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This book is an original contribution to the international debate on the psychoanalytic therapy of the psychoses. The wealth of clinical material it contains constitutes the foundation of experience underlying what the authors hold to be an innovative theoretical and methodological approach.
The book was written and composed by a specialised working group known as the Serious Pathologies Study Committee, set up many years ago within the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. The Committee's intensive and consistent work has become a beacon for others working in the field, an instrument to encourage fresh thinking and exchanges of views. The material is presented in a number of voices and comprises wide-ranging and discriminating reflections on a subject that neither psychoanalysis nor other theories have yet described satisfactorily. Yet the approach is not eclectic; owing to their common foundation of research, the basic theoretical and technical considerations presented form a unified whole. The authors have chosen to concentrate on the theoretical and practical side of psychoanalysis with a view to testing, deepening and deploying it in the therapy of the psychoses while eschewing all extraneous orientations, however numerous and valid.
The authors, as psychoanalyst-members of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society who have worked in psychiatric institutions, all remain firmly anchored within the field of psychoanalysis; they avoid yielding to suggestions from different fields in their descriptions of their research work. Favourable conditions for such an approach have existed in Italy for the last twenty years, with the involvement of large numbers of qualified psychoanalysts in the country's psychiatric structures (hospital wards and area treatment centres). A particularly important factor was the 1979 psychiatric reform programme, under which mental hospitals were closed down and various therapeutic institutions were established. The authors' work has attained