Preface

The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, which presents a selection of papers published in the previous year in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), has now reached its fourth edition. The aim of this publication is to make Italian psychoanalysis known beyond its linguistic boundaries and to help it to take its place on the international psychoanalytic stage.1

As stated in previous volumes, the Italian Psychoanalytic Society is made up of ten centres situated at various locations throughout the country, each of which organizes scientific activities of its own, frequently involving psychoanalysts from other nations as well as exchanges between the centres themselves. National seminars and congresses are held in addition to these activities.

The Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the official organ of the SPI, does not have issues devoted to specific subjects, but in principle accepts contributions spontaneously submitted for publication by authors, these being peer-reviewed in accordance with the relevant international standards.² In this way it can better reflect the plurality of theoretical currents and references represented in our psychoanalytic society, the common ground shared by its members and the various matters addressed in ongoing individual and group-based research. The journal is in consequence a fertile medium not only for the comparison of ideas but also for conflict between them, both of which elements are increasingly indispensable to the future of psychoanalysis. The titles of each volume of the Annual, as well as those of the quarterly issues of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, are specifically intended to draw attention to some of the threads that weave a diverse range of contributions into a possible common fabric.

It is therefore not surprising that in his detailed, extensive and critical review of the first volume of The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, Jack Giuliani (writing in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2009) note