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Anna Aragno's book sets itself a highly ambitious goal, a new psychoanalytic model of mind that “operationalizes meaning” (p. 385). To discover the new model, I eagerly began reading. Unfortunately, the author's writing style, in the first two chapters especially, combines density and emphatic assertion, which made access to her ideas rather difficult. She adopts a proselytizing tone, which I, as an English nonconformist, found alienating.
I found myself carried along, but sometimes submerged, by a torrent of complex and portenously phrased sentences. A sentence quoted on the jacket is typical: “Our switch in epistemological gestalt opens the way for an experiential developmental model of subjective experience in which human symbolic systems, their stages of development and organisation, along the unconscious-conscious dimension, and their variegated modes and means of expression can begin to be understood” (p. 51). Faced with such sentences, I constantly wanted to translate them into simpler and no less exact language, as in the case above: “A new approach allows for a developmental model of subjective experience, showing the evolution of symbolization in the conscious and unconscious, with its varied forms of expression.” This style may have two particular origins. One is that the work was originally a Ph.D. dissertation, a genre of writing that requires an approach comprehensive yet at the same time focused on the author's development. The other is that Aragno sees herself as joining Freud at the barricades, so that her language has a revolutionary fervor rare today in psychoanalytic books: “To the bold, the mischievous, the creative egoist, the scoundrel psychoanalyst, then, is left the challenge of ‘criminality'—the chance to transcend rules, sacrifice oneself, betray and uphold Freud's doctrines