Preface

This book contains the results of research conducted from 2014 to 2021 by a team of psychoanalysts from the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana. In 2017 it was assigned the I.PA. Research Grant.

The aim of the research is that of identifying and comparing the basic assumptions behind the theories which contest the present scenario of psychoanalysis. It is therefore intended in the first instance for psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalysis.

To carry out the comparison in the most impartial way we have extracted from the writings of the authors the axioms they start from and from which derive the differences between their psychoanalytic conceptions.

In order to limit the otherwise infinitely vast field of research- while being aware that this choice entails some significant exclusions - the criterion we have adopted is to consider in the first instance the authors from whom the principle currents in the I.P.A. have originated: Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Heinz Hartmann (for Ego Psychology), Heinz Kohut (for the Psychology of the Self); isolating their axioms and comparing them with Freud’s in such a way as to identify the points at which they reveal significant divergences.

Readers with the desire and the patience to follow the path of the research will see what conclusions we have reached and what implications do they entail for the structure of psychoanalytic theory. The idea which has guided this process is that faithfully adopting the axioms from which the divergences between the current theoretical and clinical orientations of psychoanalysis originate is an indispensable precondition for enabling a correct dialogue between these orientations and the development of our discipline.

(F.R.)