Book Review: Lessons in Psychoanalysis: Psychopathology and Clinical Psychoanalysis for trainee analysts. By Franco De Masi. London:  Karnac, 2022,  180 pp., $27.95 paperback.

DOI: 10.2307/jj.23338241

It is a strange feeling when traveling in a new place to see familiar buildings in slightly different settings. The golden arches of a McDonald's gleam against jungle palms or the desert's red aridity. Things that are well known and taken for granted appear new. Their familiarity draws attention to the newness of the landscape; the changed landscape, in turn, makes the traveler reconsider the familiar. (I recognize that referring to unfamiliar constellations, rather than chain restaurants, is the traditional and classier comparison, but I write informed by my own midwestern late capitalist perspective). Although I approached Franco De Masi's book Lessons in Psychoanalysis: Psychopathology and Clinical Psychoanalysis for Trainee Analysts curiously as a trainee analyst myself, one of the most striking features of this book is the ever so slightly different perspective offered by De Masi, an analyst living and working in Milan, Italy, who presents familiar psychoanalytic concepts from his unique perspective.

This book is an edited collection of previously recorded lectures given to analytic trainees at the National Institute of Training of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. De Masi has a long tenure as a training analyst and lecturer; he tells us that this relatively brief but information-filled book was compiled at the suggestion of some of his colleagues, who felt that both trainees and established analysts would benefit from this work. De Masi's role as an educator shines clearly throughout this book. His tone is that of an old-school senior attending physician, no nonsense, who

effortlessly makes sense of a complicated world for baffled trainees. De Masi does his readers a great favor that seasoned clinicians and teachers sometimes overlook: He is kind enough to orient