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Giuseppe Civitarese is an Italian relational psychoanalyst whose work is only now becoming more widely known outside of Europe. And he should be better known: his The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field is a challenging, deeply stimulating, and exciting work in which he considers and enlivens contemporary psychoanalytic concepts with both a respectful eye to the past and a quite singularly exciting integration of concepts from semiotics, narrative theory, and field theory.
His dense and sometimes daunting writing style is reflective of the weight of the many models of thought Civitarese is conversant with and draws from. Discursive, digressive, and deeply textured, the work sends out tentacles to history, neuroscience, philosophy, and literary theory. Civitarese works on the assumption that the reader's interest and enthusiasm, if not erudition, match his own. And in spite of the somewhat arduous work the text requires, he turns out to be unexpectedly good company. His writing is infused by a subtle wit, a contagious excitement, and a deeply humane stance toward his patients, shown in case material that feels extraordinarily intimate and vibrantly alive. Whatever one's theoretical orientation, the manner in which Civitarese interweaves case material with theoretical exposition is extraordinarily effective, each making the other the richer.
The style of the work, and its connection to the content, demands attention, both in the Italian original, published by Borla in 2008, and in Philip Slotkin's effective, if somewhat mechanical, English translation. (Civitarese comments in his last chapter on the difficulties of translation in general and of psychoanalytic writing more specifically. This makes sense for an author deeply involved in semiotics and whose relational perspective involves a strong emphasis on how we communicate and what it means to understand another's thinking process.) Civitarese delineates and expands the boundaries of contemporary