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Guiseppe Civitarese is a training and supervising analyst in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI). He describes himself as a member of the Pavia School also known as the ‘Italian Bionians’ (p. 214).
The occasion that prompted the writing of this book was the IPA Congress in Mexico City in 2011. Civitarese was invited to read a paper on the unconscious at the inaugural session. It was his discomfort with what he felt were the existing definitions and his subsequent attempt to re-conceptualize the definition of the unconscious that led to the 14 papers written between 2011 and 2014 which, in revised form, make up the contents of this book. ‘The attempt to map some of the essential nodal points of the conceptual network that developed from the key notion of psychoanalysis cost me no little effort but in the process I was able to draw up a small atlas of the unconscious’ (p. 2).
The book's title Truth and the Unconscious derives from a quote of Bion's: ‘truth is the food that makes the mind grow … what moves humans is a real drive to truth’. Civitarese's Introduction lists the questions he hopes to explore: ‘what are the truths of the unconscious … how can we grasp them …. what unconscious are we talking about … and what does psychoanalysis have to say about scientific truth?’ (p. 1). He talks of the Freudian ‘repressed unconscious’ and seemingly suggests that ‘repression’ is the limit of the Freudian understanding (pp. 132-6). In his view, Bion's concept of the ‘inaccessible unconscious, an unconscious that dates back to foetal life’, as well as Ferro's concept of transformation in dreams (p. 71) and the idea