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This book's two editors are Teresa Carratelli, psychoanalyst and associate professor, and Anna Maria Lanza, a psychotherapist engaged in child psychiatry research, both at Rome University. The appearance of this eagerly awaited volume is fitting for a number of reasons: first, as a tribute to the work of a school, established in the early 1980s and centred on the second Chair of Child Neuropsychiatry at Rome's ‘La Sapienza’ University, which studies and treats psychosomatic pathology in young children;7 second, as homage to two masters who unfortunately both died prematurely, Eugenio Gaddini, former President of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), and Adriano Giannotti, training analyst at the SPI and incumbent of the Chair just mentioned; and, finally, because the editors seem to have caught the right moment to publish the fruits of the authors’ labours and make them accessible to a wider academic readership. After all, the path from the impossibility of owning psychic pain to the development of somatic symptoms appears to be particularly well—trodden today, and a book which, by virtue of its structure, constitutes a sagacious guide to their exploration is therefore welcome.
The introduction by Mario Bertolini and the foreword by Andreas Giannakoulas, both of whom are training analysts at the Italian Psychoanalytical Association (AiPsi) and have been engaged for many years in research and training in child and adolescent psychoanalysis, confirm the aptness of the volume's publication at this juncture.
The book is divided into two parts of approximately equal length, devoted to theory and clinical practice respectively. The background is the thought of Winnicott and his conception of the psyche—soma.
It should be noted first of all that, because psychosomatic disorders in children can be studied by working with the child within and together with the environment in which he is growing up and perhaps expressing its malaise, there are better opportunities than wit