You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is the first volume of a new Monograph Series produced by the Rivista di Psicoanalisi (the Journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society) for the English publisher, Karnac Books. The praiseworthy purpose of the Series is to make the writings of Italian psychoanalysts known to the wider English-speaking analytic world by addressing, in the words of the Editors, ‘a long standing problem—the relative isolation of our Psychoanalytic Society as a result of language barriers’ (p. vii). Indeed, the English-speaking professional community is likely to have some familiarity with only those few Italian colleagues whose books have so far been translated: Fornari, Gaddini, Mancia, Nissim Momigliano, Piontelli etc.
The papers included in Writing in Psychoanalysis were originally presented in 1993 at a colloquium organised by one of the book's Editors, Antonio Alberto Semi, and subsequently published in the Rivista. Including contributions by both Italian and ‘foreign’ participants, this Symposium consisted of a critical reflection upon the Rivista's own regulations, its structure and the relationships among its component parts, for the purpose of improving it through the diagnosis and treatment of its pathology. I believe that it is uncommonly courageous for an institution such as a psychoanalytic journal to embark upon this sort of public self-scrutiny, even more so as the Italian Psychoanalytic Society was then undergoing a historically momentous process of internal splitting that must have made such a self-analysis, necessary as indeed it was, also extremely painful.
Semi's own contribution makes reference to the complementary positions of spoken and written words in classical cultures. In the Greek one ‘it is a written text [Plato's Phaedrus] on the topic of writing, that praises the oral transmission of knowledge, whereas in Judaism reflections on writing relied for many centuries upon oral tradition’ (p. 55). These observations provide Semi with a backdrop to his views