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This slim volume is a fine representative of the work being done by Continental, especially Italian, psychoanalysts working within post-Bionian field theory. We are shown the analyst's mind at work as we enter the realm of Mauro Manica's idiosyncratic version of field theory, a work pushing the boundaries separating psychoanalytic writing, literary creation, and philosophical speculation. Manica's work gives us an entrancing example
of the clinical, aesthetic, and philosophical thinking that can be generated within the porously boundaried metapsychology of field theory.
The author's central interest is the development of the self within a relational matrix, and the impasses and challenges of such creation. Winnicott even more than Bion is the essential master and inspiration for Manica's description of early mental life, though he also refers to Laplanche's extension of Winnicottian ideas, which often sounds like Winnicott's description of the early environment of the infant-mother pair. Like Winnicott (and inspired as well by the frequently mentioned Meltzer, Grotstein, Bromberg, and Ogden, and even more closely by Ferro and Civitarese), Manica is most passionately focused on an understanding of how the self is constituted, how early mental life, inevitably both relational and instinctual, creates a self—or fails to—within its interpenetrating relational environment. Indeed, this work is as much about how to understand selfhood as it is about psychoanalytic technique or treatment, which takes second place, in this volume, to using psychoanalytic understanding to construct the self and to interrogate and define the traumatic events capable of abrogating this process.
And what sort of psychoanalytic understanding? In addition to his grounding in Winnicott and Bion, Manica is inspired by Freud, Jung, Klein, Kohut, Lacan, and Laplanche and uses elements of all these theorists' work without much concern for disagreements and inconsistencies among them. I don't think Man