You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is the first of two metaphorically archeological volumes by the Italian psychoanalyst, Carlo Bonomi, who for decades has been digging beneath the foundational hagiographies of psychoanalysis. The second, Volume 2: Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi is not yet available, though there is an English précis of Volume I and a tantalizing table of contents of Volume 2 on Dr. Bonomi's website. Although identified as Volume 65 of the relational perspectives book series, Volume I is not easily obtainable. The language of the text has some awkward usages and is occasionally garbled, which, along with some careless copy-editing, makes the whopping price something of a sore point.
But … so what? These comments morph into mere cavils when held up to the potent content of this whirlwind of scholarship, destined to forever alter your understanding of Sigmund Freud, the birth agonies of psychoanalysis, and the hitherto unacknowledged origins in trauma of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise.
I first met Carlo Bonomi in 1993, in Geneva where we had both been invited to speak by André Haynal and Ernst Falzeder at the conference 100 Years of Psychoanalysis: Contributions to the History of Psychoanalysis. I was speaking of Sándor Ferenczi as an inventor whose intuitive insights transcended the practice of his contemporaries; Carlo Bonomi (1994) was presenting “Why have we ignored Freud ‘the paediatrician'? The relevance of Freud's paediatric training for the origins of psychoanalysis.” This is the paper (itself the product of substantial research) that would constitute the cornerstone of a monumental undertaking. Though this meeting was almost 25 years ago, I can recall as if yesterday the intensity and passion of Carlo Bonomi's absorption in his findings, even over lunch—and the dizzying impact of what I knew these findings should mean to psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Indeed those very impressions—intensity, passion, and dizzying amazement—are captured in these pages. I read th