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Freud Is Not a Totem and Psychoanalysis Is Not a Religion — A Lonely Planet-style guide for globe-trotting across the scientific paradigms of contemporary psychoanalysis
The New Analyst's Guide to the Galaxy is a slim volume that made its appearance a short while ago on the shelves of national and international bookstores. Simultaneously published in English and Italian, this pocket-sized summer book carries the air, the spirit, and the scientific energy of a text able to spark one's curiosity and to rouse a desire for passionate and, why not, heated arguments on the beach or in the mountains.
Written in the convivial style we have grown to expect from Antonino Ferro, who has generously shared the theoretical and clinical developments of his brilliant psychoanalytic intuitions for almost 30 years, the book lets us in on a conversation between two analysts that soon seems to reveal the nature, breadth, and depth of a Platonic dialogue between a master and a disciple about the ontology and phenomenology of psychoanalysis as a science and therapy of the mind. Here, we find a psychoanalysis that is a scientific discipline gifted with a history, a present, and a future of barely glimpsed vistas that are yet to be explored, both in clinical practice and in the metapsychology that is its guide and necessary daughter.
Imagine an evening dinner in the garden with an astrophysicist who — between a dish of spaghetti con vongole and a salt-crusted sea bream — can explain to you in simple terms the nature and mystery of those black holes that had you struggling with so many doubts and epistemic fatigue, and left you stumbling over the lines of complicated, incomprehensible academic texts. Light food and Socratic language become veritable omega-3 EPA to fluidify your