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It is with much pleasure that I present these two books by Andrea Sabbadini, a British analyst of Italian origin whom I have known for many years – since July 1990, through a conference organized in London by Alain de Mijolla on the history of psychoanalysis. This common interest materialized in a closer collaboration when Andrea became the founder editor of Psychoanalysis and History (1998–2004). In 2001, he created in London a very successful biannual interdisciplinary conference, the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, which he has been the director of ever since – the ninth EPFF will take place in November 2017. From these experiences came his previous books, The couch and the silver screen (2003) and Projected shadows (2007), two fine collections of papers drawn from the first and the third stagings of the Festival.
In 1998, Andrea was a co-editor of Even paranoids have enemies, an anthology of papers deriving from his personal therapeutic work with psychotic patients, which he had a good chance to carry out at the London Arbours Association, founded by Joseph Berke (a former associate of R.D. Laing) in 1970 (Berke et al., 1998). Also working there for many years as a psychotherapist was Andrea’s wife Laura Forti (1975), whose name had already been familiar to me before I met Andrea himself, as she had been the editor of an important Italian collection of papers of what was then called “the anti-psychiatric movement.”
The first book under review, Moving images, is a fascinating revisitation of the more than centennial relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis, as it emerges from a careful analysis of 23 films dedicated to the following six topics: psychoanalysis itself (starting with Pabst’s 1926 film Secrets of a soul), prostitution (starting with Fellini’s 1957 Cabiria), children (including Rossellini’s 1948 Germany year zero), adolescents (including Sophia’s Mila from Mars 2004), love (including Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo), and scopophilia (including Pow