Foreword

The thirteenth edition of the Annual of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi presents a selection of ten of the most significant articles from our journal, those which lend themselves most easily to interesting our foreign colleagues, stimulating dialogue about theoretical and clinical topics, and at the same time offering a panoramic view of our Society's varied psychoanalytic identity.

The volume opens with Stefano Bolognini's article about the complexity of analytic training, the impact which psychoanalytic theories can have on the psychic reality of the session, and the difficult interplay between the analyst's formative theories and the inevitable uniqueness of each patient. The author starts from his experience in the Theoretical Working Party of the European Psychoanalytic Federation which showed him how little the «theoretical Ego» is master in its own house, how often there is some incoherence between conscious theoretical assumptions and those that are unconscious and implicit. It is clinical material which allows the emergence of individual analysts' transference to the Authors of the schools which trained them, revealing the differences between genuine development of their identity and a Self formed by various imitative or substitutive incorporations. Bolognini stresses the difference between superficial eclecticism and genuine theoretical pluralism, proposing as a solution that analysts adopt a dialectical, open and suspended disposition in which, by means of an introjective identification of partial elements, each of us constructs or co-constructs with the patient the model of psychic reality which best represents what is happening within the analyst himself, in the patient, or in the field constructed by them. An English translation of the article has been published in the «Dialogues» section of the Spiweb site with comments by Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Leopoldo Bleger, and Fred Busch.

The 2018 focus is dedicated to the topic of research and consists of three articles