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This, the sixteenth volume in The New Library of Psychoanalysis series, presents a theory of the origins of mental life still relatively unknown to those who read psychoanalytic theory only in English. The distinguished British psychoanalyst, Adam Limentani, has drawn together thirteen papers by Eugenio Gaddini and organised them around three intertwined themes: imitation, formation of the ego and its separate objects, and the meaningfulness of the body to the mind. Although seven of these papers have already had disparate publication in English, monolingual readers are here provided with a coherent exposition of the work of this pioneering Italian psychoanalyst.
Eugenio Gaddini's particular focus was the development of psychic life in infancy, an interest shared with the creators of English Object Relations theory, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Psychotherapists already steeped in this tradition will find Gaddini's work, which he also linked with that of Phyllis Greenacre, truly international, encompassing concerns in both European and American psychoanalysis.
Trained in classical instinct theory with its emphasis on the centrality of the Oedipus complex, Gaddini sought to expand psychoanalytic understanding of mental life in the first three years of life through use of his own clinical knowledge and modern observational studies. Imitation has a particular importance as Gaddini proposed that by the middle of the first year an enfant has acquired a mental sense of its body drawn from the sensations which arise through experience, registered by the body but not a simple reflection of actual biological experience. Although the physiological body can exist without mental functioning, it is in the early registration of bodily experience that the mind-body continuum comes into existence. The pre-symbolic nature of this development, through which bodily experience is translated into mental sense, brings the reader up against formidable difficulties in grasping the mom