Foreword

In introducing this tenth volume of the Psychoanalytic Annual, a compendium of the best articles to have appeared in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi during 2015, I wish to begin at the beginning: the foundation of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, an achievement by the «bold» Marco Levi Bianchini, whose deeds are outlined in the absorbing narrative by Rita Corsa. The origins, present state and future character of psychoanalysis are the underlying themes of Anna Ferruta's article, in which she skilfully addresses the question of how to extend the psychoanalytic method, while still preserving its original form and distinctiveness, in order to meet contemporary demands for treatment.

One of the key elements of psychoanalytic practice is a readiness to immerse oneself in mystery, what Bion called «the capacity to have feelings of respect for the unknown». Exactly this Keatsian negative capability is celebrated in Nadia Fusini's article as a mode of encountering existence and a foundation of the ars poetica. Bion, Beckett and Heidegger make brief appearances in this piece before returning in other thematic sections of this volume.

The theme of the unknown, of negative capability, also re-echoes in Giuseppe Pellizzari's contribution, together with concepts such as hope and metaphor, constituent ingredients of a therapeutic action not to be understood as a procedure but reconceptualised in terms of an adventure.

In the piece by Benedetta Guerrini Degl' Innocenti we are taken into the consulting room: here the analyst is hard at work with an anorexic patient, with the symptomatic expression of a body deprived of its metaphorical possibilities.

Sections of the Annual such as Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Writing Psychoanalysis, and In the Cinema Screen are expressions of a psychoanalysis that can be conceived as a Bionian probe which expands the field of its investigations. This expansion comes about to the same degree as the field of psychoanalysis encounters other areas of know