Abstract

In contemporary psychoanalysis, a change seems to take place oriented towards a new and generative analytical sensitivity, that is, towards an ontological psychoanalysis that has to do with being and becoming and with innovative forms of receptivity and responsiveness in the encounter between patient and analyst. Introduced and elaborated above all by Winnicott and Bion, ontological psychoanalysis aims to allow the patient the experience of discovering himself more creatively and, «in that state of being, become more fully alive, more fully himself» (Ogden, 2022, 11). In an article published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2017, the Israeli psychoanalyst Ofra Eshel attributed to the contributions of Winnicott and Bion the merit of having brought about a quantum revolution in the scientific discourse of psychoanalysis, which would be substantiated in the transition from an epistemological psychoanalytic model (where it matters what the analyst knows and the patient comes to know about himself) to an ontological model (in which the analyst’s presence becomes essential, everything that the analyst is and manages to «become» of the emotional experience of the patient). The purpose of this work is to underline how in ontological psychoanalysis we can witness a clinical and technical transformation that is as significant on the clinical level as on that of the technique, where the development of vitality and the feeling of existing as oneself represents one of the main parameters for assessment of the progress of care.