ABSTRACT
Winner of the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Prize for best Edited book published in 2016
Psychoanalysis in Italy is a particularly diverse and vibrant profession, embracing a number of influences and schools of thought, connecting together new thinking, and producing theorists and clinicians of global renown. Reading Italian Psychoanalysis provides a comprehensive guide to the most important Italian psychoanalytic thinking of recent years, including work by major names such as Weiss, E.Gaddini, Matte Blanco, Nissim Momigliano, Canestri, Amati Mehler, and Ferro. It covers the most important theoretical developments and clinical advances, with special emphasis on contemporary topics such as transference, trauma and primitive states of mind where Italian work has been particular influential.
In this volume, Franco Borgogno, Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society provide an overview of how Italian psychoanalysis has developed from the 1920’s to the present day, tracing its early influences and highlighting contemporary developments. Forty-six seminal and representative papers of psychoanalysts belonging to the two Italian psychoanalytical societies (the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and the Italian Association of Psychoanalysis) have been chosen to illuminate what is special about Italian theoretical and clinical thinking, and what is demonstrative of the specificity of its psychoanalytic discourse. The selected papers are preceded by a first introductory section about the history of psychoanalysis in Italy and followed by a "swift glance at Italian psychoanalysis from abroad". They are grouped into sections which represent the areas particularly explored by Italian psychoanalysis. Each section is accompanied by introductory comments which summarize the main ideas and concepts and also their historical and cultural background, so as to offer to the reader either an orientation and stimulus for the debate and to indicate their connections to other papers included in the present volume and to the international psychoanalytic world.
The book is divided into six parts including:
- History of psychoanalysis in Italy
- Metapsychology
- Clinical practice, theory of technique, therapeutic factors
- The person of the analyst, countertransference and the analytic relationship/field
- Trauma, psychic pain, mourning and working-through
- Preverbal, precocious, fusional, primitive states of the mind
This volume offers an excellent and detailed "fresco" of Italian psychoanalytic debate, shining a light on thinking that has evolved differently in France, England, North and Latin America. It is an ideal book for beginners and advanced students of clinical theory as well as experienced psychoanalysts wanting to know more about Italian psychoanalytic theory and technique, and how they have developed.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |29 pages
History Of Psychoanalysis in Italy
part |148 pages
Metapsychology
chapter |8 pages
Expression in Symbolic Logic of the Characteristics of the System UCS
chapter |18 pages
Transference and Unconscious Communication
part |150 pages
Clinical Practice, Theory of Technique, Therapeutic Factors
chapter |15 pages
Meeting, Telling and Parting
chapter |18 pages
Interpretation and Construction
part |108 pages
The Person of the Analyst, Countertransference and The Analytic Relationship/Field
chapter |15 pages
The Complex Nature of Psychoanalytic Empathy
chapter |8 pages
Reverie and Metaphor
part |123 pages
Trauma, Psychic Pain, Mourning and Working-Through
chapter |21 pages
On The Patient's Becoming An Individual
part |122 pages
Preverbal, Precocious, Fusional, Primitive States of The Mind
chapter |14 pages
Hysteria, from the origins to the Oedipal constellation
chapter |17 pages
Primitive Mental States and The Body
part |12 pages
Afterword