Secret Passages: The Theory and Technique of Interpsychic Relations By Stefano Bolognini, translated by Gina Atkinson London:  Routledge,  248 pp.

Stefano Bolognini, a psychiatrist, training and supervising analyst, former president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, and current president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, has written a delightfully clear text on the diverse perspectives of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Bolognini guides us through the current landscape of psychoanalysis, narrating theory, clinical vignettes, and personal experience with warmth and openness. In a sense, this text reads like a shared voyage with an avuncular psychoanalytic surveyor journeying through important but difficult psychoanalytic terrains and passages.

In his introduction to the book, Glen Gabbard points out that “Bolognini is like a cultural anthropologist studying the various psychoanalytic civilizations around the world with assiduous scholarship and contagious enthusiasm … a veritable tour de force of international psychoanalysis today” (p. xiii). Gabbard highlights the impact of globalization on psychoanalysis, with the explosion of rapid communication traversing traditional divides of geography, language, and social group. Faced with the dilemma and potential dissonance of pluralism, Gabbard suggests that today's analyst struggles with diverse theories within one's own psychoanalytic community as well as theories/approaches derived from languages and cultures that are unfamiliar. In this regard, the analyst balances a binary opposition—retreating into an insular orthodoxy seeking a preferred form of psychoanalysis, potentially disregarding “those who think differently from oneself” versus the alternative: exploring the unfamiliar, learning from others who see and think differently from oneself.

In this text Bolognini balances his narrative—from traditional aspects of classical analysis to the contemporary elaborations of psychoanalysis from North America, South America, Great Britain, and continental Europe, citing as an example Gabbard and Westen's (2003) illuminating paper on r