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The aim of this collection of essays by Italian psychoanalysts, more than ten years after the death of Eugenio Gaddini, is to promote critical reflection on the ideas of an author who made an original and distinctive contribution to Italian psychoanalysis. Gaddini's thought is of course distinguished by his clinical research and his original contributions on the primitive functioning of the mind, as indicated by the title of the English-language collection of his writings (1992). The book is divided into three sections: (1) ‘Metapsychological considerations’; (2) ‘From the body to the symbol’; and (3) ‘The routes of relationship’.
In the first section, Gaddini's thought is deconstructed and reconstructed with dialectical rigour, although the authors’ profound esteem and affection for their ‘master’ is still evident.
Conrotto and Genovese, in their respective contributions, explore Gaddini's main themes—e.g. the body-mind relationship, the conceptualisation of the self, the origins of creativity (which is seen as the creation of the subject) and the role of the primary relationship in this process of self-creation—and emphasise their ‘creative routes’. These routes also document the process of individuation and differentiation in the construction of Gaddini's scientific thought, in relation to both the doctrinal corpus of Freudian metapsychology and to the influence of Greenacre's theoretical hypotheses on the ontogenetic requirement of the successive phases of development. They also demonstrate his profound knowledge of Winnicott's ideas. Gaddini got to know Winnicott through the dialogue entertained by his wife Renata with the British psychoanalyst. This was unprecedented for Italy.
Conrotto and Genovese have much to say about narcissism concerning the relationship between Gaddini's and Winnicott's thought. They discuss the criticism (for example, of Grinberg and Mitchell) that these authors distort Freud's concept of narcissism.
According to Conrotto, Gaddini performe