Formless Infinity—Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion by Riccardo Lombardi translated by K. Christenfeld, G. Atkinson, A. Sabbadini, & P. Slotkin London:  Routledge, The New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2016,  265 pp. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis—Development After Bion by Riccardo Lombardi translated by K. Christenfeld, G. Atkinson London:  Routledge, The Relational Perspectives Book Series, 2017,  226 pp.

An article in The New York Times Magazine — “David's Ankles: How Imperfections Can Bring Down the World's Most Perfect Statue” — graphically describes what happens when there is no vertical integrity, when the center of gravity is off, or, to put it in the language of Riccardo Lombardi, when there is a “discordant arrangement” (Lombardi, , p. 1). According to the article, fissures and cracks in the ankles of Michelangelo's David threaten to give way to a shattering crash:

The seed of the problem is a tiny imperfection in the statue's design. The center of gravity in the base doesn't align with the center of gravity in the figure itself; when the base is level, in other words, the David's body is slightly off-balance.

There is … “an eccentricity of the loads.” This places extra pressure on the David's narrowest part: his ankles. As long as the

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statue is perfectly upright, the eccentricity of the loads is tolerable. But there is very little margin for error. If you tilt the base even slightly, the stress on the ankles sharply increases. (Anderson, 2016)

In Lombardi's two books that have been translated into English — Formless Infinity (2016) and Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis 1 —he eloquently lays out the problem when the center of gravity of the vertical mind-body connection is off — when we encounter in our patients an “eccentricity of the loads” that leaves them grappling with primitive mental states that are overburdened with irrational thinking, with no direction known. In a recent interview in these pages, Lombardi says:

It was clear for me from the beginning that psychosis is at the core of psychoanalysis and that madness can be analyzable as a crucial chance of confrontation between the rational and irrational. (Lombardi & Marra, 2016)

This sensibility thrives in both of Lombardi's books. But, he emphasizes, his approach to primitive mental states in his patients is not that of “entering into a special discourse” that only a