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This is an intriguing and informative blend of humanistic philosophy, linguistics, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. It requires a reading that is slow, takes frequent contemplative breaks, and is circular insofar as the reader often revisits passages already read. Such impulse to turn pages back and connect with ideas expressed in a previous chapter—or the one before it—is not belabored. It is spontaneous (in the spirit of the book's topic) and invariably rewarding.
While regrettably unknown to North American readers, Corradi Fiumara is well established in her country. She is a former professor of philosophy at the Third University of Rome and now serves as a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and has authored a number of books on the intricate links between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics (Corradi Fiumara, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2001). A rich amalgam of these perspectives is also evident in this book, which is not only about its eponymous subject but many others that are related to spontaneity directly (e.g. initiative, intentionality, agency, action) or by their opposition to it (e.g. passivity, mind-like objects, psychic deadness). The result is a mind-enhancing gestalt of ideas, expositions, hypotheses, and declarations. The book is a joy to read.
Allow me now to take you more deeply into its cavernous thought space. Corradi Fiumara begins with a protest against an external or externalized etiology of mental suffering and wishes to bring attention to the inner contributions to the origin and sustenance of psychopathology. She is, however, aware of the dilemma that awaits us here.
If we attribute the narcissistic root of pathology to inadequate early care, we almost become ensnared in a paranoid theory of psychic life whereby all negativity derives from sources placed somewhere “out there.” But then, if we attribute basic pathology to the way in which events are internalized by developing subjects, to the response of the