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There are books that make you reflect on issues that, no matter how broad the scope of your interest or attention, you may have never paused long enough to examine or discover what you don't know. This is one of those books. For Freud, the term psychoanalysis has three definitions: (1) “a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way; (2) “a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders”; (3) “a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline” (1923, p. 235).
The commitment that Cosimo Schinaia has made in recent years has a lot to do with the third meaning, that is, to try to use the psychoanalytic method to understand issues concerning the place where we live. For Schinaia, because of our nomadic nature and the vagaries of history, home is always an imaginary place, more grounded in a phantasmatic and mental landscape than in a physical one. The place we live in has an internal reality. Deterioration of the physical environment that surrounds this internal representation of our place, called home, has an emotional impact on that internal reality. Schinaia examines the complex overlapping of external and internal reality in our psychic reactions to environmental issues.
In relation to Freud's third point, this overlapping of internal and environmental forces converges in a new scientific discipline: an approach to the psychoanalytic dimension aimed at questioning precisely the events we are immersed in but do not duly attend to at the conscious level. As his book clearly demonstrates, such events are more firmly rooted in our unconscious. “Psychic traffic jams” (ingorghi psichici) are defined in the book as moments of jumble between external experience and internal elaborations, in the delicate balance between human beings and the environment.