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Francesco Gazzillo is a young researcher at the Sapienza University of Rome, with a strong interest in psychotherapy research, personality disorders, and diagnostic methods. He has worked on the Italian version of the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP) and written empirical research papers based on this method for describing and diagnosing personality. He is also the author of a biography of Masud Khan and of other books on the history of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories (Gazzillo and Fontana 2001; Gazzillo and Silvestri 2008; Gazzillo and Ortu 2013). Such diversified interests in a person are not common. In particular, the fact that Gazzillo is a psychotherapy researcher gives this book added value, because the various psychoanalytic theories of pathological personality organizations are seen through the eyes of a person conversant with scientific methodology.
As we know, the term internal saboteur was coined by Ronald Fairbairn (1952), who also used the term antilibidinal ego. Fairbairn postulated an early unitary ego that rather than seeking pleasure seeks a relationship with the object; environmental failures lead to compensatory internalization of the object, which is then defensively split. Thus, the phrase “internal saboteurs” in Gazzillo's title is powerfully evocative. It would be a mistake, however, to think that this book deals mostly with Fairbairn's theory of personality. Three quarters of it (the first three of its four chapters) consists of detailed reviews of the many contributions to the literature on pathological personality organizations. In the fourth and final chapter, summarizing these various conceptions, Gazzillo presents his own unitary view of the topic. However, even without this last chapter, the first three make the book well worth reading, providing as they do a bird's-eye view of the various theories in the difficult field of severe personality psychopathology.
After a preface by Vittorio Lingiardi and Nancy McWilliams