in Bion’s “Attacks on Linking”
Writing Attacks on Linking, it is as if Bion had listened to his former analyst. In a lecture on technique given the year before, Klein expressed the wish that someone would write "a book about linking [...] one of the essential points in analysis". Later taken up and commented on in Second Thoughts, Attacks on Linking, has become perhaps Bion's most famous paper and, Freud aside, the fourth most cited article in the whole of psychoanalytic liter…
Duchamp, Sadomasochism, and the Psychoanalytic Field
Some patients tediously describe depictions of their sexual perversions. These can bring the analyst to feel intense boredom and frustration. This "almost unavoidable monotony" can be interpreted in various ways. It can be seen as an expression of the patient's compulsion to repeat, whether one considers it a product of the death drive, or the need to give meaning to the traumatic experience that caused the perversion itself. On the other hand, i…
On Using Bion’s Concepts of Point, Line, and Linking in the Analysis of a 6-Year-Old Child
In Transformations Bion deals extensively with the concepts of point and line. Investigating their origin and nature, he explores the process of symbolization that leads to the birth of the psyche—and to the continuous re-birth that occurs (or should occur) in analysis—as well its failures in psychosis. His thesis is that the point is equivalent to the perceptual and emotional experience of the no-breast, the line to the temporal evolution of the…
The Aesthetic-Rhizomatic Matrix of Thinking
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 …
Una vita cura una vita. Inizi, maturità, esiti d’una vocazione. Una biografia professionale
Tales of Covid-19
The pandemic has been such a dramatic experience that it has newly illuminated the factors that can transform Hegel's necessary "infection"-a permeability to the other and the intersubjective foundation of the ego-into a contagion that alienates the subject. The dialectic between these two kinds of otherness represents what is truly at stake in any encounter-i.e., mutual recognition. Therefore, despite the terrible load of concreteness and suffer…
The Analyst’s Desire
Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst
Bion describes transformation in hallucinosis (TH) as a psychic defence present in elusive psychotic scenarios in which there is a total adherence to concrete reality: as the hallucinatory activity which physiologically infiltrates perception and allows us to know reality, setting it off against a background of familiarity; and then, surprisingly, as the ideal state of mind towards which the analyst has to move in order to intuit the facts of the…
The limits of interpretation. A reading of Bion’s “On Arrogance”
When re-read today, "On arrogance", a very brief paper Bion wrote in 1958, reveals its extraordinary topicality. We can think of it both as a commentary on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and as an essay on the "disease" of psychoanalysis. In both cases, lying at its centre is the triad of curiosity-stupidity-arrogance that drives us to know the truth "at any cost". In this paper Bion redefines the crime of Oedipus (and therefore of psychoanalysis) around…
Intersubjectivity And Analytic Field Theory
Intersubjectivity is the central concept of the relational paradigm, the most widely employed in contemporary psychoanalysis. Yet we do not have a clear definition of it. Usually it is synonymous with “the interpersonal” and thus indicates the interaction that takes place between two already constituted subjects. In this sense it has little to do with the radical social theory of subjectivation suggested by the term, at least originally, in Husse…
Caesura’ as Bion’s discourse on method
The author contends that Caesura, one of Bion's last works, can be read as the equivalent of Descartes's Discourse on Method. In this compact and complex text, the dictate of 'methodical' and 'hyperbolic doubt'- so called because it is taken to the extreme form of application to the faculty of thought itself - which, for Descartes, represents the fundamental principle of philosophical and scientific research, is reflected in the formula of 'trans…
On Bion’s Concepts of Negative Capability and Faith
Bion left us an important technical principle. We can summarize it in the concepts of negative capacity and faith. They are two sides of the same coin, but they are also widely misunderstood. It is not easy to accept the idea that the analyst must listen to the patient by actively depriving himself of memory, desire, and understanding; not only, but that the analyst has also to focus on the here and now and radically put concrete and historical r…
Fire at the theatre
Only in Bion's extended idea of ‘waking dream thought’ is the oneiric paradigm of the cure (already an obvious Freudian principle) completely applicable. The author's basic hypothesis is that, by adopting this paradigm thoroughly, one can combine the radical antirealism which is expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications are transference‐connected (here meaning ‘false connection’‐i.e. as projection/displacement of elemen…
Immersion versus interactivity and analytic field
Losing oneself in a story, a film or a picture is nothing but another step in the suspension of disbelief that permits one to become immersed in the 'novel' of reality. It is not by chance that the text-world metaphor informs classical aesthetics that, more than anything else, emphasizes emotional involvement. On the contrary, as in much of modern art, self-reflexivity and metafictional attention to the rhetoric of the real, to the framework, to …
On sublimation
Although it encapsulates the Freudian theory of art, the theory of sublimation has become outmoded. What is more, since its inception there has always been something ill-defined about it. Does it use sexualized or de-sexualized drive energy? Is it a defence or an alternative to defence? Does it serve Eros or Thanatos? Is it useful in clinical work or is it unusable? The only, albeit uncertain, aid to a definition relies on the extrinsic criterion…
Bion and the sublime
In constructing his theory Bion drew on a number of symbolic matrices: psychoanalysis, philosophy, mathematics, literature, aesthetics. The least investigated of these is the last. True, we know that Bion cites many authors of the Romantic period, such as Coleridge, Keats, Blake and Wordsworth, as well as others who were held in high esteem in the Romantic period, such as Milton. However, less is known about the influence exerted on him by the ae…
The concept of time in Bion's “A Theory of Thinking”
A complex and subtle theory of time is at the heart of Bion's 1962 text "A Theory of Thinking." The central point is the differentiation of "conception" and "thought," psychic elements that in the infant are born respectively from experiences of satisfaction and frustration. These mnestic inscriptions should be understood as in dialectic relation with each other. From this matrix, within which originary temporality is established, lived time deri…
Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Analytic Process
Bion’s “Evidence” and His Theoretical Style
The author discusses "Evidence" (1976), a brief but very intense and fascinating paper in which Bion provides a unique opportunity to see him at work in his clinical practice. In the story of a patient, Bion reconstructs two sessions that are all the more true for being imaginary-i.e., narrated ("dreamed"). The matter of language and style in psychoanalysis is of the utmost importance, according to Bion-one could say, literally, a matter of life …
Dreams that mirror the session
Dreams in which the analyst appears undisguised almost always depict violations of the setting. Often experienced as special, epiphanic moments, they give a glimpse of an intense, emotional reaction to traumatogenic or otherwise significant events that have occurred during the session or in the most recent previous ones. Probably, the essential aspect of these dreams can be found in the 'form of their content'. This may be paralleled by the narra…
Intercorporeity, Un-Distancing, and Aura in Skype Analysis
The Covid pandemic has forced analysts around the world, some more than others, to work using Zoom and Skype. The technical innovation is here to stay and raises questions on a theoretical level. Is online analysis 'real' analysis or not? What is lost from the analytical experience? What, if anything, is gained? The global health emergency, on the one hand, has made these questions inescapable; on the other, it has provided a kind of huge experim…
Experiences in Groups as a key to “late” Bion
In order to understand the 'late' Bion, i.e. his production from Learning from Experience onwards, the most difficult and controversial, it is worth re-reading not only the essays in Second Thoughts, but also Experiences in Groups. The hypothesis of this work is that Bion spent his life as a scholar - probably without even being fully aware of it, since he never talks about it - to transpose his theory of groups into his theory of individual psyc…
Response by Giuseppe Civitarese
Does it Appear to ‘Resemble’ Reality? on the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Writing
This paper explores the intricate nexus of writing and psychoanalysis by addressing a key question: In what and how many directions should analytic writing be ethical? The author structures the argument across three axes. First, in an introduction, writing's role as a psychoanalytic invariant is emphasized. Then, an exploration ensues, delving into writing as praxis, navigating complex technical choices, from micro- to macro-perspectives in clini…
Intuition and we-ness in Bion and post-Bionian field theory
Intuition" is probably the most frequently used term in all Bion's writings. However, in order to understand its role in his thought it is essential to give it the clearest possible definition. The thesis of this article is that by intuition Bion means a "specific" psychoanalytic concept. It is thus possible to extract intuition from the vague and mystifying reading of it by some authors, whic runs the risk of falling into an empty "intuitionism"…
Invisible-visual hallucinations in Bion’s “Attacks on Linking”
Writing Attacks on Linking, it is as if Bion had listened to his former analyst. In a lecture on technique given the year before, Klein expressed the wish that someone would write "a book about linking [...] one of the essential points in analysis". Later taken up and commented on in Second Thoughts, Attacks on Linking, has become perhaps Bion's most famous paper and, Freud aside, the fourth most cited article in the whole of psychoanalytic liter…
Tales of Covid-19
The pandemic has been such a dramatic experience that it has newly illuminated the factors that can transform Hegel's necessary "infection"-a permeability to the other and the intersubjective foundation of the ego-into a contagion that alienates the subject. The dialectic between these two kinds of otherness represents what is truly at stake in any encounter-i.e., mutual recognition. Therefore, despite the terrible load of concreteness and suffer…
Masochism and its Rhythm
Over five years, from 1919 to 1924, Freud dealt with masochism in three texts written in close proximity: “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Initially Freud explains masochism as incestuous fixation on the father and regression to pregenital, sadistic ways of loving. Subsequently he considers it primarily as subservient to the death drive. This paper starts from an idea present in tw…
We-Community, Ineinandersein and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis
The author examines Dan Zahavi’s study of Husserlian philosophy, tracing Husserl’s transition from an early solipsistic position to the later development of a radical intersubjective view. He examines the concept Husserl invented of intersubjectivity, highlighting its development and influence on Heidegger, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. The main thesis is that his speculative view of the complex relationship between self, other, and world de…
Upgrade to PI.4, or rethinking projective identification from the vertex of the analytic field
The paper attempts to answer a key question: does the concept of projective identification (PI) still have a place in the metapsychology of post-Bionian analytic field theory (AFT)? Over time, PI has been characterized as increasingly interpersonal, especially as revised by Bion and Ogden. Beginning with the Barangers, writers on AFT have also spoken about what might best be called "crossing" PI as the foundation of the analytic field. However, o…
On the Word’s Work
On the WOrd's WOrk F or me, I guess, writing is rooted in long sittings with Pinocchio when I was a child, which my mother and I took turns reading aloud.Perhaps, on an oedipal level, it has also to do with transgression and reparation (a pair of concepts that, as it happens, bring together our analytic parents).I mean a certain taste for intertextuality, a sort of spontaneous attitude to weave threads coming from different disciplinary fields.No…
Do cyborgs dream? Post‐human landscapes in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective (2006)
“My interest in nightmares comes from my childhood. The most horrible thing for me, then, was falling asleep, because suddenly I would descend into dreams which frightened me”. As Shinya Tsukamoto
Fire at the theatre
Only in Bion's extended idea of ‘waking dream thought’ is the oneiric paradigm of the cure (already an obvious Freudian principle) completely applicable. The author's basic hypothesis is that, by adopting this paradigm thoroughly, one can combine the radical antirealism which is expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications are transference‐connected (here meaning ‘false connection’‐i.e. as projection/displacement of elemen…
Dreams that mirror the session
Dreams in which the analyst appears undisguised almost always depict violations of the setting. Often experienced as special, epiphanic moments, they give a glimpse of an intense, emotional reaction to traumatogenic or otherwise significant events that have occurred during the session or in the most recent previous ones. Probably, the essential aspect of these dreams can be found in the 'form of their content'. This may be paralleled by the narra…
When our words disturb the psychoanalytic process
Words that “touch’ are closely related to words that “jar.” This article faces the problem of micro- and macrotraumatic effects in psychoanalytic interpretation, using the theme of resistance as a guideline. If it is true that resistance is what blocks psychoanalytic comprehension and progress in clinical work, it is equally true that it provides elements for clinically organizing the psychoanalytic dialogue. Being attentive to the signals in the…
Caesura’ as Bion’s discourse on method
The author contends that Caesura, one of Bion's last works, can be read as the equivalent of Descartes's Discourse on Method. In this compact and complex text, the dictate of 'methodical' and 'hyperbolic doubt'- so called because it is taken to the extreme form of application to the faculty of thought itself - which, for Descartes, represents the fundamental principle of philosophical and scientific research, is reflected in the formula of 'trans…
Immersion versus interactivity and analytic field
Losing oneself in a story, a film or a picture is nothing but another step in the suspension of disbelief that permits one to become immersed in the 'novel' of reality. It is not by chance that the text-world metaphor informs classical aesthetics that, more than anything else, emphasizes emotional involvement. On the contrary, as in much of modern art, self-reflexivity and metafictional attention to the rhetoric of the real, to the framework, to …
Do cyborgs dream? Post‐human landscapes in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective (2006)
“My interest in nightmares comes from my childhood. The most horrible thing for me, then, was falling asleep, because suddenly I would descend into dreams which frightened me”. As Shinya Tsukamoto
Il bambino e le sue relazioni. Attaccamento e individualità tra teoria e osservazione [The Child and His Relationships
Il bambino e le sue relazioni. Attaccamento e individualita tra teoria e osservazione [The Child and His Relationships: Attachment and Individuality Between Theory and Observation] 1 by Cristina ri
Towards an ethics of responsibility
Commenting on recently discovered letters sent by Bion to Rickman, the author highlights the influence Bion's first analyst had on him. It is strikingly evident that both shared very similar points of view about key matters in psychoanalysis, including clinical theory, epistemology, scepticism, antiauthoritarianism, the intersubjective conception of the subject, the concept of analytic field, epistemology, the “truth drive,” and what can be calle…
Response by Giuseppe Civitarese
Bion’s “Evidence” and His Theoretical Style
The author discusses "Evidence" (1976), a brief but very intense and fascinating paper in which Bion provides a unique opportunity to see him at work in his clinical practice. In the story of a patient, Bion reconstructs two sessions that are all the more true for being imaginary-i.e., narrated ("dreamed"). The matter of language and style in psychoanalysis is of the utmost importance, according to Bion-one could say, literally, a matter of life …
Prendersi cura. Sul senso dell'esperienza psicoanalitica [Taking Care
Not the Accademia bridge, nor Calatrava's Constitution Bridge, but the many small bridges which pass over the canals of Venice: this is the picture which came into my mind as I read the successive
Bion and the sublime
In constructing his theory Bion drew on a number of symbolic matrices: psychoanalysis, philosophy, mathematics, literature, aesthetics. The least investigated of these is the last. True, we know that Bion cites many authors of the Romantic period, such as Coleridge, Keats, Blake and Wordsworth, as well as others who were held in high esteem in the Romantic period, such as Milton. However, less is known about the influence exerted on him by the ae…
Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst
Bion describes transformation in hallucinosis (TH) as a psychic defence present in elusive psychotic scenarios in which there is a total adherence to concrete reality: as the hallucinatory activity which physiologically infiltrates perception and allows us to know reality, setting it off against a background of familiarity; and then, surprisingly, as the ideal state of mind towards which the analyst has to move in order to intuit the facts of the…
Styles of criticism
Analytic Field and Its Transformations
Truth as Immediacy and Unison
Truthcommon groundphilosophyepistemologyanalytic theoryW. R. Bionpsychic realityemotionsknowledgethinkingunisonimmediacy
On sublimation
Although it encapsulates the Freudian theory of art, the theory of sublimation has become outmoded. What is more, since its inception there has always been something ill-defined about it. Does it use sexualized or de-sexualized drive energy? Is it a defence or an alternative to defence? Does it serve Eros or Thanatos? Is it useful in clinical work or is it unusable? The only, albeit uncertain, aid to a definition relies on the extrinsic criterion…
Masochism and its Rhythm
Over five years, from 1919 to 1924, Freud dealt with masochism in three texts written in close proximity: “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Initially Freud explains masochism as incestuous fixation on the father and regression to pregenital, sadistic ways of loving. Subsequently he considers it primarily as subservient to the death drive. This paper starts from an idea present in tw…
Hymenality in psychoanalysis
Sublime Subjects
Bion and Contemporary Psychoanalysis
On Bion’s Concepts of Negative Capability and Faith
Bion left us an important technical principle. We can summarize it in the concepts of negative capacity and faith. They are two sides of the same coin, but they are also widely misunderstood. It is not easy to accept the idea that the analyst must listen to the patient by actively depriving himself of memory, desire, and understanding; not only, but that the analyst has also to focus on the here and now and radically put concrete and historical r…
The concept of time in Bion's “A Theory of Thinking”
A complex and subtle theory of time is at the heart of Bion's 1962 text "A Theory of Thinking." The central point is the differentiation of "conception" and "thought," psychic elements that in the infant are born respectively from experiences of satisfaction and frustration. These mnestic inscriptions should be understood as in dialectic relation with each other. From this matrix, within which originary temporality is established, lived time deri…
The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott
The limits of interpretation. A reading of Bion’s “On Arrogance”
When re-read today, "On arrogance", a very brief paper Bion wrote in 1958, reveals its extraordinary topicality. We can think of it both as a commentary on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and as an essay on the "disease" of psychoanalysis. In both cases, lying at its centre is the triad of curiosity-stupidity-arrogance that drives us to know the truth "at any cost". In this paper Bion redefines the crime of Oedipus (and therefore of psychoanalysis) around…
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