Results of the Research

The idea which has guided the research is that the development of psychoanalysis requires a comparison between the main concurrent and often divergent theories which live commensally in the present scenario. This requires the theories to be addressed with sufficient fidelity and precision. We have set ourselves the following question: what are the axioms which the principal authors posited as such and from which their theories and respective divergences descend? Giving an answer to this question has been the objective of the first part of the research.

In 1938, Freud wrote an expressly axiomatic text, the Outline of Psychoanalysis with the aim of expounding the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis «in the most concise form and in the most unequivocal terms» (Freud, , 144). We therefore proposed to extract Freud's axioms literally from his text just as he formulated them, and subsequently to adopt the same criterion for the other authors.

In order to limit the field of research, we have chosen the authors from whom the principal currents in the I.P.A. have originated: Freud, Klein, Hartmann, Winnicott, Bion, Kohut. Isolating their axioms has required the careful examination of a considerable number of writings and some years of work on the original texts. The result of this work is a faithful apparatus of statements on which it is possible to base the comparison, thereby removing it from the plurality of subjective interpretations. The possibility of being able to draw on a reliable «database» constitutes the indispensable premiss for a psychoanalytic ortho-logy, a «correct discourse» between and with the theories to which we refer. Only by faithfully adopting the theories we are speaking about can we actually discuss and compare them.

The second task we set ourselves has been that of comparing the axioms with the aim of revealing the points of divergence between them. For this purpose, we

have adopted the criterion formulated by Rapaport; that of distinguishing two c