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Psychoanalysis did not become a socially significant phenomenon in Italy until the 1969 IPA Congress in Rome. In an introduction to Stefano Bolognini's paper on empathy (a version of which appears as chapter 8 of the book under review1), Marco Conti (2011) helpfully contextualized his colleague's work by telling us that in Italy, “lacking important pioneers such as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, or Heinz Hartmann, it took many years for us to get a good idea of what psychoanalysis and its many points of view were all about.” Italian analysts spent many years studying and absorbing the various schools, and meeting with and being supervised by foreign colleagues. Thus their work is inevitably pluralistic. Bolognini has studied North and South American perspectives, as well as British and French authors, and has integrated this reading into his own unique voice.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, “Three Prefaces to the Discussion,” contains three short essays that introduce readers to the author's way of thinking. In chapter 1, “Freud's ‘Objects,’” he writes, “The discussion … I will develop is not in favor of a generic theoretical-clinical eclecticism, but … it is in favor of the recognition of plurality and complexity of our contemporary utilizability in interchanges among colleagues and in the privacy of daily theoretical-clinical reflections” (p. 10). Later he elaborates: “I understand our ‘post-modernism,’ in short, as the following: a substantial familial appreciation, humanizing and not idealizing, of our original psychoanalytic objects, in full recognition of