At the Roots of Italian Field Theory

This monographic issue represents an important continuation of the still unfolding and long overdue conversation between the Italian and Anglophone psychoanalytic worlds, and more specifically between Italian and Anglophone forms of psychoanalytic Field Theory.

With respect to North American psychoanalysis, certain nodal points in this conversation can be readily identified, such as Antonino Ferro’s keynote address to the 2009 IPA meeting in Chicago, itself summarizing a number of important publications in English-speaking journals over the previous 20 years. The special relationship Ferro and several of his colleagues established with the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies in the early 2000s is another nodal point and led to years of fertile conversations, collegial collaborations, and seminars, one outgrowth of which was the increased spread of ideas central to the Pavia-group version of the Post-Bionian, Italian Field Theory into mainstream psychoanalytic discourse in North America (Levine, 2022). Noteworthy also were a series of yearly discussion groups held at the February meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) in New York City in the last decade and a simultaneous series of small private clinical seminars on Field Theory held adjacent to these ApsaA meetings.

The establishment of the Psychoanalytic Field Theory book series by Routledge in 2015, edited by Giuseppe Civitarese and Stephanie Montana Katz, marked a significant recognition of Field Theory’s years long migration from its Italian beginnings into the broader mainstream of psychoanalysis. Alongside these developments, the publication in 2016 of the encyclopedic Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (edited by Borgogno, Luchetti, and Marina Coe) introduced non-Italian-speaking analysts to the rich history, tradition, and distinct cultural interpretations of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Ferro, Borgogno, and Civitarese become recipients of the Mary Sigourney Award. Almost a decade