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It is a pleasure to review this book by the Italian psychoanalyst Riccardo Lombardi. He is in many ways larger than life, a true Renaissance man, thoroughly knowledgeable about psychoanalysis, Greek mythology, poetry, music, good food, and wine. (Indeed he is, in addition to his work as a psychoanalyst, a wine critic.) Lombardi is someone whose very presence is curative. He integrates bodily pleasures with the intellect and brings the essence of the body and its feelings into the clinical situation. He gets to the heart of matters, to the concrete real body. His cases demonstrate an application of Bion's theory in practice, so sorely needed by those of us struggling to understand Bion.
Lombardi thoroughly reviews the literature pertaining to the “body” after Freud's famous declaration that “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego” (1923, p. 26). Seven of the ten chapters are previously published. The translation of the book, included in Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron's Relational Perspectives Book Series, is excellent. Lombardi is a medically trained psychiatrist who, having originally planned to follow in his surgeon father's footsteps, learned about the important role of touch by watching his father operate. He describes how he is able to reach the most severe of psychotic patients by encouraging them to verbalize, to symbolize their inner bodily sensations, which have been cut off from the mind. He demonstrates how these concrete sensations can become experienced in the analyst's own body.