Foreword

This edition of The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual contains an article by Fausta Ferraro on Winnicott and metapsychology and an article by FulvioMazzacane on narrative construction.

It also contains the papers by Anna Nicolò, Massimo Vigna-Taglianti, Anna Ferruta and Stefano Bolognini, presented at the SPI Congress «Unconscious Unconsciouses» (February, 2021) and four articles by Giuseppe Martini, Francesco Remotti, Giovanni Meterangelis, Lucio Russo dedicated to the theme of identity.

In the article entitled «Winnicott and Metapsychology: an ongoing debate», Fausta Ferraro, starting from her participation in a research group on the method of psychoanalysis coordinated by F. Riolo, develops an in-depth reflection on the relationship between Winnicott and Freudian metapsychology. It cannot be said that Winnicott was ‘atheoretical’, although on the basis of precise textual references one can infer his idiosyncrasy for metapsychology. After discussing the detailed considerations that L. Fulgencio and M. Girard have devoted to Winnicott's relationship with metapsychology in the last decade, Winnicott's thought is retraced with particular regard to the theme of destruction and the death instinct. It is through the elaboration of some of his most original concepts, such as those of the transitional area and potential space, that he was able to diverge from the Freudian dialectic between the pleasure principle and the reality principle and thus delineate the unprecedented field of research of tertiary processes.

Fulvio Mazzacane's paper, «External reality, use of characters, and reverie in the construction of the narrative function», recounts a portion of the analysis of a young woman, from the first meeting to the moment when conditions within the analytic field make possible the emergence of a function through which the analytic couple co-construct original narratives. From a theoretical point of view, the Author address a crux in the Bion Field Theory, namely, the way in wh