ABSTRACT
My familiarity with the field concept goes back to the time of my adolescence and it still plays a crucial role in my life. Going to the uSA as an exchange student in the summer of 1972 – and living with a Jewish family in a suburb of new York City – allowed me eventually to understand the social, cultural, and psychological field from which I came originally. I am making reference to a famous and old – but provincial – Italian town of Austrian-hungarian heritage, in which psychoanalysis was very little known, and in which I was later supposed to enter into my father’s firm. Experiencing such a different field, including the attendance of an alternative high school program centered on independent study projects, gave me the courage to understand and later to pursue my own personal and professional goals – and eventually to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.
