Foreword

Like the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, of which it presents English translations of a selection of papers published in the previous year, The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual is not composed of contributions on a subject suggested in advance by the editorial board. Most of the articles are proposed spontaneously and determined by the demands of their authors' personal clinical and theoretical concerns.

The Annual thus reflects the variety of issues and interests thriving within the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, which is made up of eleven psychoanalytic centres located in a number of different towns and regions. During the course of the ninety years since the foundation of the Society (which, however, include the «blackout» of the fascist period and the Second World War), each centre has cultivated its own specific tradition of psychoanalytic thought and concentrated on specific issues within them. Each has undertaken research in its own individual and sometimes unique way, but always in close contact with the international psychoanalytic world.

However, like the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual too presents this diversity and plurality in a form and with a distinctive «banner head-line» which, in the overarching structure woven by the individual papers in their spontaneity and originality of composition, transcend any convergences or divergences of perspectives and approaches and yield a fabric of shared problems and tasks jointly undertaken of which the authors themselves are quite often unaware.

We thus have a multi-voice background dialogue which, as tellingly pointed out some time ago by Jack Giuliani (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 78, 317-340, 2009) - forgive me for quoting him again - constitutes «an original and diverse blend of several historical and theoretical traditions […], a unique synthesis and cross-cultural dialogue of theories [and] a literary and theoretical integration that is impressive and compelling».

In this sixth volume of T