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This book is a collection of thirteen of the papers of the late Eugenio Gaddini. They are by no means all that Gaddini wrote, as the Italian edition of his collected papers apparently runs into over 800 pages, compared with these papers which fill less than 200. The papers in question were selected and edited by his colleague and long-time friend Adam Limentani, specifically to focus on Gaddini's particular interest in the very earliest stages of life, illustrating both Gaddini's theoretical views of early development, and a range of clinical findings that he connected with these early pictures.
The book has a short foreword by Robert S. Wallerstein, in which he remarks that psychoanalysts who write in a tongue familiar only to their fellow countrymen—a position exemplified by those writing in Italian—could be caught in the dilemma of when, and whether, to direct their contributions to their native journals and when to direct them to the external psychoanalytic world. Wallerstein believed that Gaddini enthusiastically undertook the challenge of dividing his contributions between those originally in English and published in the International Journal, and those originally presented and published in Italian, or (actually, in two cases only presented) some of which were newly translated and published in this volume in English for the first time. It seems possible that the situation of being poised to some extent between two psychoanalytic worlds might also have provided the most fruitful background for what might be seen to be Gaddini's most notable intellectual quality. Well versed in the world of psychoanalytic theorising about early development, from Freud onwards, his geographical detachment from the main schools might perhaps have helped towards his freedom—while nonetheless understanding and referring to and learning from and using mainstream ideas—to create his own body of thought that was quite distinct from that of anyone else. The importance of this colle