In three essays, Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca undertakes to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis. As Adam Limentani states in his foreword to the American edition, the author's intention is "to promote a healthier approach to our way of looking at psychoanalysis." He does so by exploring the phenomenon of "closure" as it has functioned within psychoanalytic groups since Freud. Freud, he asserts, promoted a sense of elitism among his followers. This, together with his reluctance to tolerate innovation, encouraged a narcissistic relation to the giant on whose shoulders all psychoanalysts and theoreticians, revisionist or not, ultimately stand. Speziale-Bagliacca contends that a theoretical insistence on phallic "supremacy" is intimately linked to Freud's authoritarianism. This promoted a phallic ideology