Foreword

It is no mean achievement for a publication — and furthermore one whose subject matter is psychoanalysis — to be celebrating its first quinquennium of issues, even if it appears only once a year. That achievement — mainly due to Anna Meregnani, Annual Editor in chief, and her collaborators — is even more significant considering that the purpose and function of this publication are the dissemination to a wider public, not conversant with a relatively unfamiliar language such as Italian, of some examples of the work of, and the analytic debate within, a psychoanalytic society which now numbers over a thousand members, including candidates, and which can look back over an almost ninety-year history. Moreover, the Italian Psychoanalytic Society's journal, the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, this year completes its sixth decade of publication, although there was of course a notorious twenty-year gap in the history of both the Society and its journal.

This long and traumatic interruption had the consequence that psychoanalysis in Italy effectively began life in two phases, and this, together with certain specific cultural factors, necessarily imposed a heavy burden on its development. However, in the period following the second world war the position of our discipline in this country at least came to resemble that of Italy for Sigmund Freud, who, over the years, can be said to have woven the fabric of a personal grand tour. This is well illustrated by one of the contributions in this issue, whose author, Arnaldo Novelletto, shows how Freud's travels in our land might well have had a decisive influence on his self-analysis. Professor Novelletto also makes a convincing case for his suggestion that Freud was unconsciously induced precisely by his memory of Italy to use the metaphor of an «internal foreign territory» — the phrase appears explicitly in the New Introductory Lectures — for the unconscious, that entity which he discovered or invented, of which he provided an initial wide